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Originally Posted by Glice
I was thinking about this today, as it happens. And I think you're right, but I also wonder what happens if the war is brought into people's actual frames of reference. We've seen with the student protests that enough of a change to the status quo and people get upset (putting it mildly). You change the oil prices and people blockade ports. In the case of war - and this requires a sort of ignoring of the technical bases of war now - if you had conscription I think you'd find a lot more people saying 'hang on, I don't want a part of this bollocks'. Of course, war is mired in the play of vulgar capitalism (that Thatcherite lie of war being good for the economy is only the beginning) so this is difficult. But I do - probably naively - feel that people aren't stupid, they're just largely rendered neuter.
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I think people generally mobilitate with more determination when a war has the maximum effect on their own immediate situation. Of course the war in Iraq was initially opposed by massive worldwide demonstrations, but none of them sparked the start of real government-bothering organisations because the effects of it are spread in what is likely to happen in decades to come, and most people don't immediatly associate dangerous shakes in the economy with a war not happening on their own doorstep. The nature of those initial demos was no more than a paen to the wrongness of going to war, not exactly something a head of state takes seriously unless their scale and regularity will manifest the extent of the protesters' malcontent with more serious consequences for public safety.