I’m saying that it doesn’t matter why the democrats are saying they want to pull out. The can blame it on mismanagement or they can blame it on the moon being made of cheese – but the underlying reason is that millions of Americans are against the war and that being pro-war is thus losing votes.

Given that the Democrats aren’t really offering an alternative to the Republicans and despite that they retook House and Senate, I think its pretty obvious that the sentiment of many Americans has had an impact. Certainly in regard to Lieberman within his own state party it had an effect.

Because of the fact that at the next elections, many more Republican seats are up for vote than Democratic, I foresee further gains for the Democrats in November 2008. I also attribute this to the underlying sentiment that the war is going badly along with the side issues such as lying on the part of the government etc.

Now, that’s not entirely the same as saying that protest caused all this – but, no doubt, the arguments brought forth by the protest and the debates it occasioned throughout the country and the world have had an effect on public opinion. Widespread opinion tends to generate its own publicity – and as anti-war sentiment gained ground, so editorials could attack Bush more openly and bring in thus more people to the Democratic fold.

That also explains the recent attempts of many Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from the Bush Administration, which seems to have returned to its pre-September 11th 2001 lame duck status.

My point is this; alright, protest on its own carries only shock value. Not much will ever be changed by the act of simply parading down a street. Protest marches are in effect what’s left once you’ve stripped the genuine political impetus from a movement. Had the war gone well, the anti-war protest movement could have been discredited.

Yet the war is not going well, just like the war in Vietnam did not go well. This lends credence to those who either opposed the war or successfully adopt the position of being against the war now that it is going badly. And for the politicians who do that, there is this huge reservoir of voters to draw on, if they get the money to motivate them through the media and PR machines which politicians have.

The protests are now having their effect, delayed though it may be – and whilst the Democratic majority is slim, some Democrats may be wary of wandering too far to the anti-war side of the line, come the results in November, all bets are off.

Had there not been protests and massive opposition, do you think the political state of America would be the same as it is now?

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http://www.free-burma.org

Congress might have been noisy on withdrawal but they haven’t passed any legislation about it. For all the noise they stir up, they haven’t done anything. And given that there have been the largest protests in history over the past 5 years, it gives me pause when one asserts that protests change politicians’ minds.

I think when we withdraw from Iraq, it won’t be a principled anti-war position, although it will be for some, but rather, an acknowledgment that the war was “mismanaged.”

As you say, popular opinion gave Democrats a huge bat to beat Petraeus with and they used it. If there was no popular sentiment against the war, then that, as I suggesed on the FoOL blog, would have played substantially worse in the media.

I mean, look right now. A majority of Americans are in favor of a withdraw of some degree. And Congress does…?

Nixon winning and ending up pro-war only demonstrated to many of the protesters the futility of their efforts. No matter how successful their efforts seemed like they would be (after all, if you buy the LBJ argument, that’s a big deal), the warmongers pulled a fast one, and got a wolf in sheep’s clothing elected.

Was Congress aware of its own impending doom? Yes and no. It was acceptable doom. You gotta look at this in Cold War context: all communists are evil. All communists are all the same. If we stop here, the domino effect will begin, and a cascade of capitalist nations in Southeast Asia will fall to the specter of communism. There was no expense too high to defeat communism.

I don’t think it was money that changed Congress’s mind, but Congress decided that they couldn’t win in Vietnam.

While I don’t know if LBJ actually believed that, it’s an interesting argument. He might have been right though: it was the loss of the South and the White vote that might have hurt him more than anything else. He was, after all, one of many in a long-line of Southern Democrats who had maintained FDR’s uneasy alliance between racist Southerns and a pro-labor, generally more progressive Northern Democrats. The way FDR did it was by preventing civil rights and such by being a Federal issue, and leaving it to the States. LBJ broke that with the Civil Rights and Voting Acts, which was the single greatest step to break up segregation. If you look at statistics, segregation didn’t really decrease after Brown v Board in 1955, but during LBJ’s second term (1964-1968).

LBJ knew he broke the Democratic Party, and I think there’s a good chance he thought that what’s doomed his re-election changes.

At least the chronology of events, however, does cast doubt on that assertion, given that LBJ withdrew from the race days after the New Hampshire Primary.

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But to get back to the main point, the end result was that the American people still got a pro-war President, and in fact, one worse than LBJ. I think that’s the lesson my father and activists like him took after years of protesting: nothing in the electoral system brought us out of Vietnam, just the same, corrupt politicians who brought us in realizing that they couldn’t win.