Has there ever before been a war that so many people disapproved of but so few wanted to stop? Have the reasons for starting a war ever been so thoroughly discredited without turning into reasons for ending it?
The Vietnam-era antiwar movement had an agenda: Bring the troops home. Or, in two words -- suitable for a picket sign or a T-shirt -- "Out now." ("Out," children, meant something different back then, but liberals were in favor of it just the same.) What seems to be today's antiwar position -- it was a terrible mistake and it's a terrible mess, but we can't just walk away from it -- was actually the pro-war position during the Vietnam era. In fact, it was close to official government policy for more than half the length of that war.
Today's antiwar cause doesn't even have a movement to speak of, let alone an agenda. It consists of perhaps 47 percent of the citizenry -- the ones who voted for John Kerry -- who are in some kind of existential opposition to the war but aren't doing much about it and aren't very clear about what they would like to see happen. Meanwhile, American soldiers die by the hundreds and Iraqis -- military and civilian -- by the thousands in a cause these people (and I'm one of them) believe to be a horrible mistake.
Kerry spent months untangling the knots of his Iraq position while tangling new ones even faster. He pounded George W. Bush over the phantom weapons of mass destruction and he mocked Bush's confusion of Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein. Kerry said that Bush's invasion of Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." So was he in favor of ending it? No, his position was that he would try, but not promise, to bring the troops home in four years. Four years! American involvement in World War II lasted 3 1/2. Bush had a good point when he wondered how, as commander in chief, Kerry could ask American soldiers to die for the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, that problem does not vindicate Bush's belief that Iraq II is the right war in the right etc. But Bush's apparently sincere belief -- protected by his thick skull from all the winds of reality that contradict it -- does relieve him from needing to explain why he doesn't want the war to end now.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64027-2004Nov19.html