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Today I decided that it was finally time to get rid of the protest sign that has been mouldering in the garage for...oh, must be years now. Long ago, on one of our first national anti-war marches, I got an oversized plastic candy cane and some foam core from the local K-Mart and rigged up a base which stands up well to wind, etc. and to which I just kept taping new protest signs every time I went out on another protest.
I kept it around because I was so fond of the last sign I attached to it. It was a mock-up of a blue book exam answer written by George W. Bush and corrected in red ink with a big "F" at the bottom and the comment, "George, this exam was a MISERABLE FAILURE!" It has to be at least a year old, probably 2. I ripped that one off, and underneath it was another one reading, "Yo, George, it's 'liberate,' not 'obliterate.'" Underneath that one was another, and so on, all the way down to the first one, which just read "NO MORE BLOOD."
We started protesting the war before it happened. Though I have maintained the protest ever since, in various ways, I stopped going on the marches after a while. I'm not sure exactly why. At some point, I think, I felt that public opposition to the war was clear enough that marching wasn't the most effective way to work against it. I think that's probably even more true since the 2006 elections. Congress knows what the message is. Now it's just about engineering a situation where it's possible for them to act on it.
The lunatics in the White House know what the message is too. They just refuse to accept it.
I ripped up all the old layers of posterboard and put them in the trash. It made me angry, going back through layer on layer and realizing how old some of those signs were. All the things that all the pundits are now belatedly realizing were obvious to all of us then. That the war was a mistake; that the 'threat' Iraq posed had been trumped up; that the potential for damage, destruction, and death was extraordinary; that Bush and his crowd were either criminally insane or simply criminal. (Earlier during the move I threw out a different sign that just read "Impeach, Indict, Imprison.") We knew. And of course, nobody gave a shit.
I know all the reasons why the popular opinion about this war has shifted so late and so tragically after the fact. I wrote a long column about it back in...I think, 2003. I speculated then that Bush's appearance on "Meet the Press," in which he admitted that Saddam Hussein had never posed a direct threat to the US, was the beginning of a shift in the public attitude toward the war; and I was right about that. It doesn't really make me feel that much better, knowing that it is now too late to ward off any of the consequences that we could see coming all the way back in 2002. The damage is done. There's no way to heal Iraq. It's blown apart. It will come back together again in some sort of configuration, but we will not be the people who decide what it looks like.
Then again, there were some things I didn't predict. I could have told you the war was wrong, and that the Bush team was entering it deliberately, simply because they were hell-bent on starting it, and were merely fabricating justifications in order to line up public support for it. That much was obvious to anyone who took an objective look at their "case for war." What I could never have predicted was how shockingly incompetent this administration would turn out to be at the game they insisted on playing. It had never occurred to me that *any* American administration--no matter how intellectually challenged or morally insane--would go to war without a viable plan for the post-invasion phase. I couldn't have predicted that the American troops would be instructed to stand around with their hands in their pockets while Baghdad's government buildings, museums, banks, and power plants were looted right down to the support beams--or that our secretary of defense would respond to this situation by shrugging and saying, "Freedom is untidy."
At the time I was marching, I was inclined to view the Bush administration as engaged on a deviant but diabolically subtle and coordinated master plan. Now, I see them as a group of deluded fantasists who mistakenly assumed that simply because they were able to bribe, lie, cheat and steal their way into power in the United States, that made them omnipotent. And I have come around to the conclusion that although evil may perhaps be more insidious when it's smart, it actually does a lot more damage when it's stupid.
It's frustrating looking at all that posterboard and magic marker and thinking about how different it could have been if more people had been able to see through the charade as early as we were. But I shouldn't forget about the big picture. It took ten years and more for the Vietnam War to become as unpopular as this one has become in four years. It may be that we get out of this one faster than we got out of the last one. You can fool a lot of the people most of the time, but apparently the cycle does get shorter.
But as far as the damage done goes...well, we did ourselves and others a great deal of damage during the Vietnam War. But the speed and the scope of the destruction we have unleashed in Iraq is truly terrifying. We can now pull our own troops out; it's just about lining up enough Republicans in Congress who would like to save their own asses come 2008. But we will never undo what Bush has done over there. The consequences will outlast his reign, and probably that of the next president, even if he (or she) is a two-termer. It would surprise me if it takes less than a generation for things to start settling down there.
We can pull our troops out and move on. Ultimately, we will. I feel pretty confident about that now. But we can't really end the war, either by staying or going. I guess maybe that's the real reason I quit marching. What I wanted to do was stop the war. We could have stopped it before it started. We maybe could have stopped it in year one. There's nothing on God's earth that can stop it now. Stay, go, phased withdrawal, classified withdrawal, open-ended commitment, surge, it doesn't matter. The war we started doesn't answer to us any more.
I look forward to seeing our troops come home. They have certainly been through enough. But it does not feel good to look at all those torn-up bits of paper and think about how the war--the first phase of the war--is already history, and how much more history we have yet to live through.
I will always be glad to have had the company of all the people who marched with us. I hope that it did play its part in moving public sentiment about Bush's war--at its infuriatingly glacial pace--from the fever pitch of March 2003 to the revulsion of November 2006. All the same. So many dead, so many bodies torn apart, so much burned and flattened and ripped to shreds, over the past four years. And it could all have been so different.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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