Hoping against hope

Unbeknownst to this blogger, there was an anti-war protest yesterday – the Associated Press is a little skimpy on details  ;

SAN FRANCISCO — Thousands of people called for a swift end to the war in Iraq as they marched through downtown on Saturday, chanting and carrying signs that read: “Wall Street Gets Rich, Iraqis and GIs Die” or “Drop Tuition Not Bombs.”

The streets were filled with thousands as labor union members, anti-war activists, clergy and others rallied near City Hall before marching to Dolores Park.

As part of the demonstration, protesters fell on Market Street as part of a “die in” to commemorate the thousands of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens who have died since the conflict began in March 2003.

The protest was the largest in a series of war protests taking place in New York, Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, organizers said.

No official head count was available. Organizers of the event estimated about 30,000 people participated in San Francisco. It appeared that more than 10,000 people attended the march.

“Other US cities” – too many to name? “Largest in a series” – that can’t be hard. Protest attendence has been falling off this past year – and in human-speak 30,000 is really about 3,000 given the miscounts by ten-fold I’ve see “organizers of the event” give here in DC. Marathon Pundit reports dreary numbers in Chicago and New York, too.

Yesterday, Wordsmith at Flopping Aces wrote “What the anti-war movement is really fighting against“  – that answer of course, is that they’re just protesting war, in general. Every war is illegal, every war is immoral and there are no good causes that justify war – recent Left revisionism even has begun arguing that World War II wasn’t a just war.

You can factor in that the US is winnng the war against the thugs (link to The Redhunter) in Iraq who’ve taken to bombing and beheading civilians just for the shock value. Michael Yon writes ;

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

Even today, with the stunning successes in the last few months over the psychopaths in Iraq, the Associated Press tries temper the good news that trickles down to the American public with an unsourced rumor that al Sadr may bring his goat-roping minions out of retirement;

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr could end a ban on his militia’s activities because of rising anger over U.S. and Iraqi raids against his followers, an aide said Friday amid concerns about rising violence and clashes between rival factions in the mainly Shiite south.
 
Al-Sadr’s call for a six-month cease-fire has been credited with a sharp drop in the number of bullet-riddled bodies that turn up on the streets of Iraq and are believed to be victims of Shiite death squads.

“An aide” – some guy who says he’s al-Sadr’s aide. And the AP credits al Sadr’s non-participation in the campaign against Americans as the reason the “surge” worked. al Sadr was afraid he’d lose his entire Army – that’s why he stopped opposing the Americans. He was getting his ample butt kicked.

And from the Washington Post we get “I don’t think this place is worth one more soldier’s life” – another newspaper article based on the fact that soldiers bitch;

Their line of tan Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles creeps through another Baghdad afternoon. At this pace, an excruciating slowness, they strain to see everything, hoping the next manhole cover, the next rusted barrel, does not hide another bomb. A few bullets pass overhead, but they don’t worry much about those.

“I hate this road,” someone says over the radio.

They stop, look around. The streets of Sadiyah are deserted again. To the right, power lines slump down into the dirt. To the left, what was a soccer field is now a pasture of trash, combusting and smoking in the sun. Packs of skinny wild dogs trot past walls painted with slogans of sectarian hate.

I guess that’s more important than the fact that violence against our troops and Iraqis is down over 70%. Soldiers complain – that’s what they do when they’re not fighting for their lives. It’s not exactly worth a front page story. It wasn’t news in 1944, and it’s not news now.

Any mention of the fact that Karbala and several other provinces have been turned over to the Iraqis?

U.S. forces will turn over security to Iraqi authorities in the southern Shi’ite province of Karbala tomorrow, the American commander for the area said, despite fighting between rival militia factions that has killed dozens.
Karbala will become the eighth of Iraq’s 18 provinces to revert to Iraqi control, despite President Bush’s prediction in January that the Iraqi government would have responsibility for security in all of the provinces by November.

The public has to go on line to find support for the war, support for troops, and to discover the truth about conditions and successes in Iraq. Americans are shut out of the discussion by misleading editorial boards and the politics of misinformation.

Scott Malensk at Flopping Aces wrote that the Democrats in Congress are trying to take credit for our planned withdrawals from Iraq next;

Then it hit me like a shot o’ Irish Whiskey in the java! U.S. forces are already scheduled to be withdrawing in that time frame. Cutting the funding to force a withdrawal is moot. There’s no point. Just a few weeks ago General Petraeus told Congress (including specifically Senator Carl Levin who is trying to cut funding for the war next year). I searched for his speech, and there it was:

The fact is; the reason we’ve been in Iraq for nearly 5 years is because the insurgents and the other malcontents in Iraq thought they had a shot at defeating us politically. The Iraqis themselves weren’t helping either because they were pretty certain we’d abandon them like we had in 1991 and the dozens of times we’ve abandoned struggling people in the past decade or so.

Want to know why the “surge” worked? Because even after the loud-mouthed Democrat Congress won the election last year and promised to abandon the Iraqi people to their tormentors, President Bush did the opposite, increased presence and took the fight to the enemy. The Iraqis saw that as long as President Bush was in office, they would get our unwaivering support, despite the political climate. That’s what’s winning this war.

I suspect that by this time next year, the Democrats in Congress are going to have egg on their faces when Americans come out of their polling places.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Politics, Terror War