Doug Noble is depressed. Noble has been a fixture in the local antiwar movement for years and, like many people, he's anxiously waiting for President Barack Obama to substantially drawdown US troops in Iraq. And he's concerned about Obama's expansion of the war in Afghanistan.

"Where are the protests?" Noble asks. "Where is the outrage?"

Despite years of condemnation and a discrediting of the rationale behind it, Operation Iraqi Freedom - the war that began with the March 2003 US-led invasion of that country - continues.

And Operation Enduring Freedom, the US war in Afghanistan which began in October 2001, is ramping up. David McKiernan, the Army general formerly in charge of the war, recently sought to increase the number of US soldiers in Afghanistan by 30,000. Even though Secretary of Defense Robert Gates removed McKiernan from his post, the Obama Administration appears to be honoring the request.

Despite all of this, the antiwar movement seems increasingly impotent, Noble says.

"Since President Obama was elected and the collapse of the economy, the antiwar movement is really struggling," he says.

A group of about local 100 activists and war protestors joined a national antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., last March. Only a few thousand people in total made it to the rally, Noble says, marking a nadir in the movement's history.

"The big gatherings have come and gone, the vigils are a shell of what they used to be, and it just seems like an empty gesture," Noble says. "If people don't know by now what years of war are doing to this country, I don't know what to say. It strikes me that nothing is outlandish anymore."

Locally, the movement has taken a couple of major blows. The Storefront Anti-War Crisis Center on Monroe Avenue will close its doors on September 30, less than three years after it opened. Part retail and part educational gathering place for activists, the Storefront was something of an experiment that soured due to a combination of internal quarrels, lack of funding, and dwindling community interest.

The second hit, Noble says, came when the Rochester Board of Education recently reversed its "opt-in" policy on military recruitment. The policy required parents to notify district officials if they wanted their children's school records shared with military recruiters. Antiwar activists mobilized students, teachers, and parents to press board members to keep the opt-in policy, despite objections from military officials. The Rochester School District's stand against the military was a major victory for the antiwar movement, Noble says.

But the policy was revised last month to comply with what Pentagon officials call an "opt-out" policy, in which district officials are obligated to give recruiters access to student information, unless parents object. The district made the change because of the risk of losing Title I federal funding, which is an operational necessity for most urban schools.

"Young people are already turning to the military, because of the state of the economy and rising tuitions," Noble says. "They don't need to do this to high school students."

Several factors are to blame for the antiwar movement's malaise, says Paul Kawika Martin, national political director Peace Action, the nation's largest grassroots peace works organization.

"For a lot of Americans, Iraq is being taken care of now," Martin says. "People seem to think that the US policy toward Iraq, our foreign policy, is moving in the right direction. And there's a lot less focus on Iraq."

The momentum against the Iraq War slowed more than a year ago because Bush was seen as a lame-duck president, and that administration was on the way out, Martin says. Expectations were high that Obama would quickly change the policy toward Iraq.

"We had the elections and then the inauguration," Martin says. "The slowdown from last November to January was about a shift toward interest in what this new guy has to say. And there was a question of what the new political environment will be like. There was a ‘Let's wait and see' attitude. People didn't know how to work in the new political environment."

The economic downturn also worked against the antiwar movement, Martin says.

"Foundations were hit hard by a funding dry up," he says.

The loss of grant money was coupled by a contraction in the number of people able to volunteer time to antiwar activities.

Snehal Shingavi, assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, shares Martin's views. A prominent antiwar activist, Shingavi has written extensively on the US involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both men will be in Rochester on Friday, August 7, for "Afghanistan and Pakistan: New Challenges for the US Antiwar Movement." Their presentation, which is free and open to the public, will be at 7 p.m. at School Without Walls, 480 Broadway.

Of great concern to Shingavi is the way that Islamophobia has influenced the thinking of some Americans.

"That idea that Islam is a violent religion is still a widely held belief," he says. "That is a great and powerful myth in this country."

And without a vibrant antiwar movement, there is no educational effort to counter that myth, he says.

Shingavi is also concerned that President Obama's appeal has blinded people to his foreign policy. Some prominent activists, including Shingavi and Martin, say that the antiwar movement seems a little too willing to let Obama do whatever he wants.

"What is a surprise is how much of a pass the antiwar movement has given Obama," Shingavi says. "Much of the War on Terror was conducted under the Republican administration. People had high hopes that Obama would be different."

At the moment, that's looking less promising, he says.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the antiwar movement, Martin says, was the strategic decision to become overly aligned with the Democratic Party. Being against the Iraq War from the start gave Obama enormous credibility, and the antiwar movement more or less became an arm of the party.

"A significant segment of the antiwar movement's organizers became organizers for Obama," Martin says. "Or you could say they were organizers against McCain."

There was also an assumption by many people inside and outside the antiwar movement that if Democrats controlled all three branches of government, the wars would end out of a shared sense of values, if not outright obligation to the base. That was another miscalculation.

The antiwar movement has had successes. It did not expose the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, but it was the salve that helped ease events like these into the public's consciousness, Shingavi says.

The protests, rallies, marches, and vigils over the last seven years have worked to bring scrutiny to the wiretapping, the use of torture, and the billions of dollars needed to finance the wars, he says.

"I do think the antiwar movement exposed the actions of military recruiters," Shingavi says. "What the military was promising students and what it delivered were different."

Locally, the antiwar movement saw pre-existing groups become reinvigorated and some new ones form, Noble says. And a broad coalition formed in Rochester that includes faith, environmental, and health and human services groups, he says.

"Rochester Against War, Declaration of Peace, Veterans Against the War, Peace Action and Education - a lot of groups learned how to work in political activism because of the antiwar movement," he says.

Though many antiwar activists evolved out of the Vietnam era, a new generation of activists has entered the movement, Noble says. And they are the hope for its future.

Brian Lenzo, 27, and Ream Kidane, 28, both from Rochester, were part of a group that went to Gaza last month.

"Our main mission was to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza," Lenzo says. "We were bringing essentials like walkers, wheelchairs, and medical supplies to the Palestinians who desperately need the help."

The Israeli blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, says a 2008 BBC report, has created a shortage of everyday goods.

"We wanted to show that people in the US do care about the Palestinian people," Lenzo says. "The trip showed me that just focusing on Iraq isn't sufficient if you really want to understand what is going on in that area of the world."

The next phase of the antiwar movement, Kidane says, should not focus on isolated US wars, as it has in the past.

"I think the key is taking up an anti-imperialist perspective," he says. "We should oppose a foreign policy of US dominance in the Middle East, which has spread to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan."

And military spending has to be challenged, Kidane says.

"How can we say that Medicare spending is bringing about a deficit in this country, when continuous war spending is always off the table," he says.