"Liberal Idiots"... how to oppose the war

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 7:54 AM on March 16, 2007.

Vietnam Vet Scott Lilly's latest column piggy-backs on the David Obey/"Marine Mom" Youtube phenomenon unfolding over the past couple of weeks, arguing, essentially, that protesters need to educate themselves.

Briefly, Obey (D-WI) was confronted by an antiwar protester on video about his efforts to address the war. It didn't go too well. In trying to explain to Ms. Richards why he didn't believe that cutting off funding was the best (or possible) way to end the war, Obey called her a "liberal idiot" -- ostensibly in response to her apparent misunderstanding of the current possibilities or ramifications to differing approaches.

Lilly does a good job with the tough love, telling those who oppose the war to get savvy and educated about the sausage factory of American Politics before just hopping right in and confronting individual lawmakers -- especially when they're not constituents:

At a very minimum, I would urge my fellow Ozarker, Tina Richards, to refocus her efforts in at least one respect. Your representative in Congress is not Dave Obey; it is Jo Ann Emerson, who is also a member of the Appropriations Committee. Unlike Obey, however, she does not (at least openly) agree with you on the President’s Iraq policy.

Where he loses me, however, is in the way he talks about protesters during the Vietnam War; and this, from one who's anything but high on the art of protest.

Defending Obey's "Liberal Idiots" remark, Lilly writes that, in addition to his anger at lawmakers for not stopping the war:

I was almost as frustrated by the mindless antics of many opposing the war who did little more than harden the resolve of the war's supporters and dissuade those who might otherwise have become war opponents. They provided a perfect foil for Richard Nixon, who had run out of explanations to justify the continuation of the conflict. Nixon turned the debate over the "war" into a debate over the "war movement," a bait-and-switch that helped him rally support even among people who had growing reservations about what they witnessed each night on television.

He has me with the frustration at the fundamentally selfish aspects of some protesters, more interested in self-expression than policy change (YES YES!) but then this...

To this day, I think those who insisted on injecting arguments about drugs, sex, personal hygiene, and respect for law into the debate over Viet Nam prolonged the war (perhaps by years) and, as a consequence, contributed to the deaths of hundreds and possibly thousands of my fellow soldiers.

YE.... er. What?

I "get" what Lilly is after, and I take note of the mitigating terms "I think" and "as a consequence," but I think this is a colossally unfair connection to draw. It's like blaming the headache on the ineffective aspirin.

The war began and continued because of cynical, fatuous politicians and the uninformed passive elements of our citizenry.

To take the deeply imperfect efforts (Key Word: efforts) of those who got up off their duffs to stop the war and then to connect the deaths to their failures is wrong-headed and terribly counterproductive.

Another issue is laying the blame solely at the feet of Americans to "get educated." If one part of a lawmaker's job is to convince colleagues that legislation is worth supporting, how is it not also the lawmaker's duty to rally public support as a crucial part of any campaign? Why isn't Obey reaching out to the well-organized antiwar movement to urge their support on certain legislative strategies?

I fear that the valuable parts of the piece -- that effective protest must combine passion with a working knowledge of the process -- will be lost on the very people who need to hear it due to what we'll call, gritting our teeth, very very poor communication.

Discuss.

Tagged as: vietnam, antiwar, protest, iraq

Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.