Anti-war Democrats find little has changed

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The anti-war crowd had waited years for this moment, when it could finally use its political muscle to end or at least sharply curtail American involvement in a war that seems endless.

Instead, Congress’ most vocal anti-war activists were badly outnumbered last week when they tried to define an exit strategy for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

“We need a plan while we are there and a strategy for leaving,” said Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md., who last year defeated an eight-term incumbent Democrat who backed the Iraq war. “We don’t have it.”

They weren’t even allowed a vote on a plan. It was a setback because for years, anti-war lawmakers lacked the votes they needed to impose restrictions on former President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Now, the president is a Democrat, and the Democrats have a 79-seat majority in the House of Representatives and 59 Senate seats, including two independents, which gives them their biggest margins since the early 1990s.

Nevertheless, the anti-war crowd remains as impotent as it was during the Bush years amid widespread support for President Barack Obama and a public that’s preoccupied with economic issues and largely unperturbed by the escalating war in Afghanistan.

“Afghanistan simply doesn’t arouse the same kind of broad opposition that Iraq did,” said John Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College in California.

Though the reasons for invading Iraq proved to be questionable, there’s far less controversy about Afghanistan, Pitney said, because “that’s where the bad guys are.”

Obama has said that U.S. combat troops will leave Iraq by August 2010, so the congressional anti-war effort is now turning largely to Afghanistan.

House Democratic leaders urged members to trust Obama, and they quickly debated and passed the $96.7 billion emergency spending bill that will fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Senate will consider its version this week.