A quest majority replaces Vietnam's "silent majority."

[thedrifter]

WONDER LAND
Ghost Busters
A quest majority replaces Vietnam's "silent majority."
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, August 26, 2005 12:01 a.m.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is an aphorism of uncertain truth everyone seems to have etched into their minds. Who can forget? From the sound of the "antiwar" tom-toms thumping across the land, forgetting the past is the one thing America doesn't have to worry about. We routinely open the sepulchers of memory, and just now it is the "ghost of Vietnam" that is strolling among us.

Gary Hart, a former Democratic senator from Colorado who ran for president twice and worked on the McGovern campaign, published an op-ed in the Washington Post this week in which he exhorted someone in his party to actively oppose Mr. Bush on the war--to "jump on the hot stove" of Iraq, notwithstanding the Democrats' searing experience with Vietnam.

Chuck Hagel, a senator from Nebraska and current presidential marathoner, is beating his singular path to the nomination by explicitly saying that as in Vietnam, we are "bogged down" in Iraq and "need to be out." Also on the yellow brick road to the presidency, Democratic senator Russ Feingold has called for withdrawal from Iraq by Dec 31, 2006

Maybe Santayana was misquoted. Maybe what he meant to say is those who remember history are condemned to repeat it. And repeat it, and repeat it.

Joan Baez, now 64, has descended from the mists to sing songs at Cindy Sheehan's Crawford ditch in Texas. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, respectively 62 and 61, have decided to cap their careers with a new song called "Sweet Neo-Con" ("It's liberty for all . . . unless you are against us, then it's prison without trial.") The ghost of Tom Hayden showed up on Bill O'Reilly this week to announce, with the confidence of experience, that "an exit strategy is an art form all in itself." And indeed some polls have dropped the war's support below 50%.

Here's a truer saying: It's déjà vu all over again.

Any politician aspiring to the presidency who gets the call wrong on the Iraq war may find himself in the ditch George McGovern dug for his party in 1972--with 37.5% of the vote. Perhaps the reason Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden aren't jumping in front of Cindy's parade is that as a matter of species survival they're required to keep an ear to the ground. And you know what, the times really have changed since Vietnam.

Richard Nixon, amid a similar low ebb of popularity with Vietnam, gave a famous speech in 1969. This was the year after the Tet offensive, which caused Walter Cronkite's famous Hagel-like throwing in of the towel. In that speech Nixon described a "great silent majority" in America. The idea, of course, was that the daily media attention commanded by the antiwar movement was missing a class of Americans who sat home seething at the behavior of the protesters.

Today, because of the Internet, no one has to seethe in silence, as wired activists in both parties proved in 2004's high-tech election, and now. But it may be that the current infatuation with anti-Bush, anti-Iraq sentiment is again missing a political current flowing beneath the surface of the news, just as the media missed the silent majority 40 years ago and the values voters in the 2004 election.

I would call this faction the Quiet Majority. These people are organized and they are pro-active. But they pass beneath our politics unnoticed because they're about something deeper than TV face-time. There is a large number of groups that have organized in the past three years solely to support the American troops in Iraq.

• Bill Robie recently drove three hours from Atlanta to Camp Lejeune, N.C., to help Jim Hake's Spirit of America--which has nearly 14,000 supporters--load school supplies bound for Iraq. "Groups like SoA, Home for Our Troops, Operation Homefront, Fisher House and others don't get much attention," he wrote me a few days ago, "yet they represent the true character of our nation."

• John Folsom is a Marine Reserve colonel from Nebraska, now in Iraq. Two years ago he "passed the hat" among colleagues and raised money to create Wounded Warriors, which supports military hospitals by buying laptops for bedridden soldiers, TVs and overhead projectors for medical staff. His support base is small. "It's almost like a family," he told me.

• Soldiers' Angels was started in 2003 by Patti Patton-Bader, the mother of a sergeant in Iraq then. It now has 45,000 members. Its executive director, Don MacKay, says: "Our members come from across the political spectrum. But there is one opinion they all share: Our soldiers deserve every ounce of support we can muster."

The message boards some of these groups maintain make clear that troops are aware, in detail, of antiwar activity. Again, this isn't Vietnam. They have news access. If the Democratic left does levitate another antiwar movement, it won't be the unanswered opposition of the Vietnam years. The counter-opposition will draw numbers from these pro-troop groups. They, too, are Internet-linked. They are better informed than most people, they are committed, and they are articulate. And they have stories to tell.

