Parallels to Vietnam seen in Iraq war
Nov. 19, 2005. 08:36 AM
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON—It was the summer of 1970, the Baltimore Orioles were headed to a World Series victory, four Kent State University war protestors had been shot dead and the Jackson 5 topped the pop charts.
And Americans decided they had had enough of a futile war in Vietnam.
According to some historians and pollsters, history is being repeated here during the late autumn of 2005.
This was the week that Republicans took their first steps away from George W. Bush's Iraq war policy, a week when a senior legislator called for an immediate troop withdrawal and, perhaps not coincidentally, when discontent with the war mirrored almost precisely American frustration with Vietnam in the summer of '70.
There are obvious differences between Iraq and Vietnam. Some 6,081 Americans died in Vietnam in 1970 alone; there were 58,193 fatalities in total.
More than a million Americans had taken to the streets to protest Vietnam by 1970, something that is not happening in 2005.
But when U.S. senators voted this week to have the White House provide updates on the war with an eye toward a "phased redeployment'' of American troops, it represented a sea change in the debate in this country indicating the question is no longer over how to win, but how to get out.
"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 colour 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.
The summer of 1970 ended with a vote on a Democratic amendment to bring all the troops home by Dec. 31, 1971.
President Richard Nixon had already brought 55,000 American soldiers home in 1969 and told Americans he had a secret plan to bring all the troops home.
The 1970 bipartisan amendment by Senators George McGovern and Mark Hatfield, a bid to end the war, was the boldest challenge yet to executive power.
It failed by a vote of 55-39. But direct American involvement in Vietnam ended in January 1973.
Lindsay says the U.S. is not yet at the point of the McGovern-Hatfield challenge and cautioned about overstating the importance of the Senate vote, which came after a Democratic bid to establish a timetable for troop withdrawal failed by 58-40.
In fact, Lindsay said, we are really seeing a repeat of 1968 this week. Like early 1968, he argues, Democrats have learned the public would support politicians who said it was time to get out.
The White House and Republican leadership spent most of the week on attack, accusing Democrats of rewriting the history of the run-up to the invasion and ignoring the fact they largely backed the invasion.
Bush and Cheney say they will continue to fight back against Democrat charges that the administration misled Americans to war.
Then, Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Jack Murtha — a decorated war veteran with almost four decades of service — called Thursday for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.
Republicans accused him of waving the white flag, lacking patriotism, aiding the enemy.
That led to an angry rejoinder from Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. He said he would not stand for the "swift boating'' of Murtha, a reference to a campaign about his own military record that dogged his Democratic presidential campaign last year.
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