Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: War support waning

Saturday, July 2, 2005 | 12:12 p.m.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

WEEKEND EDITION

July 2-3, 2005

So how did you really like the president's speech?

By now we have all heard too much about what President George W. Bush said last Tuesday night about Iraq, what he didn't say, what he should have said and why he didn't say what most Americans wished he had said.

Not only has the public weighed in on that speech, but they continue to weigh in on the much broader issue of the war in Iraq and just how we are going to finish it and get out. And it is the answers people keep coming up with that are driving down the president's poll numbers which, regardless of whether he pays attention to them or not, are being viewed by others in leadership positions as the quintessential determinants of how much time this country has left in Iraq.

One of the great lessons of the Vietnam War was just how quickly the public's support for a war can turn, taking with it any hope for the kind of victory first envisioned by leadership. If, indeed, there was such a vision in the first place.

I have refrained from finding too many parallels between Vietnam and Iraq -- although many others have seen an uncanny similarity -- because I didn't believe there were that many. After all, Iraq had one dictator over the entire country, which made it quite different from the politics on the ground in North and South Vietnam. There were very few Vietnamese who ever bought into the idea of American occupation, choosing instead to view us like all the other foreign powers over the years -- just another interloper. And in Vietnam we had a slow and very reluctant move into that part of the world.

In Iraq, there were a great many people who we believed would be grateful for our getting rid of Saddam Hussein. There was also no East-West balancing act to be played out in Iraq. Remember the domino theory? And our move into the region was anything but slow and reluctant.

Recently, however, I have started to see some similarities and those are the reasons I am starting to get very concerned about the president's seeming blindness to the reality on the ground in the land that Saddam once built.

Most Americans pooh-poohed the late Sen. Barry Goldwater when he suggested that the United States have a policy of winning the war rather than whatever our policy happened to be. By that he meant that our men in uniform were too precious to sacrifice to any plan other than one that would cause a decisive victory over the enemy. He wanted to bomb ports in North Vietnam, mine the harbors and generally blow up anything that even looked like it might jeopardize American soldiers.

The voting public thought the good senator was too extreme and voted for the other fellow, Lyndon Johnson, a good president but a man who could no longer bear the heavy burden of an ever-growing body count in a war that seemed unwinnable. So much so that he refused to run for re-election.

The body count in Iraq is still just a fraction of the 50,000-plus deaths we incurred in Southeast Asia and, thankfully, it will never get anywhere close to those numbers. But today we get to watch many of those tragic ends happen in front of our eyes and in our living rooms, practically 24 hours a day. They have an impact.

So far, the daily death counts have taken a toll in President Bush's popularity numbers. Less than 50 percent of the American people buy into the Bush doctrine on Iraq. Fewer still accept his linkage of al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein as a reason for going to war in the first place. And it is getting worse, not better.

So, here's the problem. When we declared victory in Vietnam and ran out of there as fast as the helicopters could carry our people to safety, not much that was bad happened. The sky over that part of the world didn't fall and the communists -- while they got Vietnam -- did not attain their more enthusiastic goals of world dominance.

If we were to pack up and go home from Iraq, really bad things could and most likely would happen. For starters, the terrorists would claim victory, show their people how they chased the United States from their lands and embolden themselves to all manner of mischief and mayhem. If we don't stop them now, I am afraid there will be a much heavier price to pay later when we have to stop them.

So, if you buy the theory that we must stay to the end, that we must defeat the terrorists and that it is in our interests to prove that democracy can spread to that part of the world, then you have to support our continued -- if bumbling -- efforts in Iraq.

And therein lies the problem that President Bush has created for himself. It is no longer enough for him to just say, "trust me" because most Americans don't anymore. Without giving us more information, without trusting us to act as adults with facts not yet revealed, he will have a difficult time maintaining a consensus of support that will yield political capital on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. And without that support, the political will that is paying for the war and supporting the commander-in-chief will disappear.

And that would be the wrong answer.

Perhaps he can tell us what is really going on in Syria to stop the terrorists from going into Iraq, perhaps he can assure us that he has a handle on Iran and its nuclear desires, and perhaps he can convince us that Saudi Arabia, the country that paid for 9/11, is really our friend now -- both at the gas pump and at every door of a hate-filled Madras -- so that we can convince ourselves to support the war, however unpopular it continues to become.

Perhaps. And perhaps not. In which case President Bush should read the story of his White House predecessor from Texas, just this side of the Perdenales.

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