My own impression, at the level of generality you are working, is that the Afghanistan attack was almost universally supported, left, right, middle. Lots of squabbling over means--McCain was prime among them. But little if any squabbling over ends
Whoa, there, John. You are doing some highly revisionist remembering. The Left opposed the Afghanistan war. The New York Times hinted darkly at quagmires and humanitarian crises. One NYT reporter, whose name escapes me at the moment, in a bout of particularly bad timing, wrote how Afghanistan was becoming a hopeless quagmire just a day or two before Mazar-al-Sharif fell. It was one of the NYT's patented front-page news "analysis" stories. The British papers were in full cry - remember "the brutal Afghan winter"? "Afghanistan, death of empires"? And of course all the poor civilians we were going to bomb, whose deaths were going to be purely our fault, never mind if the Taliban put their anti-aircraft guns on top of civilian housing.
But when the war ended quickly and victoriously, the Left forgot about their opposition. As Michael Walzer wrote last spring,
Leftist opposition to the war in Afghanistan faded in November and December of last year, not only because of the success of the war but also because of the enthusiasm with which so many Afghanis greeted that success. The pictures of women showing their smiling faces to the world, of men shaving their beards, of girls in school, of boys playing soccer in shorts: all this was no doubt a slap in the face to leftist theories of American imperialism, but also politically disarming. There was (and is) still a lot to worry about: refugees, hunger, minimal law and order. But it was suddenly clear, even to many opponents of the war, that the Taliban regime had been the biggest obstacle to any serious effort to address the looming humanitarian crisis, and it was the American war that removed the obstacle. It looked (almost) like a war of liberation, a humanitarian intervention.
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The last couple of sentences imply that Saturday's demonstrators are manipulated. I doubt that. Conspiracy theory doesn't work well when you get this level of turnout. In the US and overseas.
I'm not positing any vast "conspiracy", for goodness sake. I am saying that the organizers of the marches were several Left and Radical Left organizations, including out-and-out Stalinists like ANSWER, and they tried to use the marches as a springboard, as any political movement worth its salt would try to do. The general message coming off those demonstrations, aside from "No War" was "It's All About OIL!, Bush is a Fascist, Israel is Fascist, Free Palestine, Bush is a bigger danger than Bin Laden, Bush is the Real Terrorist" If this is not the message preferred by most marchers, they should have done a better job forming a polictical opposition.
Large public demonstrations are about political ends, not means. Give the vote to women; get out of Vietnam; etc.
That's why they work best when the means, such as pending legislation, have already been established before the demonstration takes place.
Several reporters noted that a great many demonstrators in both European cities and the US considered doing something about Saddam a worthy end; just didn't trust the way the Bush folk were going about it.
And the other responses on offer are....?
It's definitely striking just how quickly the Bush folk converted all the favorable positioning for their foreign policy which came from 9-11, to something that is perceived so negatively.
What we had post 9/11 was a burst of sympathy (from Europe) and a burst of schadenfreude from the Middle East. That doesn't naturally translate into sympathy for actually American policies anywhere, particularly if those policies include military intervention. As Mark Steyn said the other day, Saddam is just the MacGuffin. This argument is really about American power. We can try to be liked, or we can take action, any action. One or the other. Power breeds resentment. |
