Dems and the Dark Years
"Another Vietnam" in Iraq? That doesn't seem a winning message.

BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

After Sen. Joe Lieberman lost his Democratic primary to antiwar challenger Ned Lamont, Vice President Dick Cheney held a conference call with reporters to make a simple point: Elections this fall will be a referendum on the war. In stumping for GOP candidates, "I certainly plan to talk about [the war] a lot," Mr. Cheney told reporters. "I expect the president will, too."

If it wasn't already, the war is now the dividing political issue of our time. And it's not just Iraq. Last week brought news of a foiled terror plot that aimed to knock out a group of airliners, and murder thousands, over the North Atlantic. Yesterday brought a cease-fire in Lebanon that almost certainly will not hold. Confronting the realities of these two events will require political solutions that may have moved beyond the capabilities of our two-party system. When one of the two major political parties is no longer willing to fight the protracted, hard-fought military campaign the nation desperately needs to win, whether to wage that war in a serious way will come to define the nation's elections.



If Republicans have turned a corner in the past week, it's likely because, although wars are often unpopular in America, losing a war is rarely a winner at the ballot box. It is here that the Vietnam experience may prove to be pivotal. After more than a decade of a hard-fought (if often restrained or ill thought out) military campaign, the America withdrew from Vietnam to watch it collapse under communist control. Many Democrats seem untroubled by this history. But few of the nonpartisans alive then or who grew up in the political aftermath of that withdrawal can be happy with the results: insurgent communist forces abroad and economic malaise and a loss of national confidence at home.

The Vietnamese call the two decades that followed the fall of Saigon in 1975 the "Dark Years." That period came to a close only after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, when the regime in Hanoi, though still communist, began to liberalize. The U.S. didn't suffer for nearly as long--Jimmy Carter was a one-term president, after all--but the blow to American confidence was nonetheless severe. It wasn't until the first Gulf War in 1991 that the U.S. was willing to put hundreds of thousands of boots on foreign ground again to wage a large-scale military invasion. And in the years that followed, President Clinton again hesitated to use American troops on foreign soil after 18 soldiers were killed in the streets of Mogadishu. Mr. Clinton did wage war in Kosovo, but only from the skies. And as late as the invasion of Afghanistan in the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks, serious people were still warning of "another Vietnam" in the far-flung mountains that had once swallowed up Soviet troops.

Withdrawing from Iraq now would usher in a new dark period in the U.S., one in which the nation makes clear it is unwilling to confront emerging threats. Leaving Iraq in chaos would leave the U.S. a hobbled nation that would be unable or unwilling to protect its own national security interests. Foreign policies are built as much on the psychological makeup of a nation as they are on its economic and military prowess. If the U.S. turns tail rather than confronting jihadism and the insurgency in Iraq, would it somehow muster the strength to confront the serious threats posed by a nuclear armed Iran or a missile touting North Korea?



This is about where the American voting public is asked to weigh in and for the past two election cycles, they've tended to side with the War Party. In 2002 Georgia's Sen. Max Cleland, a Democrat with an honorable military record and who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was voted out of office for being too soft on the war on terror. In 2004 John Kerry, another softy who had nonetheless served in Vietnam, lost after being savaged for calling for a "global test" in the use of American military power, waffling on the war in Iraq, and allegedly inflating his service on a Navy swift boat.

Now Rep. Jack Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, former Marine, Vietnam vet and a driving force within his party for withdrawing from Iraq, is being targeted for his antiwar views by a small cadre of political activists. "I will do my best to 'Swift boat' John Murtha," Larry Bailey, a retired Navy captain, said at a news conference recently. It's unlikely that Mr. Murtha, a 32-year-House veteran, will be bounced out of his gerrymandered seat. But judging from the long list of prominent Democrats lining up behind Mr. Lamont, voters will have ample opportunities to make themselves heard on whether they'd like to see a return of the Dark Years.

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.

Ellie