Sherman, Set the Wayback Machine for 1968

The Diary is an expansion of a comment I left a few days ago. I was prompted to write it by the many misconceived comments in the news media and on the web about the alleged perils of Democrats running against the Iraq War.

So, Sherman, set the Wayback machine for 1968 and let's review the facts.

The Vietnam War was the Democrats' war at the start. Lyndon Johnson (D) who was President at the time, escalated the war, both with ground troops and air attacks. Republicans supported the war too, but often complained he wasn't fighting it hard enough.

Toward the end of Johnson's term, his party split over the war. Everyone knows about Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy already. The Republicans were in opposition and could take advantage the unpopularity without having to worry about splitting their party. Richard Nixon, who was from the beginning the favorite for his party's nomination, regaled the public with his "foreign policy expertise" and promised to "end" the war without saying how. The fact was, many rank-and-file Republican voters were also turning against the war, although they tended to express it differently and Democrats did.

Both parties at this point were split between "hawks" who favored continuing the war and "doves" who favored getting out. There were many people also who fluctuated between the two perspectives. "Hawk" and "dove" were as much stereotypes as "red" and "blue" are now. From the beginning, Nixon's supporters varied greatly in their expectations. Some were hawks who hoped he would make a quick strike for final victory. Many others were doves who hoped his foreign policy expertise would lead to an early withdrawal instead of victory.

Once elected, Nixon played the American people in masterful fashion. The hawks were pleased when he invaded Cambodia in 1970, launched a raid into the Laotian panhandle in 1971, and mined the harbor at Haiphong (North Vietnam's major port) in 1972, the same year he bombed the dykes of the Red River in the same country. The doves were appeased as Nixon began gradually withdrawing ground troops, while the Paris peace talks, begun under Johnson, dragged on and on. Nixon called his "winding down the war" while he intensified air attacks. Fighting the war primarily by air was popular because it produced fewer casualties.

In mid-1972 Henry Kissinger, after negotiating with the NLF and North Vietnamese for four years, announced "Peace was at hand."

By now, most of the ground troops had been withdrawn and fewer young men were being drafted. Abolishing the military draft altogether, a radical position in 1968, was now in the mainstream. It was widely expected that the war would soon be over.

In 1972, the Democrats nominated Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, an outspoken critic of the war, for president. The 1972 election was NOT a referendum on whether the war the war should be won or not. By now, a majority of the American people were against the war, but a large part of that majority were satisfied that it would soon be over if Nixon was re-elected. Without the war, McGovern had no issue. He was left isolated with little more than the sector of the electorate that always votes Democratic no matter what. Nixon's 61 per cent majority was a heterogenous mass of dovish and hawkish voters.

Commentators are fond of warning the Democrats not to repeat the disaster of 1972 by opposing the Iraq war. How is the 1972 election like this election year and 2008? Not much. Bush is no Nixon. He has never made any attempt to regain the confidence of the anti-Iraq-War majority. He is stuck in a war that he is not likely either to win or to withdraw from. If he were like Nixon, he would announce that the war in Iraq was going so well that now, in the late summer of 2006, we can start withdrawing troops. He would then make a substantial withdrawal down to, let us say, about 100,000. That might or might not take the winds out of the Democrats' sails. We'll never know. Bush does not have Nixon's political cunning.

I will now return to the Wayback machine for a minute, to finish the story.

In early 1973, a pact was signed and the remained US troops, except some military advisers, were withdrawn. We were assured the war had not been lost after all, because now the South Vietnamese were capable of defending themselves. Actually, South Vietnam was left in the lurch. The Saigon government proceeded to lose the war abruptly in the spring of 1975. Was there a widespread backlash against either party for being "soft" and losing the war? NO! The American people had moved on by now, and responded with an apathetic shrug.

On an deeper level, however, we as a nation hate to lose, and don't like the fact that 58,000 American service personnel lost their lives in vain. The Republicans have spent the last quarter century repeating over and over that the Democrats are "soft on defense" in order to stoke resentment over the losses we suffered in Vietnam. They want everyone to forget how unpopular that war was and how glad the American people were at the time for it to be over. But that isn't all. The current generation of Republican leaders were young political activists at the time of the 1972 election. They either didn't understand, or have long since forgotten, how shrewdly Nixon played politics with that war, and that is why they are pursuing this counter-intuitive campaign to make an unpopular war their main issue.

So if Bush isn't another Nixon, whom does he resemble? Most Republicans would squirm at this comparison. He is "Lyndon Baines" Bush presiding over an unpopular war in Iraq. The Democrats can focus on the war's unpopularity without endangering themselves. In fact, if the Dems prevaricate on the war, as the commentators insist they should, they will look weaker than if they come out for terminating our involvement.