July 11, 2007
How Goes the War? II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:15 PM EST Just a few thoughts about John Steele Gordon’s latest post. Mr. Gordon is certainly entitled to believe that we are (to invoke some Vietnam War–era phraseology) turning the corner in Iraq, or that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I disagree, as do a great many people with honest intentions and good information. But it’s highly problematic to argue that there “are a large number of people on the left who sincerely hope” that “American defeat [is] inevitable.” Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, as antiwar a politician as they come, introduced an amendment today that would have required that servicemen and servicewomen enjoy equal “dwell” time (time spent at their home bases, resting, working, retraining, and reuniting with their families) and deployment time. Currently, many Army brigades are facing dwell time of roughly one year and deployments that last 15 months. This ratio, 0.8-to-1 dwell time to deployment time, falls well short of Webb’s proposed 1-to-1 ratio, and dangerously short of the Army’s preferred ratio of 2-to-1 dwell to deployment time. A former Marine, Jim Webb certainly does not wish defeat on America; his son served in the war, and I find it hard to imagine that Sen. Webb hopes for his son’s death or dismemberment. Neither do the 56 members of the U.S. Senate, including seven Republicans, who supported this measure today. (Despite enjoying majority support, the amendment failed, as it takes 60 votes to end a filibuster and move to a final vote.) Webb and his colleagues—most of whom also support withdrawal in one fashion or another—simply believe that the Iraq War is breaking the back of the U.S. military and that we need to do better by our servicemen by bringing them home and helping them mend their families, their souls, and their bodies. Ditto, The New York Times, whose Sunday editorial, which Mr. Gordon found “morally and politically shameful,” argued this: “Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.” The vast majority of war opponents care deeply about our servicemen and think they deserve to be treated better, resent the administration’s reliance on twisted logic and bad intelligence in initiating the war, are appalled by the administration’s mismanagement of the conflict, and believe that Iraq has sapped precious military, diplomatic, and financial resources that are needed in the real fight against Al Qaeda. Mr. Gordon is free to disagree with these ideas, as honest people can and should do, but it’s wrong to impugn the motives of those with whom he disagrees. A second case in point is Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist who has threatened to run in next year’s Democratic primary against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sheehan is as radical an antiwar figure as they come. But one needn’t agree with her to understand her motivation. Her son died in Iraq. She is grief-stricken. In World War II, Ms. Sheehan would have been called a Gold Star Mother. In George Bush’s America, conservatives have made her into a traitor. Are we to believe that Ms. Sheehan wants the terrorists to win? Or is it more plausible that, right or wrong on public policy, she doesn’t want other mothers to lose their sons? Conservative hardheadedness reached an incredible level this week when a columnist for National Review Online (NRO) lashed out against Mary-Jo Cooney, the mother of a deployed Marine who had the temerity to write an op-ed for the Washington Post in which she described the sorrow and anxiety of family members whose kids, parents, and spouses are serving in the war zone. In a scathing item entitled, “It’s All About Me,” Michael Ledeen, whose sole contribution to the war effort, as far as I know, was enjoying some Bush-era tax cuts, wrote: “In short, both she and her Marine are victims. Not. He chose freely, he was not compelled to join the Corps. Why did he make that choice? Surely not because his mom told him to. And surely not, as so many would have it, because he’s from the underclass and has no other way to earn a living. But he, the Marine, doesn’t get a word. We get her memories of his early childhood, but nothing about the current man. Narcissus running wild as he so often does in our world.” The ideas expressed in Ledeen’s vile column go a long way in explaining why George Bush’s approval rating is on a par with Richard Nixon’s, and why in generic match-ups voters now prefer Democratic congressional candidates by wide margins. Mr. Gordon writes, “The Vietnam War was lost not on the ground but in the American media. The Tet Offensive was a military debacle for the Viet Cong on the ground but a huge success for it on CBS and the pages of The New York Times. The American military and government, it seems, has yet to learn the real lesson of Vietnam, which is that it is not enough to win the battle on the ground; it must be won in the media as well, or the war will be lost regardless.” Would that this were so. Richard Nixon, no dove, committed enormous airpower to the task of breaking the NLF’s supply lines in Cambodia. Code named MENU, his secret (and potentially illegal) bombing campaign dropped 108,000 tons of explosives on the small Southeast Asian country and accomplished almost nothing. North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces required only 34 tons of supplies each day—an amount that one military historian likened to “a trickle too small for airpower to stop.” MENU did little to disrupt the flow of war materiel to enemy forces inside South Vietnam. That wasn’t the fault of the New York Times editorial board. It was the fault of an enemy force that found a frighteningly effective, but unconventional, way of prosecuting its war effort. Fast forward to 1975, when South Vietnam had one of the largest air forces and best-equipped armies in the world. None of that enabled ARVN to stave off the North Vietnamese offensive. Walter Cronkite didn’t lose the Vietnam War. South Vietnam did. By 1975 the United States polity decided that it could no longer sacrifice its young men to prop up a regime that could not or would not sustain itself. Whether Vietnam is the right analogy, I don’t know. But as I’ve argued elsewhere on this site, the antiwar left today has stood with American servicemen and asked tough questions about the relationship between Iraq and the war on terror. To say that antiwar activists want America to lose the war is to dodge their tough questions with a hollow chorus.
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