Is today's Anti-War Movement the America First Committee of the 21st Century?

[jshore]

*Originally posted by december *
For clarity I should point out that the above quote was jshore repreating his own words, rather than something I said.

Whoops, right…Thanks for pointing that out. I did an incomplete cut-and-paste job there.

But, did this stop leftists from opposing Pinochet, Le Pen, Georg Haider, Ariel Sharon and other “evil right-wingers”?

The point that you fail to understand, at least in regard to Pinochet and Sharon (were there big protests in the U.S. against Le Pen?) is that the protests are linked to our government’s policies of supporting these folks. If there was a time to protest U.S. support for the Iraqi regime, it was the 1980s. I don’t think there has been much U.S. support for the Iraqi regime since then, to put it mildly.

Do you really expect this demonstration to change Bush’s conduct of the war? Or, are you taking a moral stand to show yourself what a good person you are?

I am taking a stand because I believe it is important for citizens in democracies to be involved. I believe it is part of my obligation as a citizen. (I wasn’t at any of the demonstrations, by the way, although I have written a letter to Bush along the lines of “let inspections work; war should only be a very last resort.”)

IMHO these demonstrations were driven by anti-Bush feelings (and, outside the US, by anti-American feelings as well.)

Well, why do you think these feelings exist? As many commentators have pointed out, there was lots of sympathy toward the U.S. following the Sept 11th attacks but Bush has done about the best job possible of squelching that sympathy and re-igniting anti-American feeling (feelings he had already been inflaming with pre-9/11 policies like pulling out of Kyoto, etc.). Nonetheless, I think that most of the people still distinguish between America as a whole and its current leader.

However, it wouldn’t do to present Bush’s (and America’s) policy as merely incorrect. Bush was to be portrayed as a monster, a hate object.

Well, again I think that Bush is bringing a lot of this on himself. And, talk of war ignites strong feelings in people. I don’t personally think Bush is a monster but I do think his policies in many areas are quite misguided and he (and/or his handlers) are certainly more than willing to lie and deceive to promote these policies. On Iraq, I am willing to give him a certain amount of credit for helping to create pressure to get the inspectors back into Iraq which I think is an important accomplishment. Unfortunately, I worry that Bush is not just using the threat of war as a tool to force Saddam to be disarmed or as a last resort, but rather as the desired course of action.

[Kimstu]

december: IMHO these demonstrations were driven by anti-Bush feelings (and, outside the US, by anti-American feelings as well.)

You have good reason to be H about your O there, december: it’s pretty dumb. Yeah, sure, 10–15 million people worldwide (including myself, btw) decided to spend our money and hours of our time traveling, getting crushed in crowds, (in the case of those of us in Northern cities) freezing our butts, and now and then getting shoved around by cops just because we were feeling ticked at Bush and/or the US. :rolleyes:

In real life, as opposed to decemberWorld, it takes some pretty serious convictions to get people motivated to make such efforts. These convictions, for at least the very vast majority of antiwar protestors, do not include the belief that Saddam Hussein is a good guy. I can’t imagine why you would think that absence of anti-Saddam signs would indicate otherwise; do you also believe that pro-life protestors, for example, aren’t sincere if they don’t carry signs condemning rape and incest? We are not arguing that there isn’t a real problem here, we’re arguing with the proposed solution to it.

And, pace Polycarp, you don’t have to be an unconditional pacifist to oppose war in this case, either. Even if you share Polycarp’s blind faith in somebody else’s assurance that a war to remove Saddam Hussein would be a just war, the trouble is that launching even a just war doesn’t necessarily produce a more just world. The pro-war forces are presenting the best-case scenario for the outcome—a US-friendly democratic government in Iraq—while discounting

1) the prospects for increased anti-Americanism and support for anti-US terrorism provoked by resentment of what most of the rest of the world (not having access to Bluesman’s secret info, and not sharing Polycarp’s personal faith in the unsupported assurances of Bluesman and others in the US government) emphatically does not see as a just war; and

2) the prospects for long-term, bloody stasis in Iraq in conflicts with revolutionary Islamist guerrilla forces from the eastern mountains, eventually succeeded by the establishment of an extreme-Islamist government that will be just as bad for the Iraqi people as the current regime, and will be even more supportive of anti-US terrorism. Anybody who thinks it would be easy to prevent such an outcome should take a look at the current situation in Afghanistan.

Pro-war arguments that it’s our immediate moral duty to relieve the Iraqi people of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein (propounded by many of the very same politicians who in the 1980’s argued that it was necessary to support his tyranny as a safeguard against revolutionary-Islamist Iran) that don’t take these issues into account are simplistic and short-sighted. If we’re making comparisons to the naivete and ignorance of the old America First Committee, it seems to me that the pro-war side these days is being much more unrealistic and Pollyanna-ish in its predictions and plans than the anti-war side is.

[ElvisL1ves]

Polycarp, isn’t it possible for someone to believe so absolutely that they’re doing the right thing that it does indeed constitute bad faith? Part of intellectual honesty, IMHO, is always keeping humble enough to admit the possibility of being mistaken - we’re only humans, after all - and therefore to actively listen to and understand differing views before acting irrevocably. I do think that’s the nature of much, or most, of the anti-Bush criticism you’re criticizing, resulting as it does from our being a representative democracy where the politicians work for the people.

It can also be true, at lower levels, that one or a few pieces of information, taken out of context, can make one believe absolutely that the jigsaw puzzle makes a different picture than a broader view would suggest. Anyone is capable of believing things that are wrong, depending on how the information is doled out to them. But a lack of a healthy skepticism, or a willingness to suppress it, can also be construed as bad faith, can’t it?

Yes, Saddam is a bad guy, we’ve known that for decades, and it’s still only one aspect of the debate. It’s hard to imagine what facts about him would have to be so secret that the purportedly-overwhelming US forces would be endangered by its release.

If it’s evidence of an immediate, grave threat to the world, we better know about it. If it’s an al-Qaeda link, let’s hear it (and not that guy getting a leg amputation in Baghdad again, please). If it isn’t, then it’s way farther down the priority list than Al-Qaeda and the North Korean nuclear program.

We can all make our own judgments about the justice of this war, but we’ll do so based on our own information and reasoning and faity, not on that of people who haven’t shown much of those in other situations.