Major Anti-War Groups Staying Quiet About (Or Supporting) Obama’s Afghan Escalation
Don’t look now, but President Obama’s announcement today of an escalation in the American presence in Afghanistan is being met with mostly silence — and even some support — from the most influential liberal groups who opposed the Iraq War.
It’s another sign of the dramatic shifts in the political landscape caused by Obama’s election and the economic crisis. Groups whose fundraising and membership exploded with their opposition to Bush’s Iraq policies are adapting to a new world where public outrage is focused heavily on the economy and leading liberal groups suddenly have an inside track to the White House.
MoveOn.org, the most visible and controversial anti-war bugaboo to people on the right, declined to make any public statement about Obama’s Afghan policies in response to my queries. An official close to the group confirmed to me that MoveOn wouldn’t be saying anything in the near term. The group is expected to poll its members on Afghanistan, the official said, though it’s unclear when.
MoveOn’s own members were recently polled on their priorities for 2009, and Afghanistan didn’t make the cut.
Nor will we hear anything from Americans United for Change, which ran $600,000 worth of TV ads against the Iraq War in the summer of 2007. “Americans United for Change doesn’t plan to comment on President Obama’s new strategy,” a spokesperson for the group, Lauren Weiner, just emailed.
Jon Soltz, the head of VoteVets, one of the most pugnacious anti-Iraq War groups, came out in support of Obama’s Afghan strategy in an Op Ed with The Huffington Post.
One group did blast the strategy today: Tom Andrews of Win Without War warned that it “will lead to quagmire” and “undermine our security.”
The relative silence on the left about Obama’s Afghan strategy is understandable. The politics of Afghanistan are murky because of September 11th. The argument against staying isn’t as clear cut as with Iraq. Liberal groups don’t want to distract from passing Obama’s enormous domestic agenda. Obama’s Afghan moves are part of a larger regional strategy that rests heavily on diplomacy — a major break from the past. And officials with some of these groups don’t want to lose inside influence with the White House.
Times do change.
Update: TPM reports that Peace Action is comparing the escalation to Vietnam.
The homepage of this blog is here. RSS feed here. Twitter feed here. Email me here.
Elana Schor quotes squeaky wheel Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action…
Of course, it’s not the same strategy.
.
cool, thanks. I’ll add
Greg~
This is a little off subject but have you seen this…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/27/osama-bin-laden-resurface_n_180080.html
GOP using OBL in an ad in the NY-20 race…good lord, can’t they come up with anything else during the home stretch? OBL has been free for almost 8 yrs on the GOP watch, if I was running with an R by my name right now, I wouldn’t be throwing OBL out there, because many American’s see this as an utter failure of the GOP over the last 8 yrs…just when I thought they had started trying to reshape their image…
Greg
.
One thing that isn’t being talked about a lot today was President Obama publicly saying he would enlist the help of Iran with his Af/Pak strategy. I would have thought the new version of PNAC would have blasted him for that by now.
.
As for the strategy i think those groups that oppose war in all instances will push back but I don’t really define those groups as liberal groups. They are one issue groups. Move On et al probably won’t weigh in unless things go wrong there. The plan President Obama enumerated today was vastly different from Bush’s and the goals are also. He defines the mission as taking out the terrorists and building up Afghans’ own troops so they can fend for themselves as well as stabilizing the region. He is not trying to bring a democracy to Afghanistan like Bush was. I know a lot of people keep trying to make an analogy with other nations’ attempts to defeat Afghanistan in wars but I think they miss a key point. Every other war with Afghanistan was an attempt to take over the country and rule it. Thats markedly NOT what we are trying to do. We aren’t even at war with Afghanistan but instead the extremists IN Afghanistan and Pakistan. Because we are narrowly focused on who we are trying to defeat we have a much better chance of accomplishing our goals there.
Jean — it is dumb.
In any event, OBL has probably been dead since sometime in late 2001, but he died under circumstances that are impossible to verify or that are not helpful for AQ’s narratvie:
I.e. (i) he is a few wiffs of DNA under a mountain somewhere, (ii) he died of kidney failure or (iii) he was killed by some of his own people, in an effort to prevent capture.
Jenn D
.
While I think Scott Murphy’s response about the death penalty for terrorist was not what he should have said (there are better ways to express your disagreement with the death penalty) I think using 9-11 in an attack ad might backfire big time on the RNC. People didn’t appreciate Guliani using 9-11 as a prop and I don’t think they will appreciate it from Tedisco either. And NY doesn’t have the death penalty anyway does it?
I wholeheartedly accept what is commonly called Occam’s Razor and I firmly believe it can be used in this case. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case the simplest, and almost certainly correct, explanation as to why these groups are not criticizing Obama is because they are hypocrites, pure and simple. Protesting the Iraq War was seen as a way to help get more Democrats in office, and now that they have a Democrat in power, they quite simply don’t care anymore. The same can be said about any number of issues that got Moveon.org and their ilk all excited during the Bush administration, including deficits and out-of-control spending, indefinite detention of enemy combatants (which are now being called something else, even though the administration has defended the use of indefinite detention)earmarks, signing statements, etc. The list goes on and on, and Obama has only been in power two months. There is going to be a whole lot more jettisoning of principles during the four years this incompetent clown is in office.
I think most people protested the Iraq war because is was based on false information. Most everyone agreed that going into Afghanistan at the time was the right thing to do. That’s why I don’t think you’ll hear much protest from the liberal groups except for the ones that are anti-everything. (I’m looking at you Code Pink)
John
.
Keep trying dude. Some where the world’s tinyest violin is playiing just for you.
