Big shifts against the Bush War

The tectonic plates of history are, finally, shifting in this country. A citizenry that was largely stunned into fearful followership by the attacks of September 2001 has started to regain its sense of reponsibility, its morals, and its agency.
We saw that at the ballot-box, November 7. But it didn’t end there. Since November, citizens’ antiwar pressure on our lawmakers has continued. An incoming Congress whose leaders originally planned to put their first focus on domestic affairs was forced instead to put the Iraq war at the top of its agenda. They started yesterday. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was grilling Condi Rice on the President’s new “plan” for Iraq, at the same time the House Armed Services Committee was grilling new Secdef Gates on the same topic.
Crucially, in the Senate hearings, nearly all the Republicans there joined the Dems in expressing strong criticism of the Bush Plan.
The best read on that is Dana Milbanks in today’s WaPo. He wrote that at the end, committee chair Joe Biden told Rice bluntly:

“I hope you’ll convey to the president… that you heard 21 members, with one or two notable exceptions, expressing outright hostility, disagreement and/or overwhelming concern with the president’s proposal.”

I saw some news clips of the hearing on t.v. last night. GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel was completely scathing about the Prez’s plan for escalation, and very, very persistent in his criticism of Condi.
Condi tried to claim that what the Prez is proposing is not an escalation but an “augmentation.” (What on earth does that mean, anyway? Sounds like a distinction without being a difference to me.)
I believe the Prez’s plan is an escalation in two ways:

(1) It’s an increase over the current number of US troops in Iraq (though admittedly still not an all-time high), and also
(2) It mandates a significant increase in the lethality of the operations the GIs will be allowed, or even encouraged, to undertake in Iraq in the period ahead.

The enhanced permissivity of the military’s ROEs in Iraq (as spelled out quite clearly by the White House on Wednesday, here, p.10) is an even stronger marker of the escalation in the level of conflict that the new plan will bring to the “battlefield” in Iraq than the somewhat paltry increase in the troop numbers.
This escalation spells increased death and destruction– overwhelmingly for the Iraqis, but also for the US service members who will be caught up in the middle of it.
… And the US citizenry are starting, in strong numbers, to understand this.
Longtime JWN readers will know that every Thursday when I’m in my home-town in Charlottesville, Virginia, I take part in our town’s weekly antiwar vigil/demonstration. On many occasions there have been just three or four of us gathered on the windy street corner outside the federal courthouse building here, valiantly holding up our signs that urge the many passing motorists to “Honk 4 Peace”.
Throughout 2006, we saw a steady increase in the numbers of motorists responding. But still, for the most part, there were just between three and seven of us standing there for that one hour per week. (On occcasion I have stood alone, at least for a short time; and several times just two of us have been standing there for 15 minutes or so till someone else came to join us.)
On Thursday last week, there were about 15 people.
Then yesterday, as my doughty co-demonstrator Jane Foster, age 82, and I approached the corner at 4:30 p.m. with our bulky bundle of signs, we were surprised to see people waiting around there for us to come. People whom, for the most part, we didn’t know. “What– ?” I thought to myself as I rushed over to them with the signs. People grabbed them from the pile. Soon, we ran out of signs. People kept coming… Mothers with kids in strollers. Middle-aged couples coming in from out of town. A bunch of people from our Quaker meeting… My dear friend Catherine Peaslee, age 84. (She and Jane have both been stalwart demonstrators over the past year. What incredible women!) I saw people there I hadn’t seen at demonstrations since the big ones we held before the invasion of Iraq– and, as I said, lots of folks I’d never seen before.
The “front” side of our demonstration stretched out, facing the traffic, right along that one corner kerbside outside the courthouse and stretching a long way down sidewalks both ways.
The honking was incredible. Definitely the most ever. We’ve been working hard to “train” the drivers on this for more than three years now. I was so proud of their response yesterday! For sure, everyone who was anywhere near our busy intersection during that hour would have gotten a very strong message… and that includes, probably, the occupants of some 5,000 or 7,000 vehicles driving through. As usual, we got a particularly strong response from African-American drivers, and women. But all sorts of demographics were represented among the honkers yesterday, including the (white, male) drivers of some enormous trucks, people in expensive cars, drivers of old jalopies crammed with a bunch of co-workers going home after a long shift, etc, etc.
Many people wanted just to lean long and hard on their horns. Others did a defiant little thum-thum-a-thum-thum. At times it built up into a broad, glorious concert of varied rhythms and tones.
I must admit that the back side of our demonstration had a bit of a carnival atmosphere as old friends saw each other and went over to hug and say hi. We old-timers had been totally unprepared for this and asked each other in amazement: “What happened?” The general answer was twofold. Number one: the totally unconvincing nature of the President’s speech the night before. Number two: one of our people, Chip Tucker, had actually listed our weekly demonstration on the website of the national organizing group Moveon.org, and several of the new people had seen it there and come along.
In retrospect, I wish we had done more to follow up on and consolidate some of the new energy we saw there. (We should probably try to be a lot more intentional about this next week.)
But it really was an amazing experience… and it certainly helped convince me that Bush has now, fairly definitively, lost the battle for public support of his Iraq war.
Other indicators of this abound. The hearings on Capitol Hill– which are continuing today, and will certainly continue next week– are just riveting. They remind us how great it is, finally, to have a bit of a two-party system back in operation here… I do still want to underline that the opposition to the Bush War is not “merely” partisan. Now, as since the very beginning of this war, there has always been serious opposition to it from some Republicans. But oh, it is so great to see a leadership in the the two houses of congress that now seems prepared to explore, harness, and focus this opposition and– finally– to start to hold the administration accountable.
Today’s papers also have lots of indications that disenchantment with the President and his war policy is strong, deep, and growing. There are some poll results– I can’t immediately find a link– that reportedly show that Bush didn’t even get any tiny blip of an increase in poll numbers with his Wednesday night speech.
And today’s NYT tells us that:

