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From the diaries -- kos)
"Why We Can't Wait" was a MLK book that I grew up with during the 60's. I thought the title said it all, but what it didn't, King did. And as I watch the elections in iraq unfold, I had my eye caught by this AP article by Tom Raum, restating what we all know... as goes iraq, so goes Bush. This time, however, the author throws in an interesting timeline:
Stephen J. Cimbala, a Penn State University political science professor who has studied the effect of the Iraq war on domestic politics, said Republicans are going to become increasingly restive if they don't see an exit strategy developing as 2006 midterm elections approach.
"And as 2008 approaches, the Iraqis will pretty much have to be in charge of their own political destiny, otherwise you're going to hear the word quagmire more and more," Cimbala said.
But.. we want change sooner than that, don't we? Isn't the Gonzales vote (preceded by a Rice debate) the beginning of a democratic opposition? Well, yes. But Democratic opposition doesn't mean the Dems are quickly morphing into an anti-war party overnight. The goal here (for them, not us) is to slow Bush down, not to rally behind Ted Kennedy. Why? The American public is moving there, but isn't there yet.
Vietnam has left us many legacies, and the analogies are always incomplete, but here's one:
whether it was Wm Calley Jr and the massacre at My Lai, or the war itself, the American public supported Nixon and the war effort throughout the sixties.
Historically, Americans are reluctant to say going to war was a mistake. At no time during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 did a majority of Americans express that view. U.S. troops had been in Vietnam for more than three years before a thin majority said in 1968 that the war was a mistake. The figure peaked at 61% in 1971, the year President Nixon began to pull out U.S. troops in large numbers and turn over combat operations to the South Vietnamese. The last U.S. combat troops left in 1973. After the Vietnam War was long over, the number of Americans considering it a mistake climbed to a high of 71% in 1990.
The fact that the American public has doubts about the war now in such a short period of time is remarkable... (Internets, si... Wurlitzer, no) but that doesn't mean (as in the election of 2004) that the public is ready to withdraw. It will happen. I think Iraq is already lost and the endpoint is inevitable. But 2006 may well be a very realistic timetable.
For more on the limited correlation between polls and casualties, see Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam