They showed up by the tens of thousands; they were stridently anti-war, almost always anti-Bush and they seemed quite passionate. Protesters, from sea-to-shining-sea, seemed to be everywhere for the last five or six years. Then a strange thing happened; Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. The country is still engaged in both of the wars that angered so many but those who showed up so often to protest them have seemingly faded into oblivion.

Their guy was in the White House now, the war was over.

So, the question is, what happened to the anti-war protesters?

Check the wires yourself, you won’t find much in the way of protests against either the Iraq war or the war in Afghanistan. If you look at the numbers of killed/injured in both theaters, Iraq has been fairly stable for the last few years and deaths in Afghanistan have skyrocketed.

Compare that graphic with the fact that in September of 2007, at an ANSWER protest in D.C., more than 100,000 (est.) came out to protest both wars. Earlier that same year, an estimated 500,000 gathered for a United for Peace event. There were hundreds of protests and many had crowds much larger and even more passionate than these two examples. The deaths continue under a different President but the protesters seem to have been more interested in ridding themselves of his predecessor than in truly supporting the anti-war movement. In fact, one of the only groups to remain consistent about this has been CODEPINK, a group which still regularly protests both wars and, well, anything else they can fit in their schedule. Here they are at an event in May of this year…

The deafening silence, both in the media and among the anti-war leadership, hasn’t gone unnoticed. There have been threats of a fall push against the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era policies but nothing has materialized yet. Could it be that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were just a proxy by which to attack a President these folks disagreed with? We’ve still got 130,000 troops in Iraq and we’re approaching 65,000 in Afghanistan but the outrage has drained like a popped balloon. A Liberal faction that once seemed so focused on issues of war is now obsessing over the ‘moral obligations’ of this country to provide health care to its citizens.

A search of the well-known Liberal blog Dailykos.com for posts containing the phrase ‘health care‘ turns up 1283 results in the last six months. Searches for ‘Iraq‘ and ‘Afghanistan‘ bring in 349 and 191, respectively, over the same period. This whole disappearing trick seems a bit odd.

So is it the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that bother these folks? Or is it the political affiliation of the Commander-In-Chief of the troops fighting those wars? Sure, it could be that the most passionate of the anti-war protesters see these two relics of engagement as property of George W. Bush. But if it was indeed the ‘policies’ of war that so enraged them, what, exactly, has changed in the past nine months? One thing’s for sure, President Obama is pointing his finger backwards.

So as the leaves begin to fall and the death toll in these wars continues to climb, will the protesters return to their spots or will they remain in the shadows? If the latter is true, their intentions over the past several years will be clear. These protesters weren’t quite as interested in ‘peace’ as they were in using casualties of war as political ammo in a war of their own, this one political in nature.

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