However, some activists prefer to see the U.S. government as all-powerful and thus certain to find some way to transform this ignominious defeat into permanent political control of Iraq. But history has shown us that sometimes imperial powers simply lose.
The Vietnam Precedent
I witnessed something similar after the Vietnam War, when it became conventional wisdom inside much of the Left that the many years of anti-war marches, teach-ins and reaching out to the public via media had failed to make much of a difference.
Many progressives bought into the Nixon administration's insistence that the powers-that-be paid little heed to the "bums" as President Richard Nixon once called the anti-war protesters. So, when the war was finally brought to an end in the 1970s, the Left denied itself much sense of success.
President Richard Nixon
It would take many more years before documents and books -- from Nixon's White House tapes to The Haldeman Diaries -- would reveal how big a concern the anti-war movement was to the nation's leaders, including the thin-skinned Nixon who undid his own presidency by overreacting to anti-war whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and setting the stage for the Watergate scandal.
Yet, the American Left not only failed to appreciate its success, but many progressives -- especially those with money -- absorbed the false lesson that the anti-war movement had been largely unsuccessful.
Thus, it became a relatively easy sell to persuade progressives to dismantle the infrastructure that had brought millions of Americans into the anti-war fold.
The "underground press," including promising outlets such as Ramparts magazine and the Dispatch News wire service, were shut down for lack of funding. Other outlets were sold off either to profit-oriented corporations, as happened to Boston's WBCN, or handed off to neoconservatives, like The New Republic.
Largely abandoning a national media structure, the Left turned to "local organizing" as the key to the future, under the slogan "think globally, act locally."
Meanwhile, the Right observed the actual success of the Left during the civil rights and anti-war eras and modeled a movement that copied the Left's strategies, focusing heavily on building media outreach to the American people and constructing a political movement with national messages.
The result was that these two ideological ships passed in the night, the Left throwing its media advantage overboard and the Right loading on as much media power as possible. The consequences should now be apparent.
Over the past several decades, the Right has achieved a political dominance that the inherent quality of its positions wouldn't justify, while the Left largely lost touch with the broad American population and drifted toward irrelevance.
It turned out that local organizing -- while admirable -- doesn't match the value of framing a way of understanding the world and aggressively pushing those ideas to the public. Only recently -- relying mostly on underfunded Web sites and unorthodox protests like Occupy Wall Street -- has the Left begun to recreate its approach of the 1960s.
Faulty Analysis
The danger to the Left now from misinterpreting its anti-war success once more -- this time regarding Iraq -- is that the faulty analysis will again drive future actions.
By refusing to recognize the value of Obama's election as, in part, an expression of the nation's anti-war sentiments, the Left could veer off into a rejection of electoral politics altogether -- arguing there's not a dime's worth of difference between Obama and, say, Mitt Romney or Rick Perry, either of whom would restore the neocons to their place of preeminence in U.S. foreign policy.
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