National Security Watch: Iraq: So far, somebody else's problem
Thirty-eight years ago, a bumper sticker started to become popular across America. "Win or Get Out," it read. Of course, it would be an additional eight years before America finally withdrew from Vietnam and began a lengthy recovery from the traumatic, decade-long war.
With new polls showing that public support for the Iraq war is at its lowest point since the campaign began, some valid comparisons with the Vietnam War are emerging [Democrats see opportunity in Iraq polling (6/28/05)]. They don't involve the nature or scope of the insurgency the United States is fighting, or war strategy, or the body count, but rather the subtle, relentless shifts in public perception that can overwhelm the government's agenda the way a storm surge grows from tiny waves into an irresistible force of nature.
By the time Americans began to turn against the Vietnam War, in the second half of 1967, far more damage had been done than in Iraq. The U.S. death toll had surpassed 10,000 by the summer of 1967, more than five times the number of Americans killed in Iraq so far. The fighting in Vietnam had killed perhaps 10 times as many civilians by 1967 as have been killed in Iraq.
But it wasn't the body count that turned Americans against the war. Then, as now, Americans were willing to put up with casualties if they seemed to be for a worthwhile cause. Support for the Vietnam War turned from positive to negative after President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a 10 percent income-tax surcharge to help pay the skyrocketing costs of the war. Public opinion continued to slip for the rest of 1967 and might have been reversible had the 1968 Tet Offensive not shattered perceptions of a war being won. Once Tet occurred, support for the war crumbled, LBJ withdrew from the presidential race, and America's war aims shifted from decisive victory to face-saving exit.
Though Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi undoubtedly are familiar with Tet, few experts think a couple of hundred or even a couple of thousand insurgents in Iraq could mount such a complex, well-coordinated offensive. Still, this moment of twilight in Iraq elicits comparisons with Vietnam that are even starting to show up in polls. A recent Pew survey showed that 35 percent of Americans believe the Iraq war will turn out to be "another Vietnam," a prospect that barely registered in the polls during 2004. And in a fresh Gallup Poll, only 15 percent of those opposed to the war cite casualties as their main reason. More broadly, their objections involve vague and inconsistent war aims, the apparent lack of progress, and the long time it's taking to accomplish the job. To students of Vietnam, that sounds uncomfortably familiar.
The Bush administration, in other words, ought to heed that bumper sticker from 1967. The conventional lessons of the Vietnam War have been military ones: Fight with overwhelming force. Gradualism in war is disastrous. Military action must be undergirded by cast-iron political support. Don't micromanage from Washington. But there are a few other lessons from Vietnam that are being teased out by the situation in Iraq. For one, Americans prefer the sound-bite equivalent of war: Keep it short, and be able to explain it in one sentence. If you can't do that, the drip-drip-drip of negative news will wear away the public's patience. And if the cost suddenly goes up or there's some other shock–both of which happened in 1967 and 1968–the whole support structure can collapse. The Bush administration hasn't faced a true domestic challenge to its Iraq commitment, but if something on the domestic agenda began to compete with Iraq–an economic downturn, a burst in the housing bubble, another terrorist attack–there's a good chance the troops would be on their way home pronto.
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.