Xref: utzoo alt.activism.d:38 trial.talk.politics.peace:110 talk.politics.misc:66782
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!cmcl2!panix!mydog!gcf
From: gcf@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d,trial.talk.politics.peace,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Actually, Nine Percent Ain't Bad
Summary: 
Keywords: 
References: <9104022229.11154@mydog.UUCP><1991Apr3.185316.13519@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Followup-To: 
Message-ID: <9104032212.12025@mydog.UUCP>
Date: 3 Apr 91 22:12:52 EST

| gcf@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch) writes:
| >have an excellent chance of seeing the dissolution of the War 
| >Machine in your lifetime.  And you would not know this without 
| >the public-relations victories of the War Machine's servitors 
| >and sycophants.  Keep the faith.
j
silber@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Ami A. Silberman) writes:
| (Most of the analysis deleted.)  And, given enough time, there will
| be more members of the peace movement than people?  Wow, animal
| sentience!:)  

Okay, some of the math was a little bit humorous.  But the humor
decorates a valid point: there's a much bigger anti-war movement
than there used to be.

|               Seriously, there are differences in the peace movement
| then and now.  In the Desert Storm peace movement, a fair number
| of the nay-sayers were pessimists (I must admit that I was a bit of one
| myself until after the airwar started) who just thought it would be a
| bad idea.  Remember, back in September and August the talk was of the
| large number of casualties engendered by an immeadiate ground offensive.
| The other thing to keep in mind was that back in the early days of
| Veitnam, large portions of the American left were actually in favor of
| the war, for a variety of reasons.

Do you mean by the Left alleged liberals like Adlai Stevenson,
Jacob Javits, the Kennedys, the AFL-CIO, that lot?  If so, yes,
they were in favor of it; in fact, they engineered it.  I don't
know of anyone in what I would consider the real Left of that
time who was in favor of the war, although a good many of the
more authoritarian types have now recanted -- sucking up to a
more authoritative kind of authority, I imagine.

Before Johnson overtly committed the troops (Kennedy had been
sneaking them in) American public opinion was about evenly
divided on whether military action was a good idea.  So this was
rather similar to the recent situation.  Then as now, the people
who were seriously against war in general managed to alienate
those who were not against war in general but against the current
war in particular, although this war developed so fast it didn't
matter.  Had Congress been unwilling to go along with Bush's
plans I'm sure an incident would have been provided to get things
moving.  

If the Iraqis had fought like the Vietnamese or the Germans, we
might have seen very high casualties indeed, but that in itself
would not have done much but increase the thirst for vengeance
and justification by violence.  The time to stop a war is before
it starts -- long before.  It's probably already too late to stop
the next war, which I would guess will be directed at Cuba,
although as I noted in an article on the subject, there are quite
a few potential targets.

--
Gordon Fitch  |  gcf@mydog.uucp  | uunet!cmcl2.nyu.edu!panix!mydog!gcf