It's not a popular thing to say...but an Anti-war candidate would win

Remember how Howard Dean was slaughtered in the press for wondering if we were safer now than before Saddam was taken out? Look at the polls now--it's the majority feeling that we aren't.

I'm not saying Dean could have won it (I believe he could), but I was one of the many who said "wait just a bit...you don't know what Iraq will be like near election time".

For those of us who can see, it was just going to get worse...and guess what? It's going to still keep getting worse.

Come Nov., any support for the war in Iraq will be a negative. Trust me. I saw 3 years ago that Bush would leave office one of the most hated Presidents of all time. I'm not taking my money off that bet.

It's too bad that the antiwar wing of the Democratic party is considered to be "too leftist".

It's also too bad that folks around here tend to get real nervous when you point out that Kerry is no longer the antiwar activist that he was in the early 1970's.

We're not supposed to talk about that until after the election

I'm "Anti-Stupid-Wars".

I think a good case could be made for taking on Pakistan or N. Korea, but Iraq? Heh. No REAL threat was ever coming from there.

in the short term.
This is one of them I think.
All the focus a few months ago on whether an anti-war candidate could win tended to miss the point that being anti-Iraq war was the correct position.
So the short term consideration of whether an anti-war candidate could win was misguided.

Looks like events are proving this true now.

The candidate is John Kerry, who has always opposed the Iraq war. Whether he wins or not depends largely on what the members of this site do to get him elected.

I'm serious. If you don't do your part - and that goes well beyond simply voting - then you have no right to call the Democratic candidate unelectable. How Kerry does on November 2 will directly depend on how much work Democrats do to get him elected.

down the memory hole, double speak reigns. I agree with you, LOL!

War is hell.

How do you do that?

What does anti-war mean when we are already at war? Does it mean pulling out? Or does it mean we as a nation admit that the war was wrong, take a step back and let the UN in to help restore some legitimacy to the process?

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

anybody would have voted for him, but who opposes Kerry because of IWR, is a shameless hypocrite.

It's not enough to be anti-war. That's a pacifist, and in this country, that's synonymous with surrender in these Presidential campaigns.

Pro-Peace is different, it's wanting something positive, instead of wishing away the negative. Style is a big part of this campaign.

at least one of them says War is Peace

As long as we're going out on this radical limb of being pro-peace, let's be pro-mom & apple pie also.

That will really win some hearts & minds.

Most of us on the "anti-war" side aren't really anti-war. I wish we could do longer headlines, as I do think its an issue between wisely fought wars and wars of aggression.

Iraq was a war of aggression.

why pacifism isn't popular? Is it because people think we're implying that we're better than they are because we're against war? OMG, as soon as I mention to someone that I'm against war, they get all defensive and put their guard up. It's not even something I like to discuss, but it comes up in conversations because the war is such a hot topic right now.

I have yet to see a viable pacifist solution to the threat posed by Nazi Germany. There's a huge difference between opposition to war and pacifism - war is always terrible, but sometimes its necessary to prevent worse evils.

I think it's very ineffective. All it does is cause more hatred and violence. You can't get to peace by war. Al Quaeda hates us now more than ever, for instance. The Jews and Germans still have strong hatred for each other. If Saddam and Hitler want to murder their people, then it's not our young mens' responsibility to stop them. It's the old men that start wars that should be over there if anyone should be.

What's your opinion on how the United States could have stopped the Nazi aggression without the use of force? A symbolic act of civil disobedience? Maybe FDR could have gone on a hunger strike to appeal to Hitler's conscience.

I'm not saying war is good; war is hell. But in certain circumstances, its the least-bad option.

stopped Hitler. We don't have that responsibility. It's not our problem, just like Iraq's state isn't our problem.

If we had taken your approach, I wouldn't be alive today.

For the case you didn't know, right after Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the US. What would have been your solution? Surrendering because war is bad? Waiting until Germany had nuclear bombs?

War is awful but I have the opinion that WW2 was a war that the US couldn't and shouldn't have run away from.

that war is murder. I don't care what fancy name you put on it, it's still coldhearted killing. I cannot be a Christian and support murder because I've been taught to value others' lives over my own. If someone wants me dead badly enough, then so be it. I'm not going to stoop to their level. I don't want the eternal punishment that comes with that.

This includes the innocent Iraqi civilians' lives. Even if I believed that they would blow the U.S. sky high with all those WMDs, I'd still be against war on Iraq. These are just my opnions - no need to feel bothered by them.

But if someone's trying to kill you and your family, and you can kill him or her first, do you do so? Isn't the goal to minimize killing and suffering? If the case of Hitler, by defeating him we saved the lives of millions of people who would otherwise been exterminated. Tens of millions more would be reduced to slavery.

Which is the worse evil? Fighting back or doing nothing?

