In Salon today, Gary Kamiya writes that

A real, broad-based antiwar movement would immediately put an end to the war — and put the Bush presidency out of its misery.

But there is no significant antiwar movement. And there isn’t going to be one unless Bush completely loses it and decides to attack Iran. (Insane as this idea is, Bush might see it as the only way to simultaneously destroy what he regards as a Nazi-like threat and save his shattered presidency.) This isn’t Vietnam, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest. This is the new, post-draft America, where a subclass of poorly paid professional warriors does the bidding of a power elite. With some notable exceptions, Cindy Sheehan being the most famous, the warriors and their families, those who pay the price, do not protest. And the rest of the country, not facing death or the death of immediate family members, doesn’t care enough to.

I agree with the first sentence in the quote, but Kamiya loses me when he declares he wants an antiwar movement just like the good ol’ days of Vietnam, when “hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest.”

The Vietnam era antiwar movement was wonderfully effective — at re-electing Richard Nixon in 1972. But at stopping the war, not so much.

Every time I write that I get slammed by people who say I’m wrong. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Eric Alterman —

The first serious historical research I ever did was when I was researching my honors thesis as an undergraduate. I wanted to study the origins of neoconservatism, the Six Day War, and Vietnam—this was back in 1981—and my adviser, Walter LaFeber—insisted that I learn a little context first by examining the attitudes of the entire country to the war and the antiwar movement. I poured over the polling data and found to my surprise, that in many ways, the antiwar movement was counterproductive. Many Americans didn’t like the war but they really hated the counterculture. If supporting Nixon was a way to get back at the hippies and protesters and rioters, they were willing to do it, even if it meant extending a war they thought to be already lost.

I’m sure people who were completely immersed in the movement and had little substantive contact with outsiders saw things differently. But if, like me, you did spend time with people outside the movement, the impact of protests on public opinion was a painful thing to watch. To grab attention the protests became increasingly outrageous and flamboyant, and the more outrageous and flamboyant they became, the more the “straights” turned to Richard Nixon to protect them from the “dirty hippies.”

To a large extent, Nixon successfully made his ’72 campaign a referendum on the antiwar movement, not the war. As I saw it, the protesters handed Nixon a red herring issue that helped him avoid having to answer for bombing Cambodia.

Yes, Americans turned against the Vietnam war, and the war ended eventually. But who can say it was the antiwar protests that turned them? The bigger factor, I think, was watching the carnage and insanity on television every evening. There were real journalists in them days, children, and they told it like it was.

I’m wildly ambivalent about public protests. In the past four years I’ve participated in a few of the big protests and marches in New York and Washington. Some of these were positive and uplifting, and some made me cringe. None received the media coverage they deserved, and none had any measurable impact on Iraq War policy.

That said, I admit that if we could muster large numbers of Americans to march in the streets in an orderly manner this might have a real impact. Public protesting, done well, really does make a difference. Unfortunately, when it’s done badly it makes another kind of difference.

Yesterday was Martin Luther King day. Whenever I write these cautionary notes about public protests, someone brings up the big civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King in the 1960s. These protests had a spectacular effect on public opinion and helped bring about much positive change. But those marches were disciplined. As I wrote here, the marchers wore suits and dresses (I learned recently that MLK directed the marchers to dress this way; it didn’t just happen). They marched in a solemn and orderly manner. They waved many American flags. Their chants and signs didn’t contain language you couldn’t repeat to your grandmother.

The anti-Iraq War marches I’ve attended often were more like street carnivals than Martin Luther King’s civil rights marches. The glitter and goofiness are fun, but exactly why should marching against war be fun? Is war some kind of joke?

Some people think protesting is about “expressing themselves,” which seems to mean showing off and/or acting out whatever adolescent angst they haven’t yet resolved. But if you look at the really successful public protest movements — those led by Gandhi and MLK come to mind — you don’t see a collection of people “expressing themselves.” You see people complying with exacting discipline for the sake of a cause. You see people who understand that the cause is more important than their egos.

When a large number of people come together for a public demonstration, they do so to create one great big body that speaks with one great big voice. When a large number of people come together to engage in individual self-expression, however, the result can be one great big mess.

