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I wish there were a more charitable way to say this, but the level of anti-war outrage in the US (and, I suspect, in the western world more generally) correlates almost entirely with the party affiliation of the person currently in the White House.
The MIC is a juggernaut, and it rolls every president of my lifetime but one. Yet somehow, mass protests and general media denunciations only happen when Republicans are in office. We saw this most starkly with Code Pink after Obama was elected. They were media darlings for six years, and then unceremoniously dropped, their membership cratered and they ceased being a nationally relevant organization in the span of a few months, coincidentally at the end of the year, 2008. And this without any scandal on their part or material change in the status of the wars they were protesting.
Now, there's different ways at looking at this phenomenon. One is that the right doesn't have much of an anti-war crowd, but do notice the howls of "Putin supporters" that shouted down anyone who was skeptical of the official narratives at the start of the war. There was some energy there, but it was stamped out pretty quickly. The right just doesn't have institutional support for anti-war activity. It's the sort of thing much more organized by the left, but then is turned off when they are in power.
All that said, I do think the Ukraine conflict is pretty straightforward, one country is invading another to take their territory. I'm sure there have been atrocities (probably on both sides, though probably not equally). But that's just war. If anything, the Russians have been notably gentle compared to their own behavior in past conflicts.
Your view may be too straightforward.
The informed view from 2008 https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html was more balanced and nuanced.
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Mass protests and general media denunciations of American foreign policy are quite rare, no matter what administration is in office. People always think about the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, but those were expections; even Afghanistan, I believe, never got a mass protest reaction beyond the usual, ie. the small Communist parties and pacifist groups that kept demonstrating also during the Obama era, like Code Pink. The same orgs generally tend to think that US actions vis-a-vis Ukraine are escalatory, as well.
Iraq and Vietnam, in turn, inspired protests mainly because they led, or had the potential to lead, to mass US casualties. In Iraq, military casualties, despite the "surge", had been high precisely in 2003-2007 period but dropped in 2008 and then became a trickle. Indeed, protesting activity seems to also have subsided right around that era, preceeding the election of Obama, with 2008 only seeing one notable protest with "thousands of protestors" in the US, far cry from earlier tens or hundreds of thousands. The last notable international protests mentioned in Wikipedia take place in 2007.
The war became a standard US conflict where Americans might get killed if they are really unlucky or in specialist tasks where it's obvious to everyone they've fully voluntarily taken a very high risk task. Other than that, the deaths were Iraqi, ie. fundamentally unimportant for American society. In Ukraine, of course, there are no (formal) American troops, so it's even less likely to lead to a protest movement, apart from Ukraine solidarity rallies in the Western world calling for more Western support in the early months.
People's memories are hazy, but Afghanistan was incredibly popular at the time. The US was actually attacked on its own soil. The casualties were even greater than Pearl Harbor.
The anti-war people I knew on September 10, 2001 had reactions ranging from "well, I said the military is only for self-defense, this looks like it" to "shrug I guess we are gonna go to war."
The Onion had a fairly representative debate between pro-war and anti-war factions in the wake of 9/11:
"We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage" vs. "We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage"
That entire issue was brilliant.
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All that can be true, and still does not conflict with what I said. You're looking at the behavior of the relative normies, and I'm talking about the already-ideological. Both can be true, that the true believers are inconsistent and that the general public doesn't pay a lot of attention until their kids start coming home in bags.
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