> Yeah, except for:
> MoveOn.org -- a few million members
> DailyKos -- a million readers a day
>
> The reality is that millions of people know what those groups are and get
> information from them on why we need to get out of Iraq. How many people
> could even identify United for Peace & Justice if the name was mentioned to
> them?
Nathan makes a good point here which has been ignored by people in the antiwar movement who are mostly uninterested in open debate, critical thinking, and strategizing outside of the box.
We all know that a majority of Americans have moved to a position of opposition to the war. Why did this happen? How did this happen?
The clearly wrong answer is the anti-war movement, at least the really big organizations. The big groups such as ANSWER, NION, and UFPJ have had little noticeable impact on public opinion. Their rallies have been barely covered outside of the cities where mass mobilizations were held. Hell, my old group, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, got more press coverage than some of ANSWER's biggest demos. None of the leaders from these movements have become household names, except for Cindy Sheehan, and she really wasn't connected to the big groups when she went to Crawford last year. UFPJ only had one large protest in 2004, in New York City. It was pretty huge, but was probably lost in the overall RNC convention media spectacle.
I think an important factor in changing public opinion has been the liberal and alternative media. DailyKos, like Nathan points out, and the Nation, Air America, Michael Moore, liberal blogs and so on. Less noticed, but still getting the word out to the masses has been the alternative media: radio, blogs, Indymedia, radical magazines, news sites, discussion lists, and so on. And the mainstream media has been a factor too, merely in reporting the situation in Iraq, however filtered.
The liberal/left and alternative media have provided a consistent voice of opposition to the war. The right wing has helped too, by trying to demonize the left/liberal media. Even when you are dissing something, you draw attention to it. Like Michael Moore, who became a household name because of rabid right wing hatred of the guy. He did his part by producing several good movies that were critical of Bush.
I still think that activism and dissent can have an effect in changing public opinion, but that's not going to happen when activists cling tightly to bad ideas ("we must protest like we did in the 1960s", and, "we have to be nonviolent") or bad organizations. The worst thing activists could do is to pat themselves on their backs and say that "our protests stopped the war" or "our protests changed public opinion."
Chuck0