Maura R. O'Connor

Bio & resources

Pundits have been talking about the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq for a while, but now an Opinion Research poll released by CNN in November 2006 reports that the majority of Americans, fifty-eight percent, believe these two wars are starting to resemble each other. It isn’t difficult to recognize the similarities. George W. Bush’s leadership does nothing if not evoke the prideful bungling of Lyndon B. Johnson, while Donald Rumsfeld seemed to be doing his best Robert McNamara impression until his resignation last year. There’s the ineptness of the administration’s understanding of the social, political, and historical dynamics at work in the country we’re fighting in. And there are even the dubious justifications for both wars: In 1964, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident and misplaced fears about communism overtaking the Eastern Hemisphere; in 2003, it was the threat of weapons of mass destruction and then the goal of defeating Al-Qaeda, which we’re terrifyingly short of achieving four years in.

In addition, the nature of both wars—guerrilla combat that pits American soldiers against an enemy often hidden amid civilians—is similar. There are the tragically high body counts, some estimates of which put the death toll of Iraqi citizens at a shocking 670,000—a rate that seems sure to guarantee more than three million civilian deaths, as there were in Vietnam, if this war is to last as long as that one did. An interesting investigation by Phillip Carter and Owen West for Slate magazine claims that casualty statistics, which take into consideration medical improvements over the past thirty years, show that combat in Iraq is equally as devastating for American troops as Vietnam was, if not more so. “To send infantrymen,” Carter and West write, “on their third rotations to Iraq is akin to assigning a trooper to three tours in Vietnam: harsh in 1966 and a total absurdity by 1968.”But if Iraq really is like Vietnam, how come there aren’t hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets, most of them young people? Where’s the political outrage? Except for Cindy Sheehan and an impressive spate of demonstrations leading up to the invasion of Baghdad, there have been hardly any significant marches against the war and almost nothing on the scale of those held during the Vietnam War. We are now three years into the war in Iraq. If this were 1967 (roughly three years into Vietnam), four hundred thousand young people would be marching on the United Nations building in New York City. Or consider that, in 1969, just a few months after Seymour Hersh exposed the Mai Lai massacre of unarmed civilians, four students were killed and nine others were wounded by National Guard bullets while protesting at Kent State University. The next week, one hundred thousand undeterred students marched again. In contrast, when the Haditha massacre was exposed in 2005, in which it was discovered that unarmed men, women, and children as young as two years old had been brutally shot in their homes by American marines, there were hardly any protests to speak of.

Despite the remarkable similarities between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, what I find most interesting is the generational differences these wars are revealing between today’s young people and those of yesteryear. I believe there are two perspectives on this issue—one doom-and-gloom and the other infinitely more optimistic.

The doom-and-gloom one goes like this. Young people today represent the degradation and eclipse of American greatness, as demonstrated by our overwhelming cynicism, apathy, and self-centeredness. Whereas our parents fought for what they believed in and took a stand against inhumanity, we’re happier to satiate ourselves with the internet and to consistently demonstrate an all-around moral deficiency. On top of it all, some posit that my generation is just plain stupider than those that preceded us—a CNN poll of 500 eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds showed that eighty-seven percent of us can’t find Iraq on a map.

The second perspective, the much more interesting one in my opinion, is that we are witnessing a sea change in the political proclivities of young people. The reason we haven’t taken a position on the war is that there isn’t a place on the political scale for us. We’re not warmongering hawks, but neither are we antiwar or antimilitary. We hesitate to adopt the dovish views that many of our parents assumed in the sixties, and we don’t want to apologize for American power in the way many liberals seem to do. Of course, neither do we want such power in the hands of an unbending, anti-intellectual conservative party. (Though undoubtedly, the number of young conservatives is rising steadily. See the November 2006 article in Harper’s, “The Kids Are Far Right.”)

This tricky political split many young people find themselves embodying—repelled by both left and right—was echoed for me while reading The Audacity of Hope, Democratic Senator Barack Obama’s 2006 book, in which Obama discusses his “curious relationship” to the 1960s and acknowledges that “as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 . . . I understood his appeal.” Obama, though at the age of forty-five not a Gen-Y’er by any means, could very well become a leader for today’s younger generation if he can continue to speak to this political quandary in their hearts and minds. And if he can forge a new political identity for them, he could very well become president. Gen-Y’ers number seventy million, and by 2008, the majority of them will be of voting age.

Whereas Vietnam provided a platform for the radical idealism of many baby boomers, I think the Iraq War is revealing young people’s intense desire for pragmatism and their distaste for what Obama calls “the lack of honesty, rigor, and common sense” on both sides of the aisle. There’s a general sense of exasperation that these things haven’t been manifested yet—as if each time we tune in to the news, the adults still haven’t figured it out. It’s the same fundamental exasperation that fuels every Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert episode and the reason why political activism for many young people only goes so far as turning on the TV every night to watch these shows.

But exasperation isn’t an authentic political position. Neither is being both anticonservative and antiliberal. We need to know what exactly we stand for, because sooner than most of us want to think, we’re going to be the adults doing the leading. If we want to prevent a Vietnam or Iraq from occurring on our watch and, even more important, positively impact global affairs, we need to begin developing an unprecedented level of political sophistication now. We can’t, as the young pop star John Mayer sings, just “keep on waiting / waiting for the world to change” and still proclaim, as he does, that “it’s not that we don’t care.” It won’t look like it did in the sixties, but my sense is that a real political change is possible. Getting familiar with an atlas would be a great place to start.

Maura R. O’Connor has been an associate editor at What Is Enlightenment? magazine for three years. She currently lives in New York City and Monterey, Massachusetts.