Interesting article, but there's a certain irony with a conservative lamenting the lack of an effective anti-war movement.... :rofl:
July 4, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
How They Get Away With It
Three reasons Washington’s empire-builders don’t have to worry about ’60s-style dissent—not including the volunteer Army
by Scott McConnell
It was surprising how many people seemed to take genuine pleasure in British MP George Galloway’s contentious appearance before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. He was, after all, only a former left-Labor Party backbencher, a bit pink in his associations. And notwithstanding the vigor of his denials, the nature of his financial relationship to Saddam’s Oil for Food program was not entirely cleared up.
But it wasn’t Galloway’s protestations of innocence or his political character that made his turn noteworthy. What was striking was the sight of a man inside the Senate chamber using the full force of the English language to denounce the pack of lies behind President Bush’s Iraq policy. Galloway didn’t submit to the Democratic Party script and pretend that the war was due to a “massive intelligence failure,” that President Bush was somehow misinformed about Saddam’s weapons (or lack of them). He went instead for the jugular of the whole enterprise, reiterating what he had said well before the war—that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda—and on these crucial points he was right and Sen. Norm Coleman and the other Republicans hoping to milk his testimony for electoral gain were dead wrong. The fruit of their error, Galloway continued, was 100,000 dead, including 1,600 Americans, and another 15,000 U.S. soldiers wounded, many of them permanently maimed—not to mention that the United States now has the worst international image in its history or that the volunteer army can no longer meet its recruiting goals and may have its back broken by the burdens of an extended Iraq occupation.
One never hears words like this spoken in the Senate. A search for successors to William Fulbright or Wayne Morse or Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy yields only empty chairs. Big-name Democrats scramble for microphone time to denounce as “extremist” judges who are pro-life, but about the fomenters of a foreign policy that is manifestly extremist, they fall into timid silence. Howard Dean, the reputed mad dog of last year’s primaries, has turned toy poodle as head of Democratic National Committee, full of fighting barbs about Tom DeLay’s ethics but silent about a war that is hardly despised by his party’s big donors. It took a Brit to remind Americans turning on the evening news what it might be like to have an opposition party.
The failure of Americans to generate a politically significant domestic opposition to the war is now one of the most important developments in world politics. It means that the Bush administration can contemplate, without any fear of adverse domestic political consequences, expansion of its war to Syria or a large-scale bombing of Iran. The only constraints on its behavior are international.
(...)
In the absence of an antiwar movement or serious domestic political opposition, only the outside world can put the brakes on American policy—only when Bush’s war plans come up against foreign obstacles that produce a dramatic defeat or humiliation or generate a financial crisis that the administration can’t overcome. Barring that, the American future may be war for as long as anyone can foresee.
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_07_04/article.html
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