Reality of Iraq protests

Protests against the U.S. role in Iraq seem to have grown during the hot days of August. The thousands of articles that have appeared in the old media on Cindy Sheehan’s camp-out gave that impression.

Yet, in the latest AP-Ipsos poll last week, as the Associated Press reported, overall attitudes about the war “haven’t changed dramatically through the summer. A solid majority, 60 percent, want U.S. troops to stick it out until Iraq is stable,” even though the frustration with the reported pace of progress has a majority critical of the conduct of the war. As even Democrat critic Senator Biden observes, according to the L.A. Times, “ ‘the vast majority’ of Democrats believe that the consequences of leaving Iraq unattended justify continued American involvement” even though the anti-Iraq protestors are Democrats.

The key question, then, is who are the protestors?

As I observed (in my post of August 20) when watching a local protest in Encinitas, California, most are middle-aged, repeating their Vietnam era slogans. Across the country, in Staunton, Virginia (in the beautiful Shenandoah area that has drawn so many D.C. retirees), a protestor observed, “It’s people who lived through Vietnam and saw what it did to our country, who are leading this movement.” Compensating for the paucity of youthful faces at their rallies, this protestor continues, “It’s harder for the president and his administration to dismiss this as the efforts of a bunch of college kids.”

Unlike the real or feigned idealism of the youthful protestors of the ‘60’s, it is possible now to trace the sordid extremist track record of the aged leaders of today’s protests. One of the easiest sources to reference when encountering a leader or organization’s name in an article is at the web site of DiscoverTheNetworks.org , A Guide to the Political Left.

Celebrity has-beens like Joan Baez can only attract 200 to her free concert at Crawford, by the count of an observer. Going on to analyze the numbers claimed to attend protests or come to Crawford, this observer finds the counts quite inflated, and unquestioned by the mass media cooperating in “one gigantic photo-op staged for the benefit of the press whose seeming indifference to some of the truly kooky things Sheehan has said (not to mention the nauseating anti-semitic rants of Mother Sheehan and her supporters) is almost beyond comprehension.” San Francisco Bay Area ABC TV reports on the “small group of professionals skilled in politics and public relations who are marketing Cindy Sheehan’s message,” including large PR firm Fenton Communications funded by Ben Cohen’s Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream money, and leadership from Democrat National Party Chair Howard Dean’s organization and wild left Code Pink.

This post of photos at Little Green Footballs blog, “How Phony Can They Get?”, exposes the falsity of protest groupie Al Sharpton’s visit and the complicity of the press in how it was reported. Paralleling this disgrace, while her magic bus is being readied to run on vegetable oil, Jane Fonda is lending her faded visage to provide intros to far-out extremist George Galloway’s U.S. tour sponsored by, for example, International Socialist Review and the National Council of Arab Americans.

How does the reaction to them differ from the ‘60’s?

As Wall Street Journal deputy editor Daniel Henninger points out: “It may be that the current infatuation with anti-Bush, anti-Iraq sentiment is again missing a political current flowing beneath the surface of the news, just as the media missed the silent majority 40 years ago and the values voters in the 2004 election….These people are organized and they are pro-active….If the Democratic left does levitate another antiwar movement, it won’t be the unanswered opposition of the Vietnam years.”

An example of the results of “dueling rallies” in a small town far removed from Crawford: “The antiwar event drew two dozen demonstrators to downtown Staunton. The support-the-troops rally held the next day counted more than 125 participants.” The master of ceremonies for the troop support rally said the event and those like it across the country are “important for our troops, and are especially important for those of us who served during Vietnam, and saw a different tenor in America.” Another Vietnam era veteran added, “Most of us swore then that we could not let what we saw then happen again.”

The Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram reported that 3,000 to 4,000 people attended a pro-Bush rally in Crawford last Saturday, two to four times the height of those drawn to Crawford by the major PR and press campaign of the anti-Iraq forces. A couple who drove for six-hours to get there said, “The left had so much publicity, and we have sat back and done nothing.”

But, no longer. As during the 2004 campaign, the mass media misreading that Vietnam veterans and Americans would be gulled by John Kerry’s false self-hagiography is being repeated in its misreading of our spine and response now.