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Where Are the Iran War Protests?

Despite a wildly unpopular war with Iran, a mass protest movement for peace hasn’t materialized — at least in the ways we’ve been taught to recognize.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a vengeful America was braying for blood. Nine out of 10 Americans approved of attacking Afghanistan. About one-third were comfortable with the prospect of Afghan civilian deaths. Less than a quarter thought the conflict would last more than two years. 

Hardy bands of protesters took to the streets in New York City, D.C., and elsewhere in a vain attempt to prevent the war. They were called scum and traitors and worse.

Americans got the war that most of them wanted — and it was an abject disaster. The invasion of Afghanistan begat conflicts across the world: a sprawling global war that brought death and destruction to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Niger, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, and Yemen, among other locales. And it’s never stopped. Under Donald Trump alone, the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 conflicts. And close to 1 million people have died as a result of the post-9/11 wars. By 2013, a CNN/ORC poll found that 82 percent of Americans opposed the Afghanistan War, the highest rate of recorded opposition for any major American conflict in modern history. Almost 75 percent of Americans agreed that the war was a failure at the time of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Has anyone sought out those 2001 protesters for expert foreign policy advice? Have they been feted in the corridors of power for having sense when 90 percent of Americans — including almost the entire government — did not? Of course not. Having courage and being right — much like protesting in America — has been, especially in the post-9/11 era, a quick and sure path to irrelevance. Warmongers like Atlantic staff writer and podcaster David Frum — who coined the term “axis of evil” as George W. Bush’s speechwriter — were allowed to fail upward instead of being treated like pariahs. Of course, the protesters failed, too, in their own way. They failed to stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and everywhere else.

While war is not the answer, maybe marching isn’t either. Today, TomDispatch regular and protest veteran Frida Berrigan takes on the question of where the anti-war movement went and why we haven’t seen massive marches against the Trump administration’s failed Iran war. If we lived in a rational world, Berrigan — who was in Manhattan on 9/11 and was deeply involved in the peace movement from its earliest moments — would be a top foreign policy adviser or official. America’s loss is your gain.

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

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Do the Old Ways Still Work?

Have you been recently scolded by an older peacenik about the good old days of street protests? I have!

Has an older beloved activist — a mentor, even — bemoaned “kids these days” and criticized their lack of political engagement? Have you heard the dreaded preamble: “In my day, we…” — fill in the blank — marched, struck, organized?

Armed Border Agents Arrest Protesters, Bulldoze 200-Year-Old Tree to Build Border Wall

I have been on the receiving end of some of these rebukes recently, even though I am not much of a kid anymore. These aging activists aren’t seeing the outrage. They aren’t seeing the opposition. They aren’t seeing the resistance. But it might just mean they aren’t looking in the right place. Because there is plenty of resistance if you know where to look.

But more on that later.

The war against Iran is hugely unpopular. And it is not just a faraway, abstract wrong. It is having a demonstrable impact on the daily lives of Americans. Gas and heating fuel are and will continue to be more expensive. The Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a project of Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, estimates a nearly $1,000 war tax paid by each U.S. household. That is on top of the actual and massive price tag of military operations so far: nearly $40 billion and rising at a rate of $2 to 3 billion a month, with the projected final price tag in the trillions.

At the end of February, Trump’s war opened in typical Trumpian fashion with a massive bombardment that not only targeted Iranian leaders but also the smallest and most innocent Iranians: Operation Epic Fury had an elementary school in its sights, and the result was obliteration. Raytheon-manufactured Tomahawk missiles slammed into the school in Minab, Iran, killing 156 civilians, most of them children. A U.N. panel now asserts that the U.S. attack was a war crime.

When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents

As the war ground on, the resistance continued. In March, Green Party candidate for Senate in North Carolina, former Marine, and member of Veterans for Peace, Brian McGinnis, disrupted a Senate hearing, shouting: “Americans do not want to fight this war for Israel.” (He suffered a broken arm at the hands of Capitol Police.) That same month, a top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned from the Trump administration, citing his opposition to the Iran war. More than 65 veterans and military family members were arrested........

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