The popularity of the war in Iraq

James Joyner notes a Gallup poll has found that a smaller proportion of Americans support the war in Iraq than did the Viet Nam war three years in:

May 9 (Bloomberg) — Three years into major combat in Vietnam, 28,500 U.S. service members had perished, millions of families were anxious about the military draft and antiwar protests had spread to dozens of college campuses.

Today, at the same juncture in the Iraq war, about 2,400 American soldiers have died, the U.S. military consists entirely of volunteers and public dissent is sporadic.

There’s one other difference: The war in Iraq is more unpopular than was the Vietnam conflict at this stage, polls show.

More Americans — 57 percent — say sending troops to Iraq was a mistake than the 48 percent who called Vietnam an error in April 1968, polls by the Princeton, New Jersey-based Gallup Organization show. That’s because more people believed that Vietnam was crucial to U.S. security, scholars say.

“People simply value the stakes much lower in Iraq than they did in Vietnam,” said John Mueller, a presidential historian at Ohio State University in Columbus. Vietnam “seemed vital in terms of the Cold War and stopping the communists. People don’t see this as an important adventure.”

The poll numbers suggest that President George W. Bush may come under overwhelming pressure from voters to resolve the war, as did President Lyndon B. Johnson 38 years ago, even though both men vowed to stay the course.

This is no surprise to me: I was an adult then and I have vivid memories of the 1960’s. The poll just confirms my recollections and impressions. James goes on to observe:

Mueller is certainly right that people think Iraq is less important now than they thought Vietnam was then. Again, though, that’s not because of any objective facts but rather because of a changed mindset. While large-scale troop commitment to Vietnam was always controversial and opposed by a substantial wing of the Republican Party, which had a much larger isolationist wing in those days than now, few prominent Republicans were going to use the war for partisan advantage. “Politics stops at the water’s edge” was not only the political ethic of the day it was smart politics. The past is, in this case at least, another country.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld articulated the case for staying the course pretty well in an interview the other day:

Well, the first thing that we’d have, you’d have Iraq as a country with oil and water, and a large population as a haven for terrorists, reestablished as a caliphate, a home, a sanctuary for extremists to attempt to reestablish a caliphate throughout that region, and to destabilize the Muslim regimes in that region that aren’t extreme, and to then spread that to Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. It would enable them to have weapons programs, and gain access to powerful, lethal weapons that could put at risk many multiples of the people that were lost on September 11th. It would be a tragedy.

I recognize that there are many people of good will in this country who favor an immediate withdrawal from Iraq on the grounds that U. S. military presence there is fueling the insurgency. Americans leave Iraq and the insurgency vanishes or at least diminishes to the point where it can be controlled by the Iraqi army and police. And Americans can always return if things get out of hand.

I’m certainly open to evidence that this is, indeed, the way things would play out in the event of the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. My own view is that the insurgency in Iraq is diverse and has various and often conflicting goals. Some want to restore the status quo ante; some want to establish a Taliban-style theocracy; some have no particular program but are creating mayhem for profit or other reasons. None of those whom we group together as “the insurgency” are particularly interested in liberal democracy in Iraq.

That wouldn’t change just because the American military left Iraq. For a pretty good notion of the sort of regime we might expect consider what happened in Fallujah and Tal Afar.

So, if you add the horrible plight in which it would place the Iraqi people to the reasons explained by Mr. Rumsfeld above, you have a pretty good explanation of the reasons that I believe we need to maintain our military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Those who believe that once we’ve left we’ll return if things get out of hand are fantasizing.

I was opposed to the invasion. I’m sure that there are those who’ll think my position is inconsistent or even hypocritical and will begin a hunt for ulterior motives. Is it hypocritical to believe that crossing a busy street is a poor idea but, once you’ve arrived at the middle of the road, it’s also a poor idea to just return to the side you started on? I think, rather, one should evaluate the circumstances at hand dispassionately and make the prudent choice based on present circumstances rather than those that prevailed at some point in the past.

There are a few other things that I recall about the 1960’s and differences I see between then and now. The opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was considerably more ardent and better mobilized than the opposition to the war in Viet Nam was in 1964. And, although I’m not going to bother looking up the actual statistics, my perception is that support for the war in Viet Nam at the outset was considerably stronger than was support for the invasion of Iraq at a comparable point. There was, after all, a bipartisan consensus on fighting communism and for right or wrong the war in Viet Nam was seen as an integral component of that war.

Although our interests in Iraq are considerably stronger and the war in Iraq is much more obviously a battle in a larger conflict than ever the war in Viet Nam was, there is no such consensus now (at least not as I understand the word).

However, GWB is not LBJ although I’ve been noting for some time that the similarities are many and interesting. For one thing LBJ was anticipating running for re-election right until the mass demonstrations in 1968 convinced him that his presidency was over. GWB isn’t running for anything.