this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Some protests did, some did not. None of the Iraq war protests in the 90s or 00s had any impact whatsoever.
Worldwide protests before the American invasion of Iraq were the cause of would be coalition members reluctance and the reason Colin Powell had to get up in front of the un and lie.
Worldwide opposition to the global war on terror is the reason the consent manufacturing machine ran so hot and, as a consequence, is the reason no one trusts media anymore.
It was no coincidence that figures like obama and trump rose to prominence in American politics after early criticism of universally decried foreign action came to light.
Even in entertainment, the Israeli “shoot and cry” format was adopted in order to synthesize domestic opposition to the war into more acceptable sympathy for the troops.
If, like Korea, either gwot or shield/storm had been even just domestic propaganda victories we wouldn’t have experienced such huge shifts and would be living in a different world.
Worldwide protests were completely ignored in favor of 23 years worth of war. It ended because we got tired of paying for it, not because anyone protested.
I never suggested that the protests stopped the war. Is that your metric for if an antiwar protest “works”?
It’s important to push back on what you said about completely ignored though.
As I said before, the media environment we have now where no one trusts anything stems directly from the media responses to mass unrest.
An entire genre of American film grew in response to that unrest.
Twelve years of presidents were famously skeptical of the global war on terror and the Iraq invasion and one of those two started the chain of events that would lead to withdra from Afghanistan and the end to that war. I’ll concede that they were both lying snakes who brought with them administrators complicit in what would become 23 years of war, but neither would have the trust from their respective bases early on if it hadn’t been for their in the moment condemnation and skepticism about the war.