Although freelance journalist and former National Security Council staffer Wayne Madsen alleged that the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, pressured senators and representatives to stay away from the demonstrations (which included speeches critical of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians), the more likely explanation for the absence of leading Democrats lies elsewhere. John Judis and others have reported that behind the scenes, the Democratic Party leadership has decided that it should simply avoid saying much about Iraq.

At first glance, this position makes a certain sense. The Bush war has clearly become a huge disaster, and what is more pertinent in Washington, it has become a public relations nightmare for the Republican Party. And Democrats who criticize the ongoing war open themselves up to charges by the Republican sound machine that they are soft on national defense at the least. What pass for news shows in the corporate media are not above carrying scurrilous charges that those who oppose the Iraq war secretly sympathize with al-Qaida or are card-carrying members of the Baath Party. But since the war is sinking in popularity with dizzying rapidity, most Democrats feel that they can simply passively benefit from the Republicans' quagmire, without taking the risk of speaking out. Some Democratic senators have even talked about increasing the number of troops in Iraq, something less than 10 percent of Americans say they would like to see.

The Democrats on the Hill may in some instances be anxious about criticizing the war because they had voted for it, and fear being tagged as inconsistent. But they have other options than silence. They could point out that they were misled by the Bush administration, which menaced them with visions of mushroom clouds from Iraqi nukes, visions that now seem likely to have been outright lies. When Bush wanted to put the bogus story of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger in his State of the Union address, Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet knew that his analysts didn't believe it, but being a dutiful administration hack he allowed Bush to source the story to British, not American, intelligence. Later, when Joe Wilson revealed the Niger claim to be false, Tenet apologized. That kind of administration dishonesty, abetted by a complicit and fatally flawed intelligence service, pervaded Bush administration briefings of Congress in 2002 and early 2003. Behind the scenes, many representatives and senators are still furious about having been lied to and misled. They should put aside their fear of looking like dupes (most Americans were duped) and be frank with the American people. They should put the blame on Bush for hyping unreliable intelligence (intelligence which his administration drummed up) and point to his having been the dupe of ambitious Iraqi expatriates such as Ahmad Chalabi (now enjoying cushy offices in Baghdad as vice premier while Americans are taxed to pay for his rise to power).

The frankly pusillanimous tactic of declining to speak out on the war will ill serve the Democratic Party, which has managed to lose both houses of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court. The American public is not generally antiwar, it is simply impatient with any long-term, highly expensive governmental endeavor that does not appear likely to succeed. Especially in the wake of the natural disasters in the Gulf of Mexico in August and September, the idea of spending over $1 billion a week in Iraq is increasingly distasteful to them. Even Bush's Republican base is beginning to have second thoughts about the Iraq misadventure. It is increasingly clear that Islam and Muslim clerics will have an unprecedentedly powerful role in the new Iraq, that Assyrian and Chaldean Christians are under much worse pressure than before the war, that the position of women is being undermined, and that the country is simply not going to be the missionary field of which the evangelical Christians had dreamed. None of this news strikes Bush's Christian supporters as good.

The potential of a strong antiwar stance striking a chord with the public has already been demonstrated by Paul Hackett. A Marine who recently served in Iraq, Hackett became a civilian and ran in August as a Democrat for Congress in Ohio's 2nd District, traditionally heavily Republican. He lambasted George W. Bush as a chicken hawk and said he should never have begun the Iraq war. Yet Hackett is no peacenik. He says, "I love the Marine Corps. I happen to think it's being misused in Iraq." He only narrowly lost the election, and the Democratic leadership is seriously thinking of putting him up for an Ohio Senate seat, according to the Hill.

Even Democrats who are not veterans of Iraq need to find the courage to speak out on the war if they are effectively to challenge the Republicans. Simply waiting around for things to get worse in Baghdad is a dangerous strategy, not so much because the situation is likely to improve any time soon but because the American people want real leadership on this issue and they know they are not getting it from Bush.

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