The United States that Iraq veterans are returning to is relatively indifferent, many said. One that without fear of a draft seems more interested in the progression of “American Idol” than the bombings in Baghdad. Sure, there are the homecoming parades, the yellow-ribbon bumper stickers, the pats on the back — they continue as troops arrive back home.

But for many vets, those moments of gratitude were short-lived or limited to close friends and family. Soon they were joined by bitter impressions of a society that seems to forget that it is living through the country’s largest combat operation in more than 30 years.

When Army Reserve Warrant Officer Mark Rollings got home to Wylie, Tex., he didn’t expect anyone to treat him any differently because he was a vet. But he couldn’t help but notice that the only one to say anything about the newly installed Purple Heart license plate on his Chevy Blazer was the kid who changed his oil at the Wal-Mart.

“For having a global war on terrorism,” he said, “everything looks like business as usual to me.”

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But perhaps the worst is when they don’t say anything at all and just go on living their lives, oblivious to the war.

Which is exactly what Army Capt. Tyler McIntyre was trying to explain to some family members while eating at an Italian restaurant when he was home on leave a couple of years ago.

He looked across the restaurant and saw everyone stuffing their faces with pasta and drinking wine. “And everyone’s kind of just sitting there doing it,” he said.

Which is really sort of extraordinary, he said. The country is at war. People are fighting at this very moment. Don’t these people know what’s going on? Don’t they care?

No, he decided. They have no appreciation for their easy, gluttonous lives and don’t deserve the freedom, prosperity and contentment he was fighting to protect.

He wanted to yell, “You don’t know what you have! You don’t appreciate it! You don’t care!” ~The Washington Post

It may be that a gluttonous people doesn’t deserve freedom, and in fact such people may no longer possess it, or they are willing to trade it away for the faux security offered to them when the government tells them to sacrifice another liberty (this is one possible answer to Gen. Batiste’s idea that the American people are not sacrificing anything in this war–they are only too happily sacrificing the last remnants of republican government to achieve a nonexistent state of security). That will be their contribution to “the war effort.”

Having gone to a fairly nice restaurant with some friends last night, I can say that we and everyone else there were more or less just as Capt. McIntyre described. We had a nice time, and Iraq never came up once, and there was not the slightest sense that there was something amiss with living our lives much as we would normally do because the government has committed to a mad and inexplicable war in Iraq. I can’t say that I blame him for resenting the soft, easy lives civilians have all had while he was fighting in Iraq. But what else would we be doing? Capt. McIntyre speaks of “the country” being at war, when it really isn’t. The government is prosecuting two different sorts of wars, one of which at least theoretically has something to do with national security and another which seems to have nothing to do with America itself at all, and the country is being billed exorbitantly for the latter war that the executive started on his own (nonexistent)authority. In a sense, “we” are already paying through the nose for this pointless war, so what else are “we” supposed to be doing?

But the indifference and “business as usual” were unavoidable in a war that has not seemed to be a vital struggle for most Americans for a couple of a years now. With respect to the GWOT or GSAVE or whatever it is we are calling it these days, it has taken on an unreal, imaginary character since early 2002. There continues to be a fight in Afghanistan, but it seems to be at a fairly low level, and so there seems to be very little that people here could do even if they are inclined or would be willing to lend support. There was a tremendous reservoir of willingness to support what might have been called “the war effort,” had any effort been made to articulate what the public’s role in “the war effort” ought to be. Besides “go shopping” and “support the troops” (and surely we are all somehow supporting the troops by going shopping, right?), there haven’t been many exhortations to national solidarity. Iraq has since made the idea of a “war effort” for a war most people believe now to have been a mistake increasingly fantastical.

Can you imagine some measure of austerity, rationing or mobilisation of resources to “win the war in Iraq” that would not go over like a lead balloon with modern Americans? Many Americans these days regard material consumption almost as a kind of birthright and an expression of “freedom.” As often as you hear people tritely repeat the line that “freedom isn’t free,” many of these folks are probably less than eager to make sacrifices in that way of life, particularly when it is for a war that no longer even has a definable objective end.

Maybe when an overwhelming majority was swallowing the official line about the reasons for the Iraq war and had an official hate figure to focus on in Hussein, there was still the possibility of successful mass mobilisation and the imposition of extra burdens for “the war effort.” But notice that these three words (the war effort) have never been uttered by the President in any prominent speech, nor has there been any effort to channel the yellow sticker brigades into a more concrete demonstration of support for the war. Perhaps if there were such an effort, there would be fewer yellow stickers prominently displayed on the backs of so many cars.

Support for the war in Iraq has slumped gradually, not because people do not see its connection to them and not because they do not have a personal “stake” in it, though most of us do not have such a stake, but because they do not really see the reason for it to continue. Any attempt to “fix” this indifference and end what Gen. Batiste has described as a “lack of sacrifice” by the people will ensure the collapse of what popular support remains. It is not simply rudderless and incompetent leadership that has destroyed support for this war; it is the sheer futility of the enterprise for the last two years.

But almost everyone you meet will say that we must be “responsible” and cannot allow Iraq to fall apart, etc., but these are the stock responses of people who are not committed to winning the war , because at some level they do not believe it can be won or that it is worth fighting anymore, but are also not committed enough to ending it to do anything to that end, either. Not having been mobilisied for the war, they are also going to be remarkably apathetic about opposing the war as well. Considering how many people claim to think the war is a mistake, it is remarkable that there aren’t many sharply antiwar candidates on the hustings; antiwar presidential candidates at this point are a figment of someone’s imagination. The Iraq war deeply outrages a relative few; to the rest, it is troubling or annoying, but not something that really compels or drives most people in this country one way or the other. The war is costing them and their children greatly, but the massive expenditures for this war do not immediately impact anyone and for the moment merely annoy most people; this spending does not create resistance to the war, except among an increasingly rare breed, the fiscal conservatives.

The “antiwar movement” against Vietnam exploded in numbers and intensity after the draft was instituted. Before then, it was not quite the pathetic mockery of an antiwar “movement” that we have today, but it was hardly politically powerful or effective. It represented one part of what was then the minority view, and managed to do even that rather poorly. With the draft, the “movement” gained sudden relevance and importance for a huge constituency that had previously not given the opposition much thought, except probably to curse it. Suddenly the consequences of mobilisation for everyone were only too evident, and the self-serving imperative of opposition was also immediately clear: end the war, or you might be next. Not exactly the most inspiring political cause, I suppose, but in the end it was that personal stake in the question that finally forced people to consider whether there was any merit in that misbegotten crusade. Until a lot more people have an immediate stake in the war, strong opposition will probably not be forthcoming.

Unfortunately, before opposition to this war intensifies to such a point that withdrawal becomes unavoidable for the government, it seems that there would have to be some attempt at mass mobilisation and rallying public support in ways more substantial than another Bush speaking tour. The administration has no momentum and has completely lost the initiative in domestic politics, so there will be nothing coming from them along these lines. I suspect they hope to muddle through, not get too embarrassed at the polls in the fall and fitfully preside over the consequences of their failed policies. If there is any “war effort” at home, it will be the fruit of a future administration. Paradoxically and counterintuitively, it may be the candidate who makes the best appeal for having a domestic “war effort” who will win over the public.