Oh by the way John, you might want to take a look at some of the things MoveOn has said about President Obama not getting the troops out of Iraq faster and also continuing to block information on enemy detainees getting tortured. President Obama will get criticized on real issues more by the left than he will the right because conservatives excuse any and everything that Republicans do while people on the left criticise Dems as much as they do Republicans when they screw up. Maybe just maybe had some Republicans actually criticized Bush over the last 8 years instead of calling everyone who questioned him a traitor, you would have some credibility on the issue. But since you didn’t then obviously you don’t. Deal with it.
It is good to see the President going with what works. The surge worked in Iraq – the war there was essentially over last summer & the status of forces agreement is testament to it.
In the Afghan theater – his surge up is a start. But his thinking about finishing up in 2010 or 11… He’s going to need a lot more troops than he is sending there now. He needs double, maybe even more. I predict come ‘10 – they will be back asking for more. I hope it doesn’t become his undoing.
Get ready – this is going to be the long one. The trouble is, it’s nothing new to the afghans. You have to change the mindset. They know that we’ll leave, sooner or later. The Brits left, the Soviets left. Our military is the best on the planet, and won an outstanding victory in Iraq, they can do this too.
I think that Washington people misunderstand “groups” of people whom they so glibly call “anti-war.” Many of us were anti-IRAQ WAR. For reasons that should now be clear to almost any sentient being. The premise for the war was an outright lie. The Administration was so inept that they couldn’t be entrusted to conduct it competently. It was likely to become a quagmire. That, and, oh, it was likely to result in thousands upon thousands of needless deaths of innocent people. That doesn’t mean that these “groups” of people have been opposed to dismantling the capability of hostile jihadist groups to attack us on our own soil, through military means or whatever. We have always been concerned, I think, about the feckless lack of strategy in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t make a person “anti-war.” In that sense, the term is a pejorative, and not helpful.
interesting points, tom — I do think, though, that some officials at these groups are in some ways inclined against the current escalation, but for the reasons mentioned, don’t feel the need to say so yet…others, meanwhile, are agnostic or favor it, which is also interesting.
Agreed, Greg. However, I’m not sure that you can call Peace Action a “major” anti-war group, you know what I mean. We to the very slightly left of center have always been plagued with fringe groups like Free Mumia and the adolescent Anarchists, just as the right has always been plagued by the Klan and the Militia groups. Would you call them, in a blaring headline “Major Pro-War Groups”? I doubt it. Peace Action isn’t a “Major” group. Maybe MoveOn would be considered “Major” but let’s see how they shake out on this.
MoveOn hosted an online petition against the Afghanistan war back when Bush was president.
Apparently now that Obama’s in office, it no longer matters if [w]e perpetuate the cycle of retribution and recruit more terrorists by creating martyrs.
Most of what now constitutes the “anti-war movement” wasn’t against the Afghan war on principle before the Iraq war started, was it? MoveOn, for example, never opposed the Afghan war. It doesn’t seem like that much of a surprise that these groups aren’t suddenly materializing opposition to it now.
As has been pointed out earlier:
MoveOn hosted an online petition against the Afghanistan war back when Bush was president.
Apparently now that Obama’s in office, it no longer matters if [w]e perpetuate the cycle of retribution and recruit more terrorists by creating martyrs.
“It’s another sign of the dramatic shifts in the political landscape…” Um, no it is not. The left did no, does not and never has based its ‘opposition to War’ on any principle except to oppose all those who are not them. They are a primitive tribe motivated only by loathing of the other tribe, nothing else! When out reasoned their common response is name calling and rock throwing. I’d wager the only ‘Wahr’ in which they’d support their own country would be if Canada invaded Madison, Wisconsin. Think I’m nuts? When the draft withered away in 1972, so did the ‘anti-Wahr’ crowds. And this is funny: ” Peace Action is comparing the escalation to Vietnam.” Vietnam in 1957? ‘64? ‘69? ‘72? ‘75? Or the flight of thousands and thousands of Vietnamese boat people from the charitable and peace loving communists?
Missing from Obama’s Afghan Escalation: Anti-War Groups Suddenly Say ‘No Comment’
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2009/03/28/missing-obamas-afghan-escalation-anti-war-groups-suddenly-say-no-comment
Some of my friends and I are real leftists. Not the fauxLiberal Democrat Party type. Real leftists and real Liberals do not support US Imperialism in any way whatsoever. We always thought that Obama was a Trojan horse, a neocon in blackface, like Rice and Powell. We go to peace rallies and the fauxLiberals frown at us when we chant “9/11 was an inside job!”
I’m preying every day to hear from the FED they are firing all the Big 5 Banks CEO’S because they are who are trying to worse the Houses crisis.In my personal view and experirence they are not helping familys who really wants stay in their homes and only are pleased to help them with a loan modification lowering their payments and even if they are working but there’s hours were cut they want still paying with a good faith of the loan modification instead the Banks are aproving only a few and denied a lot.what they are trying is delaying the crisis and acting as a passive form of economic terrorism agaisnt the Goverment that we the US worker citizen elected….The goverment must act NOW and FAST before be late…..FIRED THEM………NOW
My fellow on Facebook shared this link and I’m not dissapointed that I came to your blog.
Seems a US air strike killed women and children in Afghan. How odd that if this happened during the Bush administration the media would tell us that Bush was a murderer.
So, I guess this means Obama is now also a murderer? It does not seem to me that liberals can have their cake and eat it too.
They are a primitive tribe motivated only by loathing of the other tribe, nothing else! When out reasoned their common response is name calling and rock throwing. I’d wager the only ‘Wahr’ in which they’d support their own country would be if Canada invaded Madison, Wisconsin.