There may be some credence given to the notion that the lack of protestors signifies at least some larger tacit endorsement of our involvment in Iaq if you look at it from the perspective of music. There are a number of Country/Western singers who have patriotic and supportive songs out that have sold well and been widely heard in contrast to the significant lack of such music coming from the Left and anti-war camp. For the crew that likes to keep drawing Viet Nam analogies, this is the antithesis of that time in our history when the anti-war verse and tunes by far loudly out thundered the pro-war songs. They ain't singing the counter message today although we have artists with high school degrees who are speaking out as foreign policy and military experts against the Iraq war. This says much in contrast to the likes of Toby Keith, Alan Jackson and others who ain't just whistling Dixie when they go to the bank with their large earnings. We sometimes want to exempt ourselves from our own heritage and history and to me that is a symptom of nihilism we are all guilty of. Dissent and disagreement over Iraq is extraordinarily mild compared to our past wars and issues. I learned from a tv special on our Revolutionary War that in S. Carolina alone, there were 103 firefights between Tory Loyalists and Colonial Patriots. We 're talking men down bleeding and dead here, homes burned, cattle run off, crops burned, women raped, homes looted - not just a few muskets fired in anger. Granted, extraneous issues of land disputes and revenge figured in prominently back then but so too today do all kinds of extraneous things get attached to the anti-war movement. There is an ill defined sense of evil in Iraq that our people are reacting to by not voicing strong opposition to the war. That to me is the tacit endorsement with considerable disagreement on how best to deal with it. I think the average American who sees and hears about mosque and market bombings with large numbers of dead and reads about beheadings and holes drilled in people's heads doesn't want our men and women walking away from that as if nothing can be done about it or somehow such an enemy can't be beaten or at least harshly punished. Such sentiments are in fact reflected in music and in the lack of music.