Of course, the Democratic party doesn't oppose the general policy of which the war in Iraq is a part -- they promote it when they are in office, as they did in the Clinton administration -- but they now have to pretend that they do, because the American public does. They think they can gain some factional advantage -- a presidency and more seats in Congress -- by using against the Republicans the general the dismay with the war, but their hypocrisy couldn't be more apparent. (It's recognized by the public, who give an abysmally low rating to the Democratic Congress, while the President's is rising).
Both parties are substantially to the right of the populace, on this as on other issues, but it's the Democrats who have the more difficult problem in public relations, and they're not solving it. As an example,
the MoveOn ad is about what is happening now in the war in Iraq -- not the fact that the war is an example of supreme international crime, much less that it is part of general criminal policy. The ad makes four points:
[1] "The surge strategy has failed." (The ad implies that if it succeeded -- apparently by establishing a peaceful, biddable Iraqi government -- that would be OK. In fact the surge strategy is a classic counterinsurgency campaign, on the Vietnam model, Petraeus' topic for his Princeton degree; it has succeeded at preventing the only real threat to the US position, a unified opposition capable of demanding that the US leave, which is of course what the majority of Iraqis want -- and what the surge was meant to prevent.)
[2] "A reduction in violence" has not occurred. (The violence is the result of the US invasion and occupation, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and set the Iraqi communities at one another's throats, when they resisted the US attempt to oppose an unelected government that would follow American orders. In fact the non-violent resistance of the Shia communities, even more than the armed resistance of the Sunnis, forced the US to hold elections, the outcome of which the US has struggled to control.)
[3] "Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war." (The ad implies that if the war were winnable, then that too would be OK. Insofar as it's true that the war is religious, it's a result of American policy, which for many years in the Middle East has been to destroy secular political liberation movements by promoting religiously-identified ones, such as Hamas.)
[4] Americans want "a timetable for withdrawing all our troops." (That's true, and it's the source of the Democrats' PR problem. But, as the Democratic presidential candidates make clear, it is the party's view that such "redeployment" must take place so as to secure the overall goal of US policy in the Middle East -- that the US continue effectively to control the region's energy resources as a way to manipulate America's economic and geopolitical rivals.)
This ad is specifically not designed to unite an anti-war constituency across the artificial divide of American politics, but in fact to maintain that divide by rallying Democrats with a partisan and unprincipled attack. Instead of promoting an anti-war movement beyond the party divisions, it wants to promote the party by the use of antiwar sentiments, so long as the discussion is kept within the limits of allowable debate. The Democratic party front groups like MoveOn are a Fifth Column for the ruling class, and they may once again manage to co-opt and destroy an anti-war movement -- and elect a pro-war president in 2008. --CGE