If it's true that the war's popularity has plummeted along with Bush's approval ratings then why did the anti-war protests marking the third anniversary of the war's onset pretty much fizzle in the U.S. and Europe Saturday?
There are several possible answers, among which three seem most likely:
1) Americans are not being killed, maimed, or personally inconvenienced at rates that would generate deep and serious opposition to the war.
2) The war's opponents offer no credible alternatives to continuing the effort to build a democracy in Iraq.
3) There's no draft.
All three of these are no doubt important factors, but perhaps the most important is that the premise in the first sentence above is simply incorrect. Americans will back the war as long as they think there's a chance it'll succeed, and although they'll tell pollsters that they're tired of the war and that it's time to bring our troops home, it's doubtful that most Americans will really feel strongly about that until it becomes clear that Iraq is a lost cause. The media is trying to portray it that way, of course, and the Democrats are telling us it is every chance they get, but it appears that the majority of American people are not yet convinced of it.
This is remarkable, actually, because the administration's efforts at winning the American people's support for their undertaking in Iraq has been little better than absolutely pathetic. Indeed, were this the late sixties or early seventies Washington would be brimful with protestors, but for the reasons mentioned above, it's not.
There is one other way things are different today: In 1970 there was no alternative media. Once the big three television networks and the major newspapers turned against the Vietnam war, the government had few resources with which to make the case for sticking it out. Today, talk radio and the blogosphere are potent alternatives to the miasma of defeatism that pervades liberalism and the Democratic party. Because of the influence of talk radio and the internet, the prophets of doom, defeat, and dissimulation are gaining very little traction, and, in fact, are more likely to look like fools and buffoons than like oracles. Witness, in this regard, the fate of lefties such as Dan Rather, Michael Moore, and Cindy Sheehan.
The American people being what they are, this could all change in a trice, but as of now it just doesn't look like the left has the muscle, either political or intellectual, to force us out of Iraq. Nineteen seventy, after all, was a long time ago.