It may be coldhearted killing but it also killing to protect people like you. And this is not only about you, it's also about the whole population that needed to be protected.
I'm against war but there were times it couldn't have been avoided anymore. I'm sorry, but your point of view seems irrational.
I ask again, what would have been your proposal to deal with Nazi Germany and Japan after they declared war on the US?
War is clearly not the best choice to solve problems but sometimes one is only left with this option. And to be clear, the Iraq war doesn't fall into that category.

I would also be careful with generalizations like "The Jews and Germans still have strong hatred for each other".

I don't have a family to protect. I'm a 5'2, 95 lb., 22-year-old female with no gun. Fighting is no option for me, and if it was, I wouldn't do it. I don't expect anyone to fight for me, either.

I don't believe that fighting is a neccessary evil. I think it's unnecessary period. And, I'm not going to argue my personal beliefs anymore. You do what works best for you. Discussion over.

Good because it was never about you fighting.
It was about you saying that the US shouldn't have fought in WW2 because "it wasn't their responsibility" while ignoring that Germany and Japan declared war on the US.
You also ignored that by getting engaged in that war, the killing of millions of Jews and political enemies got stopped.

I am thankful for every country that fought against the Nazis. They did stop the holocaust and the Nazi regime by paying a high price, and yes, they did it by killing.
You would have looked the other way because "it wasn't our responsibility" while millions of Jews died in gas chambers. That was the reality.

A pacifist analysis would begin by arguing that if Hitler hadn't gained so much power (through being backed by American industrialists at one point)or if the peace of World War I had been less vindictive (and had not fostered conditions that led to Hitler's rise to power) the conditions might not have come into being that led to war.

Might have not...

Just because war has always been the method in the past does not mean that ways should not be advanced to make war unnecessary now.
Unless of course we stay trapped in our current human nature, in which case war will always be necessary.

That was then, this is now.
Do we want to continue to repeat mistakes?

So please don't say that non-violence does not work. It DOES work, but you never hear about it as often because there's not the death and destruction with a "real" war.

The Soviet Union fell with nary a shot fired-- and that was done by the common people and Boris Yeltzin facing down the tanks that surrounded the Soviet "White House".

Communist Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia also fell without a war. Unfortunately, Romania had some bloodshed, but not on the scale of what a full-scale war would have brought.

And what about Milosevic in Serbia? He was also overthrown without a civil war by the people of that country. They were fed up with his leadership, and the hardship he caused their nation.

And, most recently, Eduard Sheverdnaze's (sp?) government was overthrown in the former soviet Republic of Georgia, without a single shot fired.

Nazi Germany could have been brought down by pacifism, if only the (future) Allies had dealt with it as a "rogue state" and not a beneficial trade partner in the 1930s. Before 1939, there was bustling commerce between Italy, Germany and the British and Americans. In fact, even FDR said good things about Mussolini in the 30s, and admired him for the discipline and business-friendly envoronment he imposed on Italy.

If the British and Americans had been treating Germany and Italy (AND Japan) as the aggressor nations they were (instead of sucking up to them like they did), it's highly unlikely things in Germany would have gotten to the point they had by Munich.

but it only works in certain circumstances. Gandhi was only able to use satyagraha because the English were in charge. If India had been ruled by Adolf Hitler, Gandhi would have been shot in about 30 seconds and that would have been the end of that.

The Soviet Union fell with nary a shot fired-- and that was done by the common people and Boris Yeltzin facing down the tanks that surrounded the Soviet "White House".


And it only took eighty years and 50 million deaths for it to fall. You wait.

Nazi Germany could have been brought down by pacifism, if only the (future) Allies had dealt with it as a "rogue state" and not a beneficial trade partner in the 1930s. Before 1939, there was bustling commerce between Italy, Germany and the British and Americans.

There was no way, after 1933, that Germany could have been taken down nonviolently. A full-blown war could have been averted with aggressive intervention - but there still would have been violence. And the pacifists in Britain, and to a lesser extent, France, fought vehemently against any kind of intervention. They also fought against rearming France and Britain - had either country adequately rearmed, Germany might have been deterred from invading in the first place.

... I'd say that 9-11 did certainly change some fundamental attitudes and feelings that the American public shares. We think that there are shadowy people all around who are out to get us. Whether or not that's true, it's the perceptions that counts, and I think pacifism put in that context comes off as someone who enjoys freedom, but won't fight for it or defend it. We would all love an end to war, but old habits die hard.

It's an unstable balance. Once one person upsets a pacifist world, all others have to follow suit to protect themselves.

I fail to see the basis for concluding that an anti-war candidate would win the general election.

