Code Pink Crank Laments: 'We Don’t Have a Very Vibrant Anti-war Movement Anymore'

What's a Castro-loving psychopath to do when things go bad for her guy?

As President Barack Obama formally declared an end to combat operations in Iraq this week, the anti-war movement that helped sweep him into office — and that worked for seven years to bring U.S. troops home — finds itself struggling for survival.

Several factors — war fatigue; a deep, lingering recession; and the presence of a Democratic president they helped elect — have drained the energy from organizations that led the fight against the Iraq war. Some of the most influential anti-war activist groups that once summoned half a million people to march against the Iraq war and the policies of President George W. Bush are straining to raise the money and attention to fight what they see as Obama’s military entrenchment in Afghanistan.

“We don’t have a very vibrant anti-war movement anymore,” lamented Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, one of the anti-war movement’s most visible organizations. “The issues have not changed very much. … Now we have a surge [in Afghanistan] that we would have been furious about under George Bush, yet it’s hard to mobilize people under Obama. We have the same anti -war movement and not the same passion.”

MoveOn.org, which produced a 2007 anti-war newspaper ad labeling Gen. David Petraeus “General Betray Us” for the surge in Iraq, has largely been silent, despite a similar U.S. strategy in Afghanistan with Petraeus at the helm. Cindy Sheehan, perhaps the most famous anti-war protester, believes the peace movement is over. And United for Peace and Justice — once the largest of three major anti-war coalitions — has practically dissolved.

Leslie Cagan, UPJ’s founder, resigned last year after nearly seven years leading the group.

“I was totally exhausted,” said Cagan, 63. “I have a long history of anti-war activism — about 45 years — but the last eight or nine years have been totally intense. In a post 9/11 world, it’s just nonstop.”

Fighting your own country all these years can really take a toll, huh? What a washed-up Communist to do? Well, now their battlefield has shifted. Rather than supporting America's enemies, their primary mission is propping up the people they helped elect.

After fighting the Bush administration for the better part of a decade, the anti-war movement can barely draw public attention to Afghanistan because of kitchen-table issues like the worsening economy, the increasingly unpopular health care overhaul and high unemployment. Meanwhile, the leaders have kept their grumbling about Afghanistan mostly to themselves, to keep Obama’s sagging poll numbers from sinking further or jeopardizing the Democratic majority in Congress.

“A lot of the people who were part of this movement have retreated,” Code Pink’s Benjamin said. “They wanted to give up on the timetable [for withdrawing from Iraq]. Some are still reluctant to criticize a Democratic president now with the midterms coming up.”

So it was never about the troops and all about politics.

Thanks for clearing that up, Medea. All this leaves Cindy Sheehan very confused.

“I basically think that it’s over,” Sheehan said. “And the reason that it’s over is that so many of those same groups that you’re talking about supported Obama. … I just don’t think that if you’re anti-war you can support somebody who is for war.”

Mother Sheehan is still a diehard. She thinks Obama's a war criminal.