* President Bush’s talk on his new Iraq strategy received a restrained response from soldiers at a Georgia military base.
* Voices in two conservative districts in Pennsylvania swung to an antiwar Democrat in the last election, and continue strongly antiwar.
* Iraq’s tepid response to the U.S. proposal raised questions about whether it would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan…

Over in the WaPo, meanwhile, Sudarsam Raghavan wrote about the disillusionment of US soldiers on the frontlines, in the Hurriyah district of Baghdad. Including this great quote, from 20-year-old infantryman Daniel Caldwell: “They’re kicking a dead horse here. The Iraqi army can’t stand up on their own.”
(All of that short report from Raghavan is worth reading. In it, he describes going out with this unit on an allegedly “intel-driven” raid on some houses “near the Mahanara School”… Turned out, though, that they’d done their intrusive house-to-house searching in a neighborhood near a completely different school, altogether… Those guys didn’t have a clue where they were, or where they were going… And as for their commander-in-chief??)
But what, you might wonder, is absolutely the weakest of the many weak links in the latest Bush “plan” for Iraq?
That would be its reliance on having won the “commitment” to it of Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki. In Condi’s appearance at the Senate F.R. Committee yesterday, she had made a huge deal about how this was the decisive new element in the new plan.
In Baghdad, however, as John Burns and Sabrina Tavernise noted laconically in this NYT piece,

The Iraqi leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, failed to appear at a news conference and avoided any public comment. He left the government’s response to an official spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, who gave what amounted to a backhanded approval of the troop increase and emphasized that Iraqis, not Americans, would set the future course in the war.
Mr. Dabbagh said that the government’s objective was to secure the eventual withdrawal of American troops…
“The plan can be developed according to the needs,” Mr. Dabbagh said. Then he added tartly, “What is suitable for our conditions in Iraq is what we decide, not what others decide for us.”

History, as I said, is in the making.