WASHINGTON — The disarray and despondence among Democrats this week demonstrates once again the damage that Vietnam did to the generation now leading that party. Those who went to war in Southeast Asia when they were young and those who protested it in the streets and on the campuses both carry the scars of the experience into the current debate on the showdown with Saddam Hussein.
While some significant Republicans — such as Sens. Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel — have offered modulated and intelligent criticisms of President Bush’s approach, most in the GOP have fallen quickly into line behind Bush’s determination to force the issue with Iraq, even if it means war.
By contrast, the Democrats’ most prominent leaders and spokesmen have taken wildly opposing positions, leaving the public with no clear idea where the opposition party stands.
The last presidential nominee and titular party leader, Al Gore, has argued that Bush is being hasty and is risking the larger war on terrorism by leaving most of our allies skeptical or opposed to his Iraq policy. But his former running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, is foursquare behind the president and the ultimatums to Saddam.
While others in the prospective 2004 Democratic presidential field, including Sen. John Kerry and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, challenge the assumptions behind Bush’s policy, another of the likely contenders, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, is collaborating with the president in framing and passing a congressional resolution that will let Bush begin a pre-emptive assault on Iraq when he thinks it necessary. Left-wing House Democrats are furious with Gephardt — including many of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose constituents must be lured to the polls next month if the party is to have any chance of winning the House and holding its one-vote Senate margin.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle finds himself middled between powerful elders such as Sens. Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy, who say Bush has failed to make the case for war, and a squad of embattled incumbents, who do not want to impair their re-election prospects by challenging the president on his strength as commander in chief. Senators such as Max Cleland in Georgia and Tim Johnson in South Dakota and challengers such as Erskine Bowles in North Carolina and Alex Sanders in South Carolina want no daylight between themselves and Bush on the Iraq issue.
All this would make the situation difficult enough for the Democrats, heading into a midterm election. But it is the echoes of Vietnam that inflame passions and raise political risks. You could hear them in the mutterings among other Democrats about Reps. David Bonior and Jim McDermott, who turned up in Baghdad and sounded as if they were saying that Saddam Hussein’s history of recalcitrance should be overlooked in weighing the credibility of his current promises to cooperate with weapons inspectors. It was all too reminiscent of Jane Fonda in Hanoi or antiwar protesters marching under Viet Cong flags.
And you could hear the echoes of Vietnam also in Daschle’s extraordinarily emotional speech condemning President Bush’s comment that the Senate is "not interested in the security of the American people." The off-the-cuff remark, made in reference to the dispute over the Department of Homeland Security, not Iraq, was one that never should have passed Bush’s lips; it was an offensive exaggeration and an imprudent venting of presidential frustration. But you cannot avoid thinking that the fury of Daschle’s response had much to do with memories of the way Presidents Johnson and Nixon questioned the patriotism of Daschle’s contemporaries who opposed the war in Vietnam.
The people now governing the country — men and women from their late 40s to their early 60s — have not yet come to terms with the issues that divided them when they were coming of age politically a quarter-century ago. Vietnam was not the only such issue — civil rights, women’s rights, abortion rights also split the country — but it was the most contentious.
Both sides still maintain they were right. The protesters still believe the war was unnecessary, unwinnable and even immoral. The supporters still argue that it could have been won, and should have been, were it not for the dissent at home.
The scars of that unresolved argument make it even harder to judge today’s security policy questions — as this Iraq debate is demonstrating.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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