Why the loser lobby is losing

Eli Lake:

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The peaceniks need only blame themselves for their failures. They are asking Americans to believe not that the war was a blunder, so much that the war was a sin; that the decapitators and car bombers of innocents are a resistance; that the army seeking to prevent ethnic cleansing today is in fact responsible for it.

In 2006, writing about how the antiwar movement was conducting its own diplomacy in London and Amman to meet members of the "Sunni Resistance," anti-war writer Robert Dreyfuss summed up the moral equivalency that afflicts so many in his quarter.

"Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in Iraq?" he asked. "Are the good guys the U.S. troops fighting to impose American hegemony in the Gulf? Are the good guys the American forces who have installed a murderous Shiite theocracy in Baghdad? Are the good guys the Marines who murdered children and babies in Haditha in cold blood?"

Leaving aside the deficient moral reasoning of the case the protestors make, their story of the war also makes for terrible politics. Most Americans do want to end a war they believe America is losing, but they don't suffer from the delusion that Iraqis would be better off if the Shiite and Sunni death cults took power after our soldiers left.

It is a prospect the activists for now would rather not broach. Kevin Martin of Peace Action in Mother Jones said it wasn't even for the "peace community" to come up with a contingency plan to prevent competitive genocide after a withdrawal. "In my organization and the umpteen antiwar coalitions that I am in, this is in no way a priority that we think about or talk about," he said.

Later on he added, "We are not responsible for dreaming up a perfect world. We are responsible for trying to end the damn war and putting the political pressure on our government, which is extremely difficult when you have a feeble Congress and a dictator president."

He is right that his current struggle is "extremely difficult." It is extremely difficult to expect most Americans to believe that their president is a dictator and that their soldiers are no different than terrorists. The fact that Congress is not buying this pack of lies however is evidence not of the legislature's feebleness, but of the nation's strength

By their own admission they only oppose our side of the war, so they are not really anti war just anti the US side of the war. That puts them on the side of the people who explode around non combatants and seek a genocidal end in Iraq. That cannot be perceived as the moral high ground, especially when our troops have significantly reduced the violence, hale al Qaeda on the run and have the Iraqis stepping up to stop the conflict. The "anti war" movement has demonstrated its moral bankruptcy.