Ric Francis/AP Photo
Pedestrians cross a boardwalk overlooking a memorial dedicated to American soldiers killed in Iraq, April 4, 2004, in Santa Barbara, California.
The September 11 attacks led to the largest coordinated anti-war protest in world history. On February 15, 2003, anywhere from 6 to 15 million people took to the streets around the globe to protest the war everyone knew was coming—overall that winter, an estimated 36 million people demonstrated. In the United States, as the national-security establishment vowed not to rest until Osama bin Laden was captured or killed, it became clear that the Afghanistan invasion had provided a helpful pretext to launch an offensive against a bigger target, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, there were only a small number of demonstrations against the incursion into Afghanistan. Public sentiment certainly did not align with protest. October 2001 polls showed that 88 percent of Americans supported the invasion. “The initial feeling for the first few weeks was consternation, rage, and befuddlement, which is not the mood in which to launch a successful anti-war movement,” says Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at the Columbia Journalism School.
The abrupt shift to Iraq did expand anti-war sentiment for a time. Yet even at their height, the Iraq protests never matched the pure fury of the Vietnam anti-war demonstrations. In the 21st century, most people usually do not intersect with the lives of the people who fight wars in their name. Americans on the home front are content to tune out. Protesting against the wars, indeed, reminding Americans on the home front that the country was at war, largely fell to two groups with up-close and personal views of the stakes: military families and veterans.
“For 20 years, where was everybody?” asks Nan Levinson, a Boston-based independent journalist.
Presidents have led this purposeful home front disengagement. They have glorified military service, while downplaying combat and combat deaths. George H.W. Bush banned coverage of soldiers’ remains during the Gulf War, and his son did the same in Iraq until Barack Obama lifted the prohibition. After 9/11, George W. Bush used the bully pulpit to neutralize discontent and opposition. “People are going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshiping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball games,” he said in November 2001. “Life in America is going forward.” By 2003, Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, even though the fighting was far from over.
Much of Americans’ disinterest in Iraq and Afghanistan can be chalked up to the elimination of the draft.
Gold Star families could only briefly discomfort presidents and focus the spotlight on the sacrifice of their sons and daughters. In 2004, after her son Casey died in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan spent five weeks protesting at George W. Bush’s family ranch in Crawford, Texas—the president’s entire summer vacation. The encampment, known as Camp Casey, garnered international coverage, but did not move the president to meet with her at the time.
Levinson, who wrote War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, and teaches journalism at Tufts University, told me about a student who felt guilty about not paying attention to the wars, but had other concerns, like finding a job and paying rent. “It wasn’t his war; it wasn’t his problem,” Levinson says. “He had [other] problems.”
The media, which brought Vietnam into American living rooms, operated under fresh restrictions. Reporters were embedded with troop units and largely did not circulate freely in war zones. There was no daily accounting of the dead and wounded in newspapers or on television; getting at that information meant doing the research. And eventually coverage of the wars faded away. In 2020, the three major networks’ sum total of Afghanistan coverage totaled five minutes.
Stacy Bannerman, a peace and climate activist and author of Homefront 911: How Families of Veterans Are Wounded by Our Wars, says shared sacrifice has been nonexistent and laments what she describes as Americans’ “willful ignorance.” “Who am I to say that had I had the luxury not to give a shit, that I wouldn’t have grabbed that luxury for myself?” she says.
Much of Americans’ disinterest in Iraq and Afghanistan can be chalked up to the elimination of the draft. Vietnam conscription plucked out the working- and middle-class men who could not evade the war using wealth, influence, or student deferments. Gitlin, who was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society, a key student and anti-war group, says the draft accelerated the existing anti-war movement. After the end of draft deferments for certain college men in 1965, demonstrations erupted in force.
In 1973, Congress ended the draft.
The Pentagon realized that creating an effective fighting force out of people whose sole interest was surviving a yearlong deployment by any means necessary was impossible. The men and women who went to Iraq and Afghanistan were committed to careers in an all-volunteer Army, itself a direct outgrowth of eliminating the draft and the turmoil in the armed forces during Vietnam, including race riots and “fragging” (killing another solider, often an officer, who supported perilous orders or harsh discipline).
There are 1.3 million people on active duty in the armed forces. That’s less than one-half of 1 percent of the U.S. population, which means there are smaller numbers of troops doing multiple deployments. During Vietnam, it was easy to find a solider or a person who had a friend or family member in Southeast Asia. Today, these connections are limited. Americans glorify military service at every available opportunity, but really had no connection to the people doing the bloody work of counterterrorism and so-called nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Active soldiers would prefer that their families remain silent, since there are multiple risks involved in speaking out about war. A carful of enlisted men once tried to run Bannerman, who was a charter board member of Military Families Speak Out, off the road near Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state after seeing the “Military Families Speak Out” bumper sticker on her car. Her former husband, who served in Iraq, was threatened with demotion over her activities, but simply told her she had to be right all the time if she wanted to carry on protesting. “If we are over here supposedly defending democracy, I don’t see the problem with you engaging in democracy at home,” he said.
She continues to be dismayed even now by the country’s failure to welcome home the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan or grasp what their families have endured. Bannerman, who lives in southwestern Virginia, has been on the lookout for symbols she has yet to see.
“Here we are fingers crossed in the final drawdown of Afghanistan, there is not a single yellow ribbon to be found,” she says. “Not one, not fucking one. That right there, if you want a visual representation of the whole shitshow, there it is. If you think that our people don’t see that, guess again.”