And may I add that goofy costumes and giant puppets are for circus parades, not for a solemn and serious cause. (OK, I’m an old grouch. I admit it.)

One of the more famous figures of the Vietnam era antiwar movement, Tom Hayden, had some interesting observations last November in the San Francisco Chronicle. I disagree with some of Hayden’s conclusions, but he’s worth quoting nonetheless.

…according to Gallup surveys, a majority of Americans came to view Iraq as a mistake more rapidly than they came to oppose the Vietnam War more than three decades ago. So how could there be a peace majority without a peace movement?

Foreign Affairs, the journal of the foreign policy establishment, wondered about this riddle in a 2005 essay by John Mueller reporting a precipitous decline in public support for the war even though “there has not been much” of a peace movement.

In January, when congressional opinion was shifting against the war, a Washington Post analysis made eight references to “public opinion,” as if it were a magical floating balloon, without any mention of organized lobbying, petitioning, protests or marches. That was consistent with a pattern beginning before the invasion, when both the New York Times and National Public Radio reported that few people attended an October 2002 rally in Washington, only to admit a week later that 100,000 had been in the streets.

Hayden thinks the marches and protests are having an impact after all. But then he says,

It is true there have been periodic lapses in street protests since 2003, but these can be explained by the surge of activists into anti-war presidential campaigns like that of Howard Dean. Not only were thousands involved, but MoveOn.org’s voter fund raised $17 million in 2004, most of it from 160,000 contributors averaging $69 donations.

In this year’s election, MoveOn activists made 1 million calls to their elected officials, and poured thousands of dollars and volunteers into campaigns. New Hampshire elected to Congress Carol Shea-Porter, a woman previously known for pulling up her outer garment to display an anti-war slogan.

To disregard forces such as these in the definition of the anti-war movement is a sleight-of-hand, something like eliminating Eugene McCarthy’s New Hampshire campaign in March 1968 from the history of the anti-Vietnam movement.

Exactly. There is an antiwar movement. But today’s antiwar movement is a lot less reliant on public protests and street theater than the old one was. And that’s a good thing. Why would anyone think we should return to the tactics of 1971 if, as Hayden says, the current movement is more effective?

This podcast is a riff on the last post. It’s called “If War Is the Answer, What Was the Question?“

In my ongoing struggle to understand the rightie brain, I believe I have found a new clue. The rightie blogger Ace of Spades writes about “Democratic cravenness,”

I’m not calling them cowards because they won’t support the war. They’re liberals — they don’t believe in war. They believe in “aggressive, take-no-prisoners diplomacy.”

The clue lies in the words “believe in.” I take it the Ace does “believe in” war. But what does “believe in” mean in the context of war? Usually when one “believes in” something, it’s a statement of faith or trust. If someone says “I believe in capitalism” or “I believe in regular dental checkups,” he’s saying that he trusts the thing “believed in” to be to his benefit.

Sometimes you need context. Saying “I believe in spinach” makes no sense unless it’s in the context of, say, nutrition, commodity markets, or a Popeye cartoon.

Righties sometimes slam lefties for bumper-sticker slogans like “peace is the answer,” which draws the retort “so what was the question?” It’s a reasonable retort. “Peace” as a policy proposal is, well, inane. To me, “peace is the answer” is about peace as an ideal, but that’s what I’m reading into it.

I haven’t seen righties plaster “war is the answer” on their bumpers, but maybe I’m not looking hard enough. If someone “believes in” war per se, as I infer the Ace does, that’s pretty much the same thing. “Believing in” war makes war sound like foreign policy Pepto Bismol — the first remedy you reach for to soothe your foreign problem, whatever it is.

There are times when a nation must engage in war to save itself or a vital ally, and when that’s the case I guess I “believe in” war as much as the Ace does. But when someone talks about “believing in” war without qualifiers, I do wonder if he’s thinking at all.

Let’s flip that around. I “believe in” diplomacy in the sense that I think diplomacy should be the first remedy to try when foreign events are causing American discomfort. However, I won’t say that I have faith it will always achieve the desired solution. Sometimes diplomacy succeeds, and sometimes it fails. Sometimes diplomacy only preserves a status quo. But war doesn’t come with a money-back guarantee, either. And diplomacy is the safer remedy, in that it costs less and is less likely than war to have harmful side effects.

