By the start of the Obama administration’s second term, Bush’s wars had nearly drawn to a close. American troops had withdrawn from Iraq but remained in Afghanistan.While some policies of the Bush years had been abandoned, others had continued and expanded. The Obama administration propelled the use of remote-control drone technology to new heights by conducting extrajudicial killings inside and outside war zones across the Middle East. The antiwar movement - once described as another “superpower” - could barely muster a few thousand protesters to contest drone strikes or aggressive U.S. foreign policies toward Libya and Syria.

When President Obama proposed launching missile strikes against Syria in August 2013, protests at sites around the United States were attended by only a few hundred people each. When we conducted protest surveys (analogous to those described in Chapter 4) at antiwar rallies on September 8 and 9, 2013, in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco, we found that only 19 percent of the participants were self-identified Democrats (N = 227). On the whole, Democrats would not turn out to protest their president.

As we finalize this book in the fall of 2014, the drumbeat to war has begun again, as President Obama announced plans for new airstrikes in Iraq to quell the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Cooper, Landler, and Rubin 2014).