Parallels to Vietnam Seen in Iraq War
by Tim Harper
commondreams.org
<<..."What we saw this week was a tipping point,'' said James Lindsay, the vice-president of the non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations. "The framing of the debate over Iraq has changed and what we saw with the Senate vote was a rush by Republicans to get on the right side of this issue.
"It is exceedingly important symbolically. The question of how to extricate from Iraq will color the debate over the next year leading to the mid-term elections.''
Julian Zelizer, a professor of American history at Boston University said the parallels between 2005 and 1970 are unmistakable.
"During 1970 and 1971 you started to see Congress actively challenging the executive power,'' he said.
"It was the breaking point when Congress was no longer quiescent. You are seeing it again. Republicans, and many Democrats, have been in lockstep with the president since the invasion. That very quickly unravelled this week.''
Public opposition followed the same pattern, as well.
Americans began questioning not just the Vietnam War, but the truthfulness of the politicians who got Americans there, a process that has gained much momentum in the wake of the indictment of Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter'' Libby, Zelizer said.
And during those pivotal years when support for Vietnam crumbled, politicians were looking at elections — in that case the 1972 presidential election — and today, the 2006 mid-terms.
Gallup found this week that 54 per cent of Americans want U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq within the next 12 months. In 1970, Gallup reported about 50 per cent of Americans wanted their troops out of Vietnam within 12 months.
Gallup also found 54 per cent now believe it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq, although other polls have put that number as high as 60 per cent. In the summer of '70, 56 per cent of Americans told Gallup sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake, a number that topped out at 61 per cent when troops were all withdrawn in 1973.
Gallup pollster Frank Newport said historically Americans turned against this war much more quickly than they did during the Vietnam era.
Part of that, he said, was that Americans of the '60s were more trusting of their government, a trust that was shredded by that very same war and the Watergate scandal of the early '70s. They also thought it unthinkable the U.S. would lose a war.
"Based on the Vietnam experience, it is a matter of once burned, twice shy,'' Newport said.
The first time Gallup found a majority opposition to the Vietnam war was 1968, three years after the war began.
Fifteen months after the Iraq invasion, Gallup found 54 per cent of Americans thought the war was a mistake. The U.S. death toll in Iraq has reached 2,083.
Yesterday, at a Houston convention, about 2,000 representatives of the Union for Reform Judaism asked the Bush administration to provide a clear exit strategy from Iraq and begin to bring some soldiers home in mid-December.
There has been a steady erosion of trust in Bush and an increase in the percentage of Americans who believed they had been lied to in the lead-up to the war.
In May of 2003, fewer than one-third of Americans told Gallup they thought Bush had misled the country in the run-up to the war. Today, that number is 53 per cent...>> |
