Empire Notes

The latest Gallup poll shows 55% saying Bush's leadership has been a failure and 54% that the war on Iraq was a mistake, down from slightly higher peaks earlier. Polls consistently show 60-70% of Americans in favor of withdrawing some troops, with support for immediate withdrawal about half that.

So why does there seem to be an almost total lack of serious opposition to the war among mainstream circles (as opposed to criticism of the way it's being handled, which is universal)?

An article by Harriet Erskine in the Spring 1970 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, recently referenced by the History News Network, may help shed some light on that. Writing near the height of the Vietnam War, she looked at records of public support for World Wars I and II and the Korean War, as evidenced through polls of those times.

Her conclusion was that World War II was the only one that saw consistently high levels of support from the American people during its prosecution. Perhaps most relevant, although just initially only 20% said the Korean war was a mistake, by February of 1951, only eight months into the war, 50% thought it was a mistake. Later, as truce talks stretched out and the war bogged down into a highly destructive stalemate, that number went into the high 50 percents, even over 60% in one poll.

As Erskine pointed out at the time, only months after the highly successful Moratorium events of Fall 1969 and months before the resurgence of protest over the bombing of Cambodia, these disapproval numbers for the Korean War were higher than any seen by the end of 1969 for the Vietnam War.

Do you recall learning in school of how public opposition forced the United States to end the Korean War and how the war transformed the nation's consciousness, creating a Korea syndrome that kept it out of major interventions for decades?

No?

I think the lesson is clear and can be encapsulated in two points. First, "opposition" in public opinion, as expressed in answers to poll questions, means very little; what matters is political opposition, things that genuinely make it more difficult for those in power to continue on their course, or that make alternatives seem preferable.

Second, closely linked to the first, is the source of and reasons for opposition. That first poll, shortly after the Korean War began, asked people if it was a mistake for the United States to "defend Korea." Throughout the horrors of U.S. bombardment of North Korea, which made the bombing of Vietnam seem light by comparison, the mounting numbers who opposed it still viewed it as the defense of Korea – as do the vast majority today.

We defended Korea from the Koreans, as we later defended South Vietnam from what Adlai Stevenson termed "internal aggression" by the people of South Vietnam. And yet, for a variety of reasons, that story broke down and, by the early 70's, almost nobody believed it. So complete was the breakdown that it took a 20-year propaganda campaign to rewrite the story of the Vietnam War, starting with Reagan and a spate of Hollywood movies and ending when John Kerry reported for duty at the Democratic Convention last year. Even the seemingly overwhelmingly successful first Gulf War and a spate of supposedly humanitarian interventions in the 90's were not enough to completely rewrite the story.

There is no doubt that the vastly greater commitment and perseverance of the Vietnam antiwar movement as compared with the current one had a great deal to do with the immediate threat to activist students posed by the draft, something that is certainly not going to happen again. But it is equally true that much of that fervor came from two other sources – horror at what was being done and belief that society could be dramatically transformed.

Today, right now, in our movement, we have some of that first component, though I would argue not enough, and we have little or none of the second. The Vietnam movement managed to help spread the first widely through society, though the majority clearly rejected the second. Our antiwar movement has largely failed even to spread the first. By so failing, we not only have a harder time ending the war, we lose the potential to use the horror and the failure of the war as a starting point for transforming society.