The facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same

So says Cindy Sheehan, who hasn’t been fooled enough by Obama’s moderate anti-war stance to not notice the buildup of troops in Afghanistan or the fact that withdrawal from Iraq seems more talk than action. Like she did with Bush, she therefore turned up at Obama’s holiday address to protest. As she explained:

“The reason I am here is because … even though the facade has changed in Washington DC, the policies are still the same,” Sheehan told a handful of journalists, against a backdrop of her “Camp Casey” banner.

She told US peace activists to wake up and protest Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and complained that despite the president’s anti-war stance, US troops remained in Iraq.

“We have to realize, it is not the president who is power, it is not the party that is in power it is the system that stays the same, no matter who is in charge.”

“We are here to make the wars unpopular again,” she said.

I’m not sure it’s just Obama’s election that has rocked the (US) antiwar movement to sleep. There also seems to have been a certain amount of normalisation of the war, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on and they became part of the background noise to our lives. What’s more, our own more immediate problems as the economy collapsed have seemingly left little interest in Afghanistan or Iraq with either the public or the newsmedia.