HELLO 9-11 SYNDROME:

Goodbye to the Vietnam Syndrome (Rick Perlstein, 10/15/02, NY Times)

I wonder whether it will ever again be possible for a president to rouse the nation to support any war unless the threat is far more than an abstraction. I wonder whether a president will be able to sell military action without the kind of reasoned political debate we would ideally demand of any political issue.

And that, it seems to me, is what we lately have been getting.

It has happened with startling rapidity. Last winter, when Tom Daschle ventured some mild criticisms of President Bush's foreign policy, his patriotism was impugned.

By this summer, John Kerry suffered no such baiting, and his criticisms were much stronger. A few weeks later came measured demurrals from Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, and warnings to Democrats from their political consultants of bad consequences for a headlong embrace of intervention. At the end of August the administration acknowledged the political necessity of a congressional resolution (they still deny its legal necessity); and after that plans began in earnest to court United Nations support.

Since then varieties of antiwar expression, even in mainstream political quarters, have become profligate: from the unsentimental strategic calculations of realists like the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer to the strict-constructionist Constitutional arguments of Senator Robert Byrd. Questions of war and peace are being debated as they should have been debated all along, and as they haven't been debated since Lyndon Johnson escalated Vietnam with doctored reports of a 1964 attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. And there's no reason to expect the debate will end just because of Congress's deferential vote last week.

Which does no good for George W. Bush. So long as he could frame the issue as anything but political--in Manichean terms more appropriate to the war on terror than our present Iraq predicament--the president had the upper hand. Now when he tries that language he appears to be reading from an outdated script. For sending troops into battle is no longer a function of the post-Vietnam culture wars. Now it seems you have to make your case, all along the line. Mirabile dictu. Long may this last.

We're big fans of Mr. Perlstein's fine book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. But this column seems kind of silly. If the Democrats can be said to have shed Vietnam Syndrome, they've surely developed 9-11 Syndrome. The President didn't so much have to make the case that Iraq is a threat, which it isn't, as make Iraq the focal point of public attention. Democrat fear of a revenge-minded electorate took care of the rest. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 15, 2002 7:48 AM