Falling Short

Despite an article that notes just how poor the turnout at an anti-war demonstration in New York City's Greenwich Village (the bastion of uber-left anti-Bush sentiment), the photograph accompanying the New York Times article attempts to show a large crowd.

The article notes that the organizers of the event were attempting to get people to hold hands across Manhattan in protest of the war. They figured that they'd need about 2,500 people to do so.

They couldn't even manage that.

“We figure three feet per person, not including the intersections,” said Leslie Kielson, 44, a New York coordinator for a group called United for Peace and Justice and the lead organizer of the march. “So we need about 2,500 people.”

The protest marking the fifth anniversary of the war fell short.

There were huge gaps a block or so west of where Ms. Kielson spoke, at the south end of Union Square. Organizers asked passers-by, “Hello, would you like to join the peace line for a second?” On many blocks, there were more people waiting at bus shelters than demonstrators.

Ms. Kielson said her group was a 75-member coalition of unions, religious organizations and neighborhood groups. She said that in contrast to protests against the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and the early stages of this war, large groups of students from Columbia, New York University and other institutions did not turn out Saturday.

For the most part, the demonstrators were parents with children, middle-aged people or older protesters with long white hair tucked underneath berets or bandannas with antiwar buttons.

Jonathan Fluck, 53, an actor from Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, who attended the protest, was frustrated. The war is “so under the radar, it’s like it’s not happening,” he said.

Two of the few protesters in their 20s were Jose Negroni, 26, a schoolteacher from Queens, and his fiancée, Claire Noelle Frost, 24, a professional organizer. Both carried small drums to beat on in case their voices became strained from chanting.

Mr. Negroni said the volunteer Army had removed a goad to war protests. “If there were a draft, there would be probably 150,000 people for every protester like you and me,” he said to Ms. Frost.

But Negroni, there isn't a draft. There isn't any support for America to lose the war, despite the best efforts of the anti-war groups which are dominated by anti-American groups like ANSWER and MoveOn.org and various communist, socialist, and anarchist groups, many of which are funded by none other than George Soros.

The single biggest reason that no one turned out for these anti-war demonstration is that the US is winning the war in Iraq and the surge last year has shown that the US has gotten its act together to improve security in Iraq significantly. That success has translated into fewer war stories in the papers and media, because nothing breeds silence in the media as success.

Other reasons for the failure of the anti-war demonstrations includes the fact that in most cases, the anti-war types are simply Vietnam era retreads trying to recapture their earlier significance. It's simply not happening.