cnredd said:
If certain people get what they want...it WILL be another Vietnam...
From an earlier post of mine...
Was that you?
I could have sworn it was
Adam Garfinkle
From Mythed Opportunities: The Truth About Vietnam Anti-War Protests
Foreign Policy Research Institute Volume 1, Number 8
June 2000
The protesters’ myth is really more interesting. With every passing year one gets the impression that virtually all Sixties types were at antiwar protests. (They were all at Woodstock, too.) It has become unassailable gospel that the protests were noble and effective. They may have been nobly intended, but there is nothing but aging egos and pure wind to sustain the notion that they were effective in stopping or shortening the war. There is evidence, however, that the protests lengthened the war and that more people were killed on account of them.
How so? Political scientists talk about the phenomenon of a “negative follower group,” which is defined basically as any group that ticks others off to the point that they become the friend of that group’s enemy. All the data we have from the time, and since, show that the obscenity, illegality, and raging anti-patriotism of the antiwar protesters made them the most hated group in America during the late 1960s and early 1970s. When police beat up protesters in the park across from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, most people who were watching on television sympathized with the police.
The backlash had significant repercussions on the national political scene. Without the antiwar protests, which were associated in the minds of the “silent majority” with a militarized black power movement that had somehow metastasized from the civil rights movement, George Wallace could never have become a national political figure, if only for a while. Nor would Richard Nixon have won the White House in 1968. Furthermore, the antiwar movement undermined the Democratic Party and hurt Hubert Humphrey’s bid for the presidency in a very tight election.) The political reaction to the radical antiwar protests aided both the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ efforts to manage growing public disquiet over the war. More Americans would have opposed the war sooner had they not been put off by radical protest tactics.
I don't know what exactly
you meant when
you wrote the same words, but Mr. Garfinkle was referring to a phenomenom that has not been widely repeated in this war. He's talking about the massive, chaotic and often violent "street activism" that has not been as prominent these days as it was in the sixties. There's been more than one commentator who has noted that this relative lack of the "foul mouthed, dirty hippie" influence in today's anti-war movement has prob'ly allowed the movement to become more popular, more quickly than it otherwise would have.
Mr. Garfinkle, takes the trouble to make some distinctions.
The Spirit of the New Antiwar Movement
Above all, antiwar street activism needs to be distinguished from antiwar sentiment...
The vast majority of people out in the street protesting, however, do not see the Iraq question as a “near” thing, and they are not humble. They are stridently certain not only that going to war is unwise, but that it is also morally wrong and even criminal. They have not done the careful analytical thinking that has led people like Brent Scowcroft, Morton Halperin and Gary Hart to disagree with the present policy— people who clearly cannot be accused of rank ignorance about the issues or of a lack of patriotism and courage.
So, from this we can see that it's not at all clear that Mr. Garfinkle's comments were intended to apply to much more than sixties-style, street protests. Though it remains unclear if you meant the same thing when you said the exact same words.
