The Vietnam war is also a good indication of how easy it is to forget the past.
Yeah, sorry about that. I didn’t mean to come across as bigoted, I just misinterpreted your post as somewhat more ad hominem that what it actually was. My bad.
I would say that with Iraq there are a number of issues needed for dissection. Firstly the problems with analysing motivations before the war; I agree that the issue was far less pre-determined than the decision to go to war in Afghanistan, but there was plainly a majority of support for the war. The means by which that war should be fought was, to me, a different question; there was overwhelming support for a war in Iraq, just a differing of opinion on which war should ultimately be fought.
I just found this too. Some of the statistics are very telling. There’s pages and pages of raw data on the war in Iraq. Here, I think, is the most telling poll:
Once the US was engaged in the war, people threw their support behind Bush. There’s a lot of different and conflicting polling data, but the fact that they re-elected him a year later (and yes, that’s putting aside the incompetency of his opposition) shows that they at least didn’t entirely hate him and/or disapprove of what he had done.
However, as the war dragged on and people realised the monumental mistake that the invasion was, people started to move away from supporting bush. There are a lot of polls in the aforementioned article that state that a majority (somewhere in the order of >60%) believe that going into Iraq was a mistake. And that’s not even taking into account the percentage that believe that it could’ve been done better.
Well, you see, Afghanistan is very different. Focus on that war petered off with the troop surge in Iraq, and its only very recently that the US forces in Afghanistan have actually been moving towards a sustainable long-term solution for the country. Reconstructing a country that hasn’t had a stable government in 30 years is no mean feat, and the fact that they didn’t pay much attention to proper strategies (other than the destruction of AQ) until late in the Bush presidency and now in the Obama presidency proper means that a longer commitment is necessary there for the US to actually do what they originally wanted to achieve; stop the breeding ground of Islamic extremism.
Afghanistan is also fundamentally different because the war was fought on self-defence grounds. I don’t think there’s any contention that people wouldn’t support a war that was fought in self-defence, but there’s no way that that’s applicable to the current case. Saying that people will support a war to acquire oil deposits in the Middle East is fundamentally different to saying that people will support a war to destroy people who threaten their existence. I think they’ll be more apprehensive about engaging in wars where the threat isn’t clear (i.e. Iraq), but I doubt they’ll be more cautious about engaging in wars that threaten the country; that goes to the root of one’s sense of community, and nothing is going to change that. But if the Government tries to sell a war on the basis of oil, I seriously doubt that, given the above discussion, the people will support it. And that means no war.
I guess we just fundamentally disagree about the influence (or lack thereof) that public opinion has on US foreign policy. You certainly won’t get any argument from me when you say that foreign policy is a strong driver of public opinion (“once the US was engaged in war, people threw their support behind Bush”), but there’s an abundance of evidence which implies the inverse is not the case.
Revisiting my point about Iraq withdrawal: