By Matt Holdridge
From the Huffington Post:
Over the past few weeks, the news out of Afghanistan and Iraq has been pretty grim. Abstruse and bizarre comments from Afghan President Hamid Karzai troubled America’s diplomatic community; violence followed the election of Iraqi president Iyad Allawi; and a leaked, two-year-old video showing the killing of civilians in New Baghdad raised fundamental questions about U.S. military policy.
It’s a sequence of stories that two years ago would have produced howls in Congress and spurred demonstrations outside the Beltway. Today, the fallout is negligible.
America’s military campaign in Afghanistan and its draw-down in Iraq are hardly resonating on the political landscape.
…Having a Democratic president in office has, indeed, changed the dynamics in fundamental and sometimes difficult ways for the progressive community. And it’s not just simply because it presents more opportunities for collaboration than existed under George W. Bush.
…”I think it is true that progressives do not want to take on this war partly because they think it will hurt their specific domestic causes, partly because they think it will be disloyal to Obama,” said Robert Greenwald, the activist filmmaker who has spearheaded anti-war efforts. “In the end, not pushing Obama on this is one will be one of the greatest single mistakes progressive will make and will continue to make.”
The Liberty Movement, for better-or-worse, has often had to join forces with the principled Left on certain foreign policy issues because of the Right’s embrace of neo-conservative thought.
Members of our movement, this website included, have pointed out for sometime the loss of anti-war enthusiasm among progressives. In many instances, we’ve become the sole critic of our government’s foreign adventures.
This of course begs the question, was the opposition to American empire on the Left ever really principled to begin with, or just an issue to be abandoned once electoral victory was at hand?