Jim Cohen
Staff Writer
Protesters took to the streets Saturday in cities across the United States from sunny Los Angeles to wintry Washington, D.C., as Americans from all backgrounds voiced their opposition to the war in Iraq and President Bush’s surge plan to escalate an unpopular war.
Iraqi demonstrators, raising signs saying “peace” demanded Baghdad return to its former nickname, “The City of Peace.” But the bloodshed and violence of the day provided an ironic contrast to the calls for peace.
When the baby boomers took to the streets, they brought change. Critics forced President Lyndon Johnson to give up seeking another term in office while giving President Richard Nixon headaches he couldn’t shake. But, the allure of protesting faded fast after the tumultuous years of Vietnam, although our nation continued to struggle through racial and economic divides which still linger today.
Without a military draft, few Americans are motivated to protest an ill-planned war, even if it means our troops still don’t have all the equipment they need. Despite the $60 billion weaponry deficiency and poor national emergency response preparation, both attributed to the Iraq war, most people will not protest.
With the advent of the Internet and Web-based grassroots organizations, many Americans have found different ways of voicing their protest. With personal and political blogs, activists can dissent without changing out of their pajamas or fear of arrest. But then again, typing on a personal computer doesn’t carry the same impact as marches or rallies. A million words of protest on a Web site usually will not provoke the same urgency in people as does old-fashioned protesting.
Because the weekend’s Protesters will have little influence in the national debate, the real protest comes from those once considered strong supporters of President Bush. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R–Neb., who originally supported the war, became one of the first to criticize the commander in chief for sending an inadequate number of troops to prevent the counterinsurgency and sectarian civil war the country now faces.
Hagel is a Vietnam combat veteran and considered by many to be a staunch conservative across all political issues. Conservative colleagues Sen. John Warner, R–VA., and Sen. Sam Brownback, R–Kan., have joined Hagel to protest the president’s plan to escalate a failed policy. Warner is a World War II and Korean combat veteran, while Brownback is a presidential contender. Their protest has caught the attention of at least a half-dozen additional Senate Republicans, emboldening them to voice their true feelings about the war and join the Democrats in power and oppose the president’s surge plan.
In response to this protest, Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently reiterated the president’s continued charge that those who don’t support his policy in Iraq are “emboldening the enemy” and “not showing support for our troops.”
Although Gates did not see combat during Vietnam, like Bush, he somehow feels he has the intellectual clarity to lecture bona fide American combat veterans about what it means to support our troops and encourage our enemy.
Such trident remarks by the secretary and president are used to instill fear into those who oppose a failed leader and policy in order to quell a political uprising in their own party. Clearly, anyone who would question combat veterans’ sincerity and commitment to our nation’s security offers nothing more than utter cowardice and the ultimate failure of leadership.
The American people have been offered a surge strategy that is just more of the same. It has been attempted numerous times before and has failed because a “surge” won’t resolve the religious and political divides of three distinct groups— the Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’ites— who were forced to form a country during British colonial rule.
Some say a person who continuously repeats the same actions and words is in the early stages of going insane. It seems the recent protests in American streets and in the halls of Congress are the appropriate remedies to cure the insanity of one of the biggest foreign policy blunders ever made.
02-01-2007