The anti-anti-war campaign.

"We have been Where before, writes Martin Peretz in an August 7 Wall Street Journal column. "Leftwing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue 'peace candidates.'" Peretz goes on to smear U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont, who beat Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary, as a descendant of "that most highborn American Stalinist Corliss Lamont." (Never mind that Corliss Lamont was the author of a tract titled "Why I Am Not a Communist," as my colleague John Nichols noted in the Madison Capital Times in response to similar Red-baiting by the conservative Waterbury Republican-American.)

Why, in 2006, are we suddenly refighting the Cold War?

It's not just Peretz (the editor-in-chief of The New Republic) and the cranky Republicans of Waterbury, Connecticut. In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter issued a dire warning that anti-war activists and candidates like Lamont would be the undoing of the Democrats. "The revival of the romance of the anti-war left is a potential disaster for the Democrats," Alter wrote, reminding readers that "ideologically pure liberals who backed Eugene McCarthy in the primaries refused to rally around Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey was 'complicit' in the Vietnam War machine." Hence, Richard Nixon's win in 1968.

Peretz makes a similar point, though in more feverish Red Scare terms. He goes back to George McGovern, calling him "a morally imperious isolationist with fellow-traveling habits" who "augured the recessional--if not quite the collapse--of such Democratic politics, which insisted our enemy in the Cold War was not the Soviets but us."

Into the breach, according to Peretz, stepped "muscular, " brave" centrists like Joe Lieberman.

You would hardly recognize the Bush-kissing, Democrat-bashing Lieberman of Fox News stardom in Peretz's description. This Lieberman is all about considered compromise, deep moral choices, and independent integrity. What about calling his colleagues who dared to criticize the President dangerously disloyal? What about the Terri Schiavo nonsense?

Lieberman can be "treacly," Peretz concedes, but, particularly on Iraq, he is a profile in courage.

As for the merits of the Iraq War debate, "There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war," Peretz writes, adding, disingenuously: "They are, to be sure, all retrospective." (I guess our little magazine got lost in the mail on the way to The New Republics editorial offices, along with those copies of The New Yorker containing Seymour Hersh's early warnings about Iraq, which relayed the misgivings of his sources--those commies over at the Pentagon and the CIA.)

Here is where we get to the crux of the issue. Pundits like Peretz and many, many others bought into Bush's quick, easy war plan in Iraq. Now they find themselves confronting the disastrous and discredited policy they once endorsed. Their reluctance to admit their mistake is one reason for the venom directed at the war's opponents. No one knew how bad it would be, they declare, or anyone who did is a hippie communist sympathizer. So there!

Peretz is deeply involved with the neocon fantasists who came up with the war in Iraq. As Counterpunch reports, on September 20, 2001, Peretz signed a letter from the right-wing think tank the Project for the New American Century urging Bush to wage war with Iraq: "We agree with Secretary of State Powell's recent statement that Saddam Hussein 'is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth....' It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

The idea of Peretz giving up his Washington insider status to a bunch of neophyte peaceniks and bloggers moves him to issue his most scornful threat of impending catastrophe.

"The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party," Peretz writes. "Ned Lamont is Karl Rove's dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly."

Those words are not quite so ringing if you consider that the Democrats already lost the present by following Peretz's and the DLC's prescriptions.

Another strange thing about the panicky comparison to Cold War politics is that it completely ignores prevailing public attitudes. Unlike 1968, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Iraq--by a margin of more than 60 percent. In contrast, a February 1968 poll showed that just 24 per cent of Americans polled wanted to "discontinue the struggle and begin to pull out of Vietnam gradually in the near future."

The Democrats, meanwhile, in a recent Zogby interactive poll, are now showing a distinct advantage in the upcoming midterm elections. And it's not because voters are hoping for more Lieberman-like kissing-up to Bush.

"In generic tests, Democrats outpace Republican incumbents," Roll Call's Lou Jacobson points out. The only question, he says, is "later, with actual candidates, does that change?"

In other words, will the Democrats offer a real alternative? That is the question for 2006 and 2008.

"The Democrats have a big opportunity. But how can they do it?" says Jacobson. "I wouldn't say the wave is so strong they can win based on how bad the other guys are. It's close to that, but they can't get by just by being generically not Republican."

So far, there is still a muddle of messages from different candidates--the "muscular centrists" in the Joe Lieberman/Hillary Clinton mold, and those no-longer-fringe anti-war candidates like Lamont and Ohio's Sherrod Brown.

"They don't want to have a national strategy yet, because it gives the other side something to attack," says Jacobson. But the Democrats will have to get one mighty soon. In 1994, Newt Gingrich's Contract with America was announced September 27, Jacobson points out.

As for the threat posed by a divisive takeover by the anti-war left, "That message was planned and coordinated and in the can way in advance," says veteran Democratic adviser Bill Dixon. "It was unleashed by Rush Limbaugh, et al, in their daily conference call and daily fax. They started in with it immediately. It's so typical of Peretz that not only is he wrongheaded, but he's not even original."

Dixon was around for the McCarthy and McGovern campaigns, and he later became Gary Hart's campaign manager. He saw the divisive politics of the Vietnam era up close: "They're all writing and saying the exact same thing because they all want it to happen--I don't think it's going to happen," he says. "Not with 60-plus percent of people saying we should pull out of Iraq."

The message Dixon would like to hear from Democrats is the new Nancy Pelosi line. "We want to fight terror effectively and efficiently," she says. "The Republicans are not doing that. They are bankrupting the country and we're not any safer."

At the end of August, the majority of Democratic Congressional candidates were still not calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. But that could change.

"I think Russ Feingold is a hell of a lot closer to the mainstream opinion than he was six months ago," Dixon says. It's up to individual candidates, he points out, to stake out a strong position in their individual races.

If Peretz and the no-longer-Democratic Lieberman have their way, it will be the same old reheated Cold War militarism recast to fit the Bush era. If not, there might be a future worth fighting for.

Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.