One of the hallmarks of liberalism is its belief in empiricism. When things aren't working we try to figure out why and solve the problem. Despite our unfounded reputation for starry-eyed naive belief in human perfectability, we are the practical thinkers who are looking to the future and trying to figure out a way to make things better. It is a grave misreading of the current sentiment to assume that we don't care about national security. The reason we are trying so hard to change things is because we do care about it. I don't think I'm the only who feels much less secure than I once did knowing that we have alienated half the world out of some misplaced faith in machismo as a diplomatic strategy. The world stage isn't high school and I'd like to see something a little more sophisticated than locker room psychology brought to bear to solve these problems. In case nobody's noticed, the middle east isn't looking so good right now and the Republicans are shrieking like banshees in ever more hysterical terms. Far be it for me to object, what with the need to live down the summer of love and all, but that just doesn't seem like a good situation to me.

Perhaps it's fashionable to adopt Weisberg's disdainful pose, but it's completely worthless on both a political and policy level. It's as if they are living in an endless feed-back loop and haven't thought a new thought in decades. I doubt that even winning a majority will convince these timorous chatterers that objecting to Republican national security policy isn't a death wish, but it won't matter. The only thing that matters is that the Democratic party stops listening to them.

The valid parallels between Vietnam and Iraq are in the wooden-headed approach of the American leaders to policy in both cases -- it's what made reading Tuchman's The March of Folly so chilling for me -- not in the domestic political considerations surrounding the wars. We are, in fact, well past the point with Iraq in which not supporting the wall can do any great political damage. It won't gain any fervent pro-Iraq voters, of course, but those folks were never going to be with us in the first place. More to the point, it won't lose any great number of voters now, as it did in 1972.

In 1972, supporting the war effort was the general default condition; now, lack of support for the war in Iraq (which, it should be emphasised, is not the same thing as being ardently opposed to the war) is the general state of the electorate. How that possibly translates into a repeat of 1972, I don't know. Even if Rove can pull off some major manipulations, I don't think it's going to push public opinion back to what it was when the majority of the electorate strongly supported the war.

It's certainly true that Cheney & Rumsfeld and (to a certain extent) the military don't seem to have learned the lessons of Vietnam, and, in fact, "learned" precisely the wrong message, but that's no reason for us to repeat their error in our own way.

Update: This post on Tiny Revolution quotes a Gallup poll from 1971 saying that 73% of adults polled were in favor of full withdrawal from Vietnam. That seems odd to me, as it doesn't accord with my memory of the siuation in 1971 (when I was a junior in high school) -- which, of course, could well be completely wrong, or I could be telescoping several years together. By 1971 we'd had the Tet Offensive (1968), the My Lai massacre (1969), the incursions into Laos and Cambodia (1970), the incident at Kent State (1970) and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers (1971). "Vietnamization" of the war had been announced by Nixon and there was a gradual US troop withdrawal in effect, in favor of bombing. Given all of that, it wouldn't be unusual for opposition to the war to be a majority opinion.

It's worth noting that Nixon's relection, defeating George McGovern, wasn't actually a repudiation of anti-war sentiment. Nixon's victory was in large measure guaranteed because he and Kissinger assured everyone that "peace is at hand." Given that and the classic reluctance of the electorate to make a change if it isn't necessary, Nixon won, and won very very big, but drawing the lesson that McGovern's anti-war position was the cause of his defeat is rewriting history.