Bush's Iraq War Is Drawing Less Support Than Vietnam Did at Same Stage

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aO9FvxAJz8Pw&refer=us

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.''

[Jacobin]

1. Having lived through the Viet Nam era, I would quibble

over a lot of the statements in that article....particularly the assertion that 'saving Viet Nam from communism' was somehow critical to our survival, and that this was a widely held belief.

Most people who paid attention during that time knew that it had nothing to do with communism or the 'domino effect' (see:"They hate us for our freedoms").

It was a struggle by a colony to free itself from western rule, first the French and the next the U.S., and a way for the USSR to stick a finger in our eye and drain our treasury by giving the North Vietnamese a few bucks and planes, much the same way we stuck a finger in the eye of the USSR when we supported the mujihadeen and bin Laden against the USSR in Afghanistan.

[NNN0LHI]

2. 3 years into the Vietnam conflict my parents were convinced that...

..we had to fight the communists over there so we didn't have to fight them over here. They would have been proud to have had my brother or I drafted to go off and do our part to fight those communist evil doers.

That is my recollection anyway.

Don

[Jacobin]

4. I suppose there was a split

My father served in Burma in WWII as an officer in the Army. He did not want me going to VietNam, saying it was a country tired of colonial rule and that we would never win the war and shouldn't in either event. He was a country club republican.

The big thing I remember hearing was the 'domino effect', that if Viet Nam fell to the communists, then it would spread and soon the hammer and cycle would be flying over Hawaii, California, etc., but that was so discredited by 1970 or so that most people I know laughed at the notion. I know there were a lot who did believe that but it was not universally accepted.

Horrible time, it was. The blowback to America was nothing from our meddling back then, compared to the blowback we are in for in the Middle East.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. I remember a CBS poll from 1967. Only 17% wanted America out of Vietnam.

I guess the flag waving "Support Our Troops" etc, aren't as effective at duping the public as it was then.