War, on the other hand, can have repercussions that are as bad if not worse than the original disease. Even when one achieves the desired outcome, the costs and side effects can leave a nation in a weakened, depleted state.

So even when diplomacy fails, sometimes it’s the better choice to live with the failure, or to patch together conditions — sanctions, perhaps — to keep a threatening situation from getting worse. It’s a matter of judging how vital the national interest in question is, what price the nation is willing to pay to achieve it, and what risks are involved. It’s also a matter of judging whether a military solution could achieve the desired result under any circumstances, or if sending troops would amount to dusting the porcelain with a hammer.

These are issues the Bush Administration, and the hawks, didn’t even try to think through before they got fired up to invade Iraq. So certain were they that war is the answer that they didn’t bother to formulate the question.

And after all this time, they’re still not thinking through the question.

The Ace (linking to Jonah Goldberg) repeats the usual drivel about how some people want to win but other people want to cut and run. But I think the fundamental question about Iraq is not whether the war is “winnable.” It’s whether a military victory in Iraq could help resolve the problem of Islamic terrorism (assuming that’s what we’re at war about) at all. And this is the question that righties lack the moral courage to address. Goldberg:

Here we have a president forthrightly trying to win a war, and the opposition — which not long ago favored increasing troops when Bush was against that — won’t say what it wants.

In fact, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have made it clear that it’s time to begin a withdrawal. Even Hillary Clinton has decided it’s time to withdraw. Other than Joe Lieberman and maybe a handful of conservative Dems from Red states, the overwhelming majority of Dems in Congress are now in favor of withdrawal, and have said so. Goldberg needs to keep up.

This is flatly immoral. If you believe the war can’t be won and there’s nothing to be gained by staying, then, to paraphrase Sen. John Kerry, you’re asking more men to die for a mistake. You should demand withdrawal. But that might cost votes, so they opt for nonbinding symbolic votes.

I don’t like the “nonbinding” resolution stuff, either, but I understand the strategy behind the “nonbinding” resolution is that Republicans are more likely to support it. We’ll see how that works.

Another Democratic dodge is the demand for a “political solution” in Iraq, the preferred talking point among Democrats these days. This is either childishly naive or reprehensibly dishonest. No serious person thinks that peace can be secured without a political solution. The question is how to get one. And nobody — and I mean nobody — has made a credible case that the Iraqis can get from A to B without more bloodshed, with or without American support.

Oh, really? How about

“[M]y belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” — Vice President Richard Cheney, March 16 2003

What Goldberg is too thick to understand is that calling for a “political solution” is not a strategy, but a goal. If he agrees that “political solution” is the proper goal, as he seems to do, then he and other war supporters need to think long and hard about how “military victory” could bring about “political solution.” By itself, I don’t believe it would.

Saying we need a political solution is as helpful as saying “give peace a chance.” Peace requires more than pie-eyed verbiage. In the real world, peace has no chance until the people who want to give death squads another shot have been dispatched from the scene.

There are plenty of people in the military and the State Department who tried to explain this to BushCo before the invasion of Iraq. The early section of Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco is the story of how experts tried to tell Wolfowitz and other neocon hawks that military force, no matter how well used, might not result in the desired outcome. And the neocons just brushed off the advice and called it crazy.

“The people around the president were so, frankly, intellectually arrogant,” this general continued. “They knew postwar Iraq would be easy and would be a catalyst for change in the Middle East. They were making simplistic assumptions and refused to put them to the test. It’s the vice president, and the secretary of defense, with the knowledge of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the vice chairman. They did it because they already had the answer, and they wouldn’t subject their hypothesis to examination.” [ Ricks, Fiasco, p. 99]

In other words, war was the answer. But what was the question? I do not believe everyone in the Bush Administration, or its pro-war supporters, were asking the same question. By that I mean they weren’t on the same page about the purpose or objectives of the war. We know now the WMDs and links to 9/11 were just the sales pitch, not the reason for the war. Certainly control of oil was a big factor, but I think most of the neocons really believed the fairy tale that deposing Saddam Hussein would by itself result in a more stable Middle East. Some (Karl Rove) probably just saw it as the Greatest Wedge Issue Ever and didn’t give a hoohaw about either security or peace. The war also promised to reward certain big, supportive companies with fat contracts (if only Enron could have hung on a little longer; war contracts surely would have bailed them out). For the President himself, I think a desire to depose Saddam was related to his unresolved oedipal conflicts with his father.

