Iraq headlines conjure the past
News @ Wheaton, September 2005
It's 1968 all over again, says Professor of History Alex Bloom. The anti-war protests sparked by mother-against-the-war Cindy Sheehan have brought American society to a turning point similar to that which occurred in 1968, when the majority of Americans concluded the war in Vietnam was a mistake.
"As in 1968," says Bloom," the majority of Americans no longer support the Iraq war." Indeed, the most recent news opinion polls show the majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake. The most obvious difference between 1968 and 2005, says Bloom, is that popular sentiment against U.S. policy in Iraq has grown far more quickly than did opposition to the Vietnam War.
"People look back on the sixties now and think there was protesting from the very beginning," he notes. "But it took years to build up this type of movement during Vietnam. We seem to be getting to that crossover point˜1968 in America˜a lot sooner."
"There's something about Cindy Sheehan's protest, lining up with a steady decline in public support for the war, that has galvanized Americans," says Bloom, a scholar of 20th-century American intellectual history, with particular focus on American radicalism, the 1960s, and post-1945 social and cultural concerns. He is teaching a course this semester on the social and intellectual history of the U.S. up to the Civil War, and will lead a class on post-World War II American history.
Professor Bloom's current project is the forthcoming book, The End of the Tunnel: The Vietnam Experience and the Shape of American Life, a study of the way in which the Vietnam war has shaped American life—politically, socially, diplomatically, and culturally—since that war ended in 1975. "Vietnam hangs like a shadow over this entire [Iraq] experience, and we are still haunted by that loss."
According to Bloom, the influence of America's struggles in the jungles of Southeast Asia is reflected in the way in which activists articulate their goals now.
"They are clear in stating their support for the troops, not the policy," he notes. "They want to protect the soldiers, give them more armor now and then bring them home," Bloom says, contrasting that with the way U.S. soldiers personified U.S. policy in Vietnam to many protesters. "The present model for anti-war protest was invented in response to the Vietnam era," he says, explaining that it has been modified by technology, generational factors and memories of the Vietnam conflict and its legacy at home and abroad.
The nature of the conflict between U.S. troops and a hard-to-find enemy also mirrors the Vietnam experience, he says. "It's not a conventional war. At any moment, behind any turn, there could be danger," Bloom says.
While Bloom sees many parallels between 1968 and the present—from the uncertain nature of the fighting on the ground to the special power of soldiers' families who are active in the protests—he cautions about following the comparisons too closely. First, today's military is an all-volunteer force; opposition to Vietnam was fueled in part by the draft. More important, the scenarios for ending the nation's military involvement in Iraq are different from Vietnam.
"In Vietnam, the eventual answer was for America to get out and let the so-called popular government take charge of the whole country," Bloom says. "That isn't an option in Iraq because there is no popular government, and there is an obligation that the U.S. has for having mucked it up in the first place."
Professor Bloom's books include Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now (2001, Oxford University Press). He is co-editor of the anthology Takin' It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, the second edition of which was published in 2002 by Oxford University Press. Visit his web page here.