Does this add up to millions of pro-Iraq voters? Who knows? But the quiet, mostly nonpartisan, pro-G.I. activism of these people has put them closer to the reality of the war--its pain, its losses, its successes and kinships. My guess is their kind of support is what the troops on the front want most now, rather than having to sit along the Euphrates River wondering if Chuck Hagel, Russ Feingold and the Rolling Stones are going to pull the rug from under them over the next two years.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Deja Vietnam All Over Again
By Brandon Crocker
Published 8/26/2005 12:04:26 AM

At a National Press Club forum shortly after the 2004 election, ABC's Carole Simpson famously commented that the primary role of the news media was not, as many thought, to "inform" but rather to "influence." Indeed, the reelection of George W. Bush was, according to Simpson, evidence that the news media had failed in its duty to educate the American public. Given this sentiment, the recent elevation of Cindy Sheehan to media superstardom should come as no surprise.

The Cindy Sheehan phenomenon, after all, is highly reminiscent of the immediate and wide media attention given to a select group of families of September 11 victims who, within 24 hours of the release of Bush campaign commercials that included a few seconds of video from that important day, had press conferences decrying Bush's "political use" of September 11. A typical headline was one used by Reuters in its reporting: "Sept. 11 Families Disgusted by Bush Campaign Ads." Almost no news outlet reported that the disgusted families were members of a rabidly anti-Bush group called "September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows" that had even opposed the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Likewise, Cindy Sheehan has become a media celebrity even though her protests have almost no news value -- except for her own kooky views, which the so-called "mainstream" media is loath to report. Ms. Sheehan's opinion, shared by much of the American left, that Bush went to war in Iraq for the benefit of his "oil buddies" certainly has no basis in fact and is queer given that Bush argued against the subsidies to domestic oil producers to increase exploration efforts in the recently passed Energy Bill (arguing, correctly, that the currently high price of oil provided incentive enough to oil producers). You would think that the news media, eager as they are to put John Q. Public right, would be conscientiously flushing out the problems with this particular opinion of Ms. Sheehan and her left-wing buddies. But instead they are oddly silent.

Just as they are oddly silent about Ms. Sheehan's proclamation that the Iraq war was all about advancing the goals of Israel (note the abundance of Palestinian flags in Ms. Sheehan's camp), or that the United States has engaged in "nuclear war" in Iraq. (Even if Ms. Sheehan were speaking metaphorically, this is a horrendous statement and, yes, one that is an insult to American servicemen who have spent much of the last two years building schools, water treatment plants, and the electrical grid in Iraq -- largely with U.S. funds.) The "mainstream" media is also reluctant to report the fact that much of Ms. Sheehan's entourage is made up of left-wing extremists and of groups hostile to American interests such as "Code Pink" and the American Communist Party. Instead, the work of a couple dozen left-wing activists is reported daily as an important groundswell of anti-Bush sentiment, and used as an excuse to air anti-Bush blather as "news."

Again, no surprise. Just as it is no surprise that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel is sure to get prime media coverage whenever he criticizes Bush's Iraq policy. This was true a few days ago when he proclaimed that Iraq was becoming -- you guessed it -- another Vietnam. Just about every U.S. military action since Vietnam, according to the "mainstream" press, and, for that matter, much of the Democratic Party, was going to be another Vietnam. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, were all going to be Vietnams. Now it's Iraq's turn.

Donald Rumsfeld commented that there are so many differences between Iraq and Vietnam that it would take too long to list them all. Well, just for the record, assuming that our friends in the "mainstream" media might need some help, I'd like to list a few of the most important.

* Iraq, we destroyed a large opposing army in little more than three weeks.

*In destroying that army, we liberated 25 million people from one of the most brutal dictatorships in modern history, and freed the world from an unapologetic supporter of terrorism.

* In Iraq, we have helped a people to create a new, representative government that may become a model for the region.

* The continuing insurgency has little support within Iraq.

* Our success in Iraq has convinced other regimes, such as Libya, to abandon their quest to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

* And we have done all this, to date, at the cost of the lives of approximately 1,864 American soldiers, sailors, and marines. That comes out to an average of about 750 deaths per year; in Vietnam the average casualty rate was about 5,000 per year.

These are some stark differences; ones that the news media will not trumpet. Instead, we will hear more about Cindy Sheehan and the daily casualty figures. This is the one big similarity to Vietnam. The "mainstream" media sees its job not as reporting the news, but as trying to defeat U.S. foreign policy.


