National Security Watch: Iraq: So far, somebody else's problem
Another lesson: Polls can be a lagging indicator, not a leading one. Well before public sentiment turned negative in 1967, there were sizable antiwar protests featuring people like Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And when the tipping point came, it came with force felt powerfully, even inside fortified Washington. Less than two months after the polls shifted, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara watched an enormous antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon from the window of his office, his own doubt rising about where his war was headed. Shortly afterward, he resigned from the Defense Department to run the World Bank.
There are few sizable antiwar protests today, but there are protests all the same. They just look different. The Army's mounting problems recruiting adequate numbers of troops–—especially in the National Guard and Reserve, which are bearing a burden for the war on terrorism that few of those soldiers ever envisioned–amount to a referendum on the war. They represent a very focused kind of "poll" among those who actually stand to bear a cost for warfare–potential servicemen and women as well as their parents. And they seem to be definitively rejecting military service in favor of other lines of work.
This may be far more telling than any polls of the general public, because few people, except for families involved with the military and the global war on terrorism, are bearing any cost at all for America's overseas adventures. Defense spending for Iraq in 2005 will be less than one third the level it was for Vietnam in 1967, in terms of the percent of GDP it represents—and it's one twelfth the cost of the Korean War in the early 1950s. And instead of asking Americans to pay a tax surcharge or some other bill to finance the war, the Bush administration is borrowing to pay for it and pushing the cost into the future.
The human pain is spread far more narrowly today, too. In the 1960s, roughly 1.3 percent of the total U.S. population was in uniform. Counting friends and family members, 10 percent of Americans or more may have had a direct connection to the U.S. military at any given time. Today those proportions are far smaller. Though the U.S. population has grown, there are barely half as many people in uniform today as in the 1960s, and they represent less than one half of 1 percent of all Americans. That makes it much easier to dismiss problems with Army recruiting or military morale, or even ongoing casualties, as somebody else's problem. For the majority of Americans, it is. But if Vietnam is a guide, sooner or later it may become everybody's problem.
Senior writer Richard J. Newman is coauthor, with CNN military analyst Don Shepperd, of Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots, the Vietnam War, and the Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, to be published next February by Presidio Press.
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