First, VDH on why there was little to no anti-war movement after Pearl Harbor as compared to the anti-war movement following 9/11:

Then a much poorer, much more endangered populace was still in large part rural or lived in small communities, felt shame, and knew that America was good or at least better than the alternatives. The rise of big government, big corporations, and anonymous suburbs have created a sort of transience and unaccountability, enhanced by enormous wealth and materialism. The Clintons on the Left and the Enron people on the Right are good examples — the lifestyles of each, the similar improper financial deals, the abuse of language, the sense of entitlement, all that is the same. Bill Clinton is the Ken Lay of politics — pampered, insincere, duplicitious, felonious, smug, and star-struck. Both are reflections of the corruptions of the time; the one mouths concern for the poor, the other for free markets, but they both like Aspen, peddle influence, and share the same values.

Because we are products of an affluent and leisured West, we have a special burden to remember how tenuous and fragile civilization remains outside our suburbs…. [W]e have the leisure to engage in utopian musing, assured that our economy, or our unseen soldiers, or our system working on autopilot, will always ensure us such prerogatives. And in the La-La Land of Washington and New York, it is especially easy to forget that we are not even like our own soldiers in Iraq, now sleeping outside without toilets and air conditioners, eating dehydrated food, and trying to distinguish killers from innocents. What does all this mean? Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in arms — even when those enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate byproduct of an enlightened society. I think we are indulging in this unreal hypercriticism [of the war] — even apart from the election-season antics of our politicians — because we are not being gassed, or shot, or even left hot or hungry.

[T]he danger to a civilisation that is sophisticated and that has conquered the age-old challenges of feeding people, and of keeping them sheltered and protected, has always been over-abundance of wealth, and how you inculcate to an affluent suburban youth principles of an agrarian virtue, muscularism, patriotism, family values [and] civic duty. We have a large group of several million people in our media, government, and universities who have the privilege and the luxury to almost make fun of, indeed, trash or criticise, the very culture that gave them so much abundance.

The attitude reflected in many of the responses to Rod’s book—the attitude of don’t criticize; knee-jerk defense of suburbia and transience and rootlessness and materialism and sacrifice-free comfort from sea to shining sea; false accusations of anti-Americanism; etc.,—is not harmless. Reality (that infamous mugger) is lurking ‘round the next corner, or perhaps the one after that. It can be avoided for a while, but it always makes itself known in the end. And as C.S. Lewis remarked, nature is a far harsher taskmaster than reason.