Where’s the Outrage? Where’s the End?

A mid-March demonstration in Washington against the war in Iraq, called to mark the fourth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, attracted a crowd that the Washington Post estimated at about 10-20,000, smaller than the crowd that demonstrated in January. The demonstration was also called to mark the fortieth anniversary of a 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam.

The parallels to Vietnam and to the anti-Vietnam movement are there, all right. But their implications are discouraging, for both supporters and opponents of the war.

Other historical parallels aren’t much more encouraging. The Civil War, for example, began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter by Confederate forces on April 12, 1861. Four years later, almost to the day, April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The war was over.

The U.S. role in World War II began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Despite American unpreparedness and a slow start—“you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want,” as Donald Rumsfeld put it—four years after Pearl Harbor, the war had been over for more than three months after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in August.

Several wars were over much faster. The War of 1812 lasted about two-and-a-half years. The US-Mexico War was over in less than two years. The Spanish-American War, three-and-a-half months.

The Revolutionary War took a lot longer, and we won that one—in five years, if you date it from the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 to the British surrender after the Battle of Yorktown in October, 1781. But even without the fact that that was more than 225 years ago, what precedential value the Revolutionary War has cuts against the US in Iraq.

That war pitted the greatest military power on earth against an opponent that Wikipedia describes like this:

When the war began, the Americans did not have a professional army or navy. Each colony provided for its own defenses through the use of local militia. Militiamen were lightly armed, slightly trained, and usually did not have uniforms…Militia lacked the training and discipline of regular soldiers but were more numerous and could [on occasion] overwhelm regular troops…Both sides used partisan warfare… At every stage the British strategy assumed a large base of Loyalist supporters who would rally to the King given some military support.

The British defeat at Yorktown resulted in the defeat (in a Parliamentary vote of no confidence, Britain’s first) of the Prime Minister. After three short-lived governments (“administrations,” we would say), leadership devolved upon an opponent of continuation of the war and advocate of peace with the former colonies, William Pitt the Younger, whose party held the prime ministership for 47 of the next fifty years.

The predominant military power in the world defeated after a long war, thousands of miles away, by lightly-armed militias and partisans, resulting in the opposition party taking power and keeping it for almost a half-century. It’s not a cheering parallel for supporters of the war in Iraq.

Then there’s Vietnam. It’s hard to say exactly when the war in Vietnam, or even America’s role in it began. But let’s date it in March of 1965, with the dispatch of the first American ground troops, who were joined by contingents of troops from that era’s coalition of the willing—including Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines, all of them, as it happens, original members of this era’s coalition of the willing.

How were we doing four years later, in 1969? In March of 1969, Richard Nixon had been in office for two months. He had a plan to get American troops out of Vietnam, and he called it Vietnamization. The idea was to recruit and train Vietnamese troops to defend South Vietnam, and to withdraw American troops as the South Vietnamese troops reached their potential. Sound familiar?

Nixon had another plan, too, a secret one. Much of the damage inflicted on US troops was the result of troops and materiel brought across South Vietnam’s border with Cambodia. Nixon initiated a secret bombing campaign along the Vietnam-Cambodia border and then, when the border was closed, launched an invasion, which he referred to as an incursion, of American and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia. Not only did the bombing and incursion not cripple the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in South Vietnam, but when the secret got out, as these secrets always seem to do, it brought down a hailstorm of opprobrium on the US and destabilized the friendly Cambodian government, paving the way for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to take over.

Back home, although voters had elected Richard Nixon, generally perceived as the more hawkish of the two candidates, an aggressive anti-war movement was in full throat. In 1967, just two years into the involvement of American combat troops in Vietnam, 100,000 had marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon, as this year’s demonstrators did in March. In 1968, two thousand demonstrators had disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In October of 1969, millions had taken a day off from work or school to take part in the Moratorium. And on November 15, 1969, between 250,000 and 500,000 came to Washington to demonstrate against the war.

Yet on St. Patrick’s Day of 2007, less than 20,000 went from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon.

Is the country a less fertile breeding ground for dissent four years into the war in Iraq than it was four years into Vietnam? Possibly. Is the pool of Americans from which protestors are drawn less caring, more selfish, more focused on their own futures than the protestor pool of forty years ago? A bit, perhaps.

But there are more concrete and immediate differences as well. Facile comparisons between the two wars overlook the vast difference in scale. At its peak, there were more than 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam, more than three times the peak troop strength in Iraq, and drawn from a US that was a third smaller than it is today.

The difference in casualties is even more striking. As of March 17, 2007, approximately 3200 American soldiers had been killed in four years in Iraq. That many were killed in Vietnam in the first two months of 1968 alone. The US war in Iraq would have to last for more than 75 years to reach Vietnam’s total of more than 57,000.

Moreover, the risk of death in Vietnam was even more real to the young people of that time than the death totals suggest. The Vietnam era armed forces of were not volunteers, but draftees. And in 1968, the risk of being drafted increased even more when graduate students deferments were eliminated. Depend upon it, to update Samuel Johnson’s bon mot, when a man knows he can be drafted in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Today, of course—this is obvious but bears saying nonetheless—the chance of being involuntarily inducted into the armed forces and killed in Iraq is zero, and the concentration of young minds on the war in Iraq, while not zero, is a small fraction of what it was forty years ago.

History is not destiny. What they say about individuals and rivers—that you can’t step in the same river twice, because from moment to moment, neither you nor the river stay the same—is true in spades for nations and historical eras. Even when the history is just a few months old, our projection of the future is usually only in a straight line from the present.

But a combination of historical precedent and observation of today’s realties does not bode well for either supporters or opponents of the war. Even to supporters, history suggests that as wars drag on, the chances of success become worse, not better. Flawed premises do not become valid with the passage of time. People fighting on their home ground are not broken but toughened by the defeats that foreign troops inflict. More often than not, if a plan for victory were going to work it would have worked before the people of the precipitating country begin to lose confidence in their leadership.

Opponents cannot take comfort from historical parallels either, especially parallels with the Vietnam-era anti-war movement. The elimination of the draft ended the risk of involuntary military service. But it also ended the widely shared and personally felt sense of threat that aggregated the anti-Vietnam War movement. Conversely, those who do volunteer to serve are far less likely to develop the shared hostility to the war that infected many troops serving in Vietnam. Finally, the increased efficiency of war has drastically reduced the number of soldiers it takes to wage war, while advances in battlefield medical care have reduced the number of troops who die in connection with combat. Fewer soldiers and fewer deaths mean that foreign wars will have smaller domestic impacts and stir less outrage when things start going badly.

The leaders who began the war in Iraq didn’t expect it to see a first birthday, let alone a fourth. The history they looked at—the quick victory over Iraq a dozen years before, the mostly peaceful overthrow of Communism in eastern Europe, the stable democracies that emerged in Germany and Japan after World War II—seemed to augur well for their enterprise. Now, after four years, the historical parallels point not toward but away from success—both for those who would win the war, and for those who would end it.