But Bush in his public statements still evokes 9/11 and the threat of terrorism, and still claims that a military victory in Iraq will make America safer from terrorism, even though I see no logical reason why that would be true. Either he’s still not thinking through the question, or he’s lying about the objectives. Or both.

And what the righties also can’t see is that talk of achieving a political solution by means of “victory” verges on magical thinking. They can’t see that using the military to dispatch “the people who want to give death squads another shot” is just turning the wheel and creating more of those people. The violence now is so out of control it cannot be contained by force of arms, in my opinion. One can argue that if we’d had many more troops in Iraq with a solid plan for occupation in the spring of 2003 it might not have come to this. But we didn’t, and it did come to this.

The question we should be asking now is, will our staying any longer make a damn bit of difference to the outcome? Anyone who says yes should try to be realistic about what might be achievable, how much it’s going to cost, and how long it will take. And considering that the hawks haven’t been right about anything for the past four years, let me express skepticism that they know the answers to those questions.

And, of course, if the answer to the question is no, then why are we staying?

Following up the last post — in Slate, Andrew Rice provides a simple explanation of what’s going on (emphasis added):

The intelligence gathering, according to the agencies that conduct it, is meant to help discover potential spies and other security threats by giving them information about targeted individuals’ sources of income. When their suspicions are raised, the agencies issue so-called “national security letters” to banks and other financial institutions. Unlike the F.B.I., the agencies have no power to compel the banks to turn the information over, but they’re seldom refused. The military seems to be much more involved in it than the C.I.A. The strongest voices of criticism—and the sources for the story?—seem to be at the F.B.I., which thinks the spooks are going on fishing expeditions. “The more this is done, and the more poorly it’s done, the more pushback there is for the F.B.I.” when it goes to banks to conduct its own investigations, an anonymous “official” tells the paper.

The paper notes that the disclosure is significant, because it marks a breach of the traditional strictures on domestic operations by spy agencies. Congress has rejected several attempts by the agencies to gain the power to compel banks to give them such information. It’s not clear whom the agencies are investigating. The military claims it’s mostly keeping tabs on servicemen and private contractors, though others say the surveillance is broader, especially when it comes to the Pentagon, which has made the use of such letters “standard practice.”

Digby:

… the Pentagon and the CIA have taken it upon itself to investigate the finances of American citizens with no warrants or oversight and keep the information on file forever … The military, the clandestine spy service and the FBI have all been gathering financial information on American citizens. Nobody knows what they have, who’s been targeted or if the information is correct or useful.

Don’t miss this:

We are building a well funded national police state apparatus at the same time that we are giving unlimited money and power to our military and foreign intelligence agencies to operate in the United States. This is incredibly dangerous and I can’t help but wonder why there is so little effort on the part of anyone in public life to educate the public on the inherant dangers of such powerful, unaccountable institutions. This is why we had a revolution to begin with. It’s why we fought two world wars in the last century. (Where is the Al Gore of civil liberties?)

And the most laughable thing is that all of this is apparently perfectly acceptable to the principled right wingers and “libertarians” who spent decades railing against the jack booted government thugs — at least until a Republican administration was wielding the power. It seems that unless the target in question is buying weapons or explosives (in which case they come roaring in to protect the only amendment in the Bill of Rights they care about) these people are just fine with all this. After all, only the “right” people are being spied upon — Muslims, war protestors, liberals, Democrats and other enemies of the state.

Indeed, as near as I can tell from Technorati and Memeorandum, the only rightie blogger commenting on this story as of yet is this one, who says what the Pentagon is doing is “all perfectly legal,” and adds, “As usual, the left is in a snit! Gee, big surprise huh?”

Stupid is as stupid blogs, I say. As Tim F. writes at Balloon Juice, “Add power and subtract accountability. Abuses are inevitable like water flows downhill.”

I just saw this and haven’t had a chance to digest it yet, but Eric Lichtblau and Mark Mazzetti write for the New York Times:

The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.

The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say. …

…The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives.

But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.