The Real Cost of the Iraq War
Page 3 of 3
|
|
In March 1968, Clark Clifford played a vital role in convincing a doggedly hawkish Lyndon Johnson that a seismic shift had, in fact, occurred among influential patrons. Clifford was a prototypical Washington insider, a polished and well-connected lawyer who for decades served as a counsel to the president and maintained close ties with the giants of corporate America. He felt comfortable speaking truth to power, and power listened, knowing Clifford had its best interests at heart.
In January 1968, Clifford replaced Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense. Although recruited as a hawk, he formed a new assessment of the war after examining the military realities and polling his well-heeled contacts to gauge the domestic outlook. Historian Gabriel Kolko cites Clifford's recollections from March 1968, when he told several White House aides, "I make it a practice to keep in touch with friends in business and the law across the land... Until a few months ago, they were generally supportive of the war... Now all that has changed. These men now feel we are in a hopeless bog." He went on to say, "It would be very difficult -- I believe it would be impossible -- for the President to maintain public support for the war without the support of these men."
That same month, Clifford helped organize a two-day meeting between President Johnson and his Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam -- nicknamed the "Wise Men." These were veteran operatives and diplomats with powerful connections to the business and financial communities. As David Halberstam relates in The Best and the Brightest, they "quietly let [Johnson] know that the Establishment -- yes, Wall Street -- had turned on the war... It was hurting the economy, dividing the country, turning the youth against the country's best traditions." As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard notes, just a few days later Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection and started the U.S. on its long exit from Vietnam.
Iraq: The Politics of Withdrawal
Though the obvious "Wise Men" figures of this moment, like the elder Bush's confidant Brent Scowcroft, remain out in the cold when it comes to the younger Bush's Iraq policies, business leaders are one group that might yet be turned by a cost-benefit analysis of the Iraq War. In their report, Stiglitz and Bilmes consider, among other factors, how the war has hurt the economy by increasing global and domestic insecurity while contributing to a boost in oil prices. Outside of a few energy companies and defense contractors that continue to directly benefit, America's corporations have generally been adversely affected by these costs. A significant number of corporate leaders have begun complaining about a damaged Brand America and a chilled climate for doing business abroad. Certainly, business leaders have reason to doubt that a neoconservative foreign policy works in their favor, and they may yet decide to cut their losses. If some CEOs and other executives reevaluate their allegiance to the White House -- becoming more vocal supporters of realism in Republican foreign policy or even of the Democratic Leadership Council's multilateral brand of corporate globalization -- the turn could make the discussion about the war in upcoming electoral contests significantly more contentious.
As for the public at large, polls on Iraq started showing majority disapproval as early as the summer of 2004. Antiwar opinion now regularly registers as high as 60%. John Mueller, Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University and an expert on wartime public opinion, has argued that eroding support for Iraq matches patterns for wars in Korea and Vietnam. "The most striking thing about the comparison among the three wars is how much more quickly support has eroded in the case of Iraq," he writes in Foreign Affairs. By the start of last year, with just 1,500 American troops dead, public opinion on Iraq had dropped to depths only reached in the Vietnam War after Tet, when some 20,000 Americans had been killed.
Mueller concludes, "If history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline."
That might be cause for celebration, if only it were the end of the story. Mueller's formulation may sound simple, even deterministic, but the reality of withdrawal is not. True, public support for the Vietnam War never rebounded after March 1968. Yet the conflict dragged on for another five years. The ticker for that intervention kept racing higher because President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger were willing to take the tragedy Johnson made and adopt it as their own. A lesson for us now is that no set pattern will guarantee a satisfying end to the situation we face, a situation in which another unpopular war threatens to stretch on for years.
The fact of the matter is that the majority of the country has already decided that the war in Iraq has become too costly. Americans have rejected the prospect of funding a massive and prolonged occupation. In that sense, we have already tipped.
Questions about the price of war keep resurfacing not because there's a credible argument for most Americans that the price is reasonable, but because our elected officials thus far have only pushed those costs ever higher. What remains, then, is for the public to hold accountable those who would carry forward the neoconservative crusade -- to make their stance a costly one in public life. What remains is for us bring the political price of war into line with the human and financial costs that we will continue to bear.
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and a contributor to Newsday, In These Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and TomPaine.com. He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com. Research assistance for this article provided by Kate Griffiths.
Copyright 2005 Mark Engler
This piece appeared first, with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt, at Tomdispatch.com.
