the war dragged on so long, the protests didn’t even start until 3 or so years into the war, then they didn’t go away.
By one reckoning, the war began in 1919 when Ho Chi Minh, working as a cook at the Versailles negotiations, decided that the European governments were hopelessly corrupt and that Viet Nam would never get a fair deal by peaceful means. By another reckoning, it had been going on since the 1930’s or 1940’s with resistance movements against the French and Japanese, respectively. We took over the French role in 1954. The policy-makers decived themselves in thinking they could achieve victory cheaply, or perhaps only with bluff. The institutional problem was that no one wanted to take responsibility for pulling the plug, so they kept putting in insufficient resources until the bluff was called. This happened in 1967, IIRC, with the attack on a barracks in Pleiku. Johnson threw in more chips. Then Tet happened. Johnson asked the Pentagon for an estimate of what it would take to win. They thought 500,000 troops for 5 years would be just dandy. He realized there would never be domestic support for that. Concluding that he’d been fucked, he stepped down.
The major protests came after that. Columbia that spring. The Democratic convention that summer. The preceding protests like the “march on the Pentagon” had been orderly but with a titillating hint of violence for normally sedentary types like the Nobel dudes and the Rev. Coffin.
If the violent protests hadn’t happened, the troop drawdown would have looked more or less the same under either party. Nixon had the political genius to placate the middle class by pretending he was withdrawing only under pressure from the comsymp hippies. I certainly don’t approve of this, but in considering its effectiveness I respectfully call your attention to the results of the 1972 Presidential election.

Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 21 2006 14:42 utc | 101