Actually, the three pro-war candidates (Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards) all lost the primary. Kerry opposed the Iraq war from Day One. But regardless of your stance on the issue, whether or not you feel Kerry is sufficiently anti-war, all of this is moot. The Democratic Party has its nominee, and I think we can all agree he's a hell of a lot better than Bush. So rather than refighting old and now meaningless primary fights, lets get on to the general.

By voting the same way that every Republican except Chaffee voted on the IWR?

edit typo

and we've done so before. John Kerry's explained why he voted for the IWR - to enable a process. You can argue that he should have voted against the IWR, but you can't argue he supported the war. The record is clear - he never once did.

Now maybe you supported another candidate in the primaries. Tough; I did too. Kerry is our nominee, and he's as anti-war as we're going to get this election season. Its time for us to move on to the real issues of the general election and put this primary season bickering behind us.

The vote was support of the war. I cannot believe that people cannot face up to that fact.

The vote wasn't whether we should go to war or not. The vote was to empower the President to use force, if diplomatic avenues were exhausted and Saddam still had not cooperated.

What happened? Well Saddam cooperated, diplomatic avenues were not exhausted, and Bush took us to war anyway -- Bush had simply lied to Congress about what he was going to do.

Can you argue the IWR vote was wrong? Absolutely.

But Kerry has never once supported the war. Never. He supported the President's power to threaten the use of force - a threat made by virtually every President in at least once circumstance somewhere (I'm still checking on William Henry Harrison).

Is Kerry sufficiently anti-war? He is in my book, maybe not in yours. Fine.

But he's the Democratic nominee and the primary season is over. We Democratic voters have made our choice.

along the way.

but no attempt at a cogent response.

What's your point? Do you have one?

Remember though that lame rationalizations that one could have opposed the war while voting for the IWR contribute to the belief among many that Kerry is a waffler. Don't expect people to buy it though.

Kerry is the Democratic nominee. All your whining won't change that. Regardless of whether he really opposed the war or not (and of course I contend that he did), TODAY, April 14, 2004 he most certainly opposes the Administration's policies in Iraq.

So do you want more of the same? Do you want four more years of Bush?

That's the only question that needs to enter your calculus. Because we're not switching candidates simply because some online guy called JVS isn't completely satisfied that Kerry's not a "waffler."

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It's as much their fault as anyone elses

If you don't vote for Kerry, you're helping Bush get reelected.

So far, the only reason you've put up, is that you think Kerry's a "waffler."

So that's it? You'd rather have someone who was always wrong on the war, than someone who you feel was wrong at one point and then changed his mind? Am I missing something?


On edit: As for those who put up a "bad candidate," I assume you're referring to the rank and file of the Democratic Party. (As for me, I happen to think he's a fantastic candidate. But that's just me.)

You are mistaking waffle for flip flop. Flip flop is to change back and forth. Waffle is more subtle and is a way of claiming correctness no matter what. Flip flops happen over a period of time. Waffling is when your actions show no clear direction. Whoever has flip-floped has at least shown direction before.

Waffle and flip-flop are synonymous. If there is a distinction, it is too subtle for the lexicographers. It is also too subtle for the Bush-Cheney Campaign, which uses the two expressions interchangeably.

Synonym
1 : one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses

Nearly is the key word here

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It's just that simple.

people are starting to get more and more pissed about the war. I guess it takes dead soldiers being dragged through the streets to fuel emotions. People are starting to get really angry - esp. if draft talk keeps circulating, it's going to cause some major re-thinking. Kerry's war vote will hurt him, not just with liberals, guaranteed.

when the first primary took place - anyone who was against the war should be supporting the person who has the foreign policy and military experience to extricate us from Iraq in the least harmful way possible.

Howard Dean was not that person - he doesn't have a diplomatic bone in his body or if he does, he hides it very well. No, Dean would have been a huge mistake. Luckily the voters got that right.

And get slaughtered everywhere else. Remember McGovern?

not to mention the crimes carried out by Nixon/CREEP.

Humphrey and Daly (and their pals at the AFL-CIO, led by George Meaney) didn't get behind the Democratic ticket until late October, which was WAY too late to make any difference. They withheld not only their support (and their footsoldiers), but also the immense amout of money they could have raised for the ticket.

The Daly/Humphrey/Meanie axis was pissed off because of the rule changes at the 1972 convention allowed the seating of affirmative action delegate slates that effectively locked out the old-stlye machine "backroom pol" types. Mayor Daly's own hand-picked IL delegation was refused seating, while the IL "New Democratic" delegation led by Rev. Jesse Jackson were all seated.

Trying to blame 1972 entirely on George McGovern is like blaming 2000 entirely on Al Gore. Neither one tells the complete story.

An anti-Iraq war candidate may be able to win.

Kucinich had his ass handed to him and he was the only one I saw as anti-all wars not just Iraq.

factor in all of the other issues and only very few polls ever had any candidate other than Kerry beating *.

I still think so.