Democrats rode the anti-war movement into office

and then jumped off the straw donkey. Here's a long scholarly paper to describe the goal of protesting the war in Iraq--to get Democrats elected.

"After January 2007 [Democratic Congress elected in 2006], the attendance at antiwar rallies dropped by an order of magnitude to roughly the tens of thousands, or thousands, through the end of 2008. Consistent with our environmental mechanism, the pending departure from office of President Bush and the prospect that the Democrats would nominate an antiwar candidate for President in Barack Obama, could have been perceived as a diminished threat to peace from the Republicans. After the election of Barack Obama as president, the order of magnitude of antiwar protests dropped again. Organizers were hard pressed to stage a rally with participation in the thousands, or even in the hundreds. For example, we counted exactly 107 participants at a Chicago rally on October 7, 2009. The threat to peace from the Obama Administration, as perceived by the grassroots constituency of the antiwar movement, must have been very small. The partisan dynamics of contention by Michael T. Heaney, of U. of Michigan who studies social movements and political parties

And of course, this was written before Obama's interference and rallying the rebels in Libya, which aroused no protest at all among Democrats. Looks like sincere pacifists (if there are any left), Communists and anarchists will just have to wait for another Republican to take office to stage a decent protest (unless we count Madison and Columbus).