The strength of the peace movement is dependent on the outcomes of the wars in living memory. In broad terms, the movement was strong prior to the Great War, and declined as the First and Second World Wars demonstrated the fallacies of the peace movement. By 1945, there was no meaningful peace movement. The closest you can come in the 1948 election (a significant election to say the least) is the Wallace candidacy. As a war secretary at Commerce, Henry Wallace was hardly a peace-at-any-price figure, but he did hold to a vision of WWII as a war to usher in a left-liberal world order. Wallace got 2.4% of the vote, 13,000 fewer voters than Strom Thurmond. For nearly twenty years the peace movement was discredited and meaningless. Vietnam changed that. The problem with Vietnam as a cause for intervention was made by Eisenhower, who refused to get involved on several occasions. That a movement would rise up against a ten year war was absolutly inevitable. It was a mistake of the peace movement to generalize from the errors of Vietnam to military action in general. Nevertheless, the Vietnam war loomed large in the minds of Americans as the paradigm of war. The peace movement waned as Reagan flexed American muscle, but it was far from dead. The Gulf War of 1991 was able to capture the center of American politics and so isolate the peace movement, but they were there. Today we see the peace movement and all the other usual suspects going through the same paces we saw in 1915. Of course one significant difference is that Main Street isn't supportive. 9/11 was the sinking of the Lusitania, the violation of the Sussex pledge, and the Zimmerman Telegram all rolled into one. Nevertheless, the peace movement ignores a century of lessons and makes essentially the same arguments that they made prior to the Great War.

Certainly its possible to argue against specific military actions without making the unsupportable mistake of peace at any price. What is most interesting is the fact that the Democrats would cling to the peace movement as its guide to foriegn relations rather than attempting to redefine Bush's proposed Iraq war in terms more compatible with their vision of the world order. One can only conclude they have no conception of the world order, and the only members of their constituancy that does is the peace movement. Of course, the American electorate repudiated that. The significant thing to note about the 02 election was not that the Republicans picked up seats during the midterm elections while occupying the White House, its that with so many Republican seats in the Senate vulnerable, it was the Republicans who gained seats. The President will do a much better job in Iraq if the Democrats can credibly hold his feet to the fire. If they cling to a peace at any price they will have no influence on the war and its aftermath.