Brandon Crocker is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator online living in San Diego.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Hagel's Parallels Between Iraq And Vietnam Are Inaccurate
by Oliver L. North
Aug 26, 2005

At the National Cathedral, just days after Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush spoke to grieving sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers -- whose family members had been murdered by terrorists. "This conflict," the president said, "was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing."

According to Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., the hour of our choosing is midnight, Dec. 31, 2006. So mark your calendars, rent the hall and order the catering. The boys will be on their way home in time for the New Year's Day college bowl games. So says the junior senator from Wisconsin.

Last week, as the Iraqis were debating the first democratic constitution ever drafted in an Islamic country, Feingold, in one of his famed "Listening Sessions" in Wisconsin, said that U.S. military counter-terrorism operations in Iraq were only "feeding the insurgency," and he called on President Bush to withdraw U.S. military personnel from the fight by Dec. 31, 2006. A firm "end date," the senator claimed, would "help us to undermine the recruiting efforts and unity of the insurgents." He went on to say that, "I think not talking about endgames is playing into our enemies' hand." In short, Feingold and his friends want us out of Iraq by a "date certain."

Three days later, Feingold -- who admits he has never supported the war in Iraq -- tried to fudge what the words "end date" mean. "No, it's not a deadline," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Just like the other things I just mentioned, it's a target." This is the kind of doublespeak for which Yasser Arafat was famous: say one thing to your home constituency -- and something else to a broader audience.
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Unfortunately, Mr. Feingold is not alone in deciding that now is a good time to forecast an American withdrawal. Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and two-time Purple Heart recipient, did support the war, and even advocated sending in more troops. But now he is calling for the administration to develop -- and publish -- an exit strategy. "We should start figuring out how we get out of there," Mr. Hagel said. "But with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East." Sen. Hagel, who is occasionally mentioned as a GOP presidential candidate in 2008, says our soldiers are getting bogged down in Iraq the way they did in Southeast Asia a generation ago.

Hagel's parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are inaccurate. Having spent a significant amount of time in both wars, about the only comparisons I have seen are that the bullets are still real and the media is still hostile. Otherwise, there are extraordinary differences in terrain, the support received from outside powers, the type of enemy -- and a huge dissimilarity in casualties. During 1968 -- the year I arrived in Vietnam -- and the year we committed ourselves to getting out of that country, we averaged 39 casualties per day -- far in excess of what we are experiencing in the war on terror.

Whether they call it a "deadline" or a "timeline" or a "blueprint for withdrawal," what Messrs. Feingold and Hagel are advocating is a distinction without a difference. Both of them are saying, "Cut and run." Feingold would simply tell everyone the exact day and time of our departure. But leaving at any time before it is the right time would create the power vacuum about which Hagel is concerned. We won't know what the right time is until it arrives.

As we near the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11, it's important to remember that events make dates important, not the other way around. And in the new democratic Iraq, positive events have already created dates for its citizens -- and Americans -- to remember:

March 19, 2003: The day the liberation of Iraq began, as the U.S.-led Coalition entered Iraq.

April 9, 2003: The despot's statue in Firdos Square, Baghdad, toppled by a joyfully liberated people.

Dec. 13, 2003: A bedraggled, wild-eyed Saddam, dragged from a rat hole in the dirt and taken prisoner to stand trial.

Jan. 30, 2004: Millions of Iraqi men and women proudly displaying ink-stained fingers to show the world that they had braved threats and intimidation to vote.

In the weeks ahead, the Iraqis will submit the constitution that they have drafted to a referendum of the Iraqi people. In December, they will hold elections for a 275-seat National Assembly, and form a multi-ethnic, largely secular government that will guarantee the same rights and privileges to all of the country's ethnic and religious groups.

None of these events -- past or future -- are the consequence of artificial timelines imposed by a hostile mainstream media or skittish lawmakers. This week, the president reiterated that we will stay the course until the Iraqi people are able to govern and defend themselves against terrorists who would deny them, and us, the most fundamental of liberties.

To do otherwise would surrender the people of Iraq -- and the region -- to a fate even worse than that to which we left the Vietnamese thirty years ago. And if we do that, there will be another "date certain" -- the point in time, years from now, when historians will look back and say, "that's when the great American dream of individual liberty began to die."

Ellie