JACKSON - Several recent respected polls show that a majority of Americans now believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and not worth the lives and money it has cost.
It took over a year and a half for people to come around to that opinion. But they have, and parallels to Vietnam are now being raised.
The Vietnam War was a great mistake that cost the lives of 58,000 Americans, at least half of them young men drafted into military service.
Our White House leaders repeated that grave mistake, invading Iraq. So far it has cost the lives of almost 1,000 Americans, some, significantly, women. Tragically hidden from public view is that 5,500 more have lost limbs or otherwise been maimed for the rest of their lives.
This administration invaded Iraq unilaterally and without provocation, totally unprepared for the continuing resistance that has followed the swift military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Now our Americans on the ground in Iraq are paying the price in a Vietnam-style quagmire - with no end in sight - and more troops, many of them National Guardsmen, are being fed into the conflict to replenish returnees.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (the guy who as special envoy in 1983 called Saddam a friend) launched the Iraq venture with what he called "lean and mean" military forces, rejecting advice of senior commanders that troop recruitment had to be immediately stepped up.
Now we're seeing an unprecedented activation of National Guardsmen, even the recall of retired veterans. Now 40 percent of the "boots on the ground" in Iraq are Guardsmen and reservists.
The National Guard is the mainstay of states' home forces to respond not only to terrorism but to local emergencies ranging from forest fires to major natural disasters. As we well remember in Mississippi after Hurricane Camille, the Guard maintained martial law and order and saved many lives on the coast.
Mississippi, where both Army and Air National Guard units have always been an integral part of local community life and infused needed income, is supplying a substantial share of activated Guardsmen. Many fathers, even in their 40s and 50s, have left anxious families waiting at home.
Many state governors meeting last week in Washington voiced objections to decimation of their Guard strengths by federal activation. In Oregon, now entering fire season, half of its Guardsmen have been called up, and 40 percent in adjoining Washington.
The specter of Iraq becoming another Vietnam brings back memories of when my wife and I saw our oldest son go off to Vietnam. Thank God two years later he came back alive (with a Bronze Star) and his limbs intact.
Now my concerns are whether or not the nation's military policies being shaped by Bush's war in Iraq will impact on the lives of another generation of Minors - our five grandsons ranging in age from six to 23.
What especially bothers me is that America is being conditioned by the daily drumbeat of news (and propaganda) about Iraq to create a mentality that the nation is, and will remain, on a wartime footing, something I know about from experience in World War II.
Never before in our history has war been used as it has been by George W. Bush as an instrument of America's foreign policy. What made America the world's pre-eminent nation is not our military might, but that we have been looked to as the shining beacon of hope, and peace, for a troubled world.
Since Bush claims that he is a wartime president, what sacrifice has he asked the American people to make? It's as though the time-honored doctrine "you can't have both guns and butter" has been repealed. Even the butter has been sweetened by big tax cuts, skyrocketing the deficit.
My war was the "good war," thrust upon us by huge military machines built by Germany and Japan. Even before we had been directly attacked at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese forces had ravaged neighboring nations in Asia, and Germany had overrun a half-dozen nations in Europe with an invasion of Britain imminent.
All Americans during WWII, not only those of us who were in military service, were asked to sacrifice in some way. Gasoline was doled out sparingly, and commodities rationed. New automobiles were not to be bought, nor new appliances. People lined up to buy war savings bonds.
Contrast that with today when $6 billion a month is being spent on an increasingly unpopular war, using borrowed money, much of it coming from Social Security and Medicare trust funds.
In neither Vietnam nor now in Iraq was our national security threatened. Each was a war of choice, not necessity. Vietnam spanned four national administrations, fanned in an era of anti-Communism hysteria, supposedly to stop Communist extension in Southeast Asia.
Bush preyed on panic still gripping Americans from the shock of 9/11 after al-Qaida terrorists rammed suicide planes into New York's Twin Towers and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000. He duped the country into invading Iraq with false claims that weapons of mass destruction there threatened us.
His Iraqi WMD claims have several times been discredited since, and now his assertions of al-Qaida-Iraq ties have been dismissed by the bipartisan 9/11 investigating committee.
