1,000 Deaths and Counting: Will Americans Turn Against the War?

In the fall of 1965, the death toll for American troops in Vietnam quietly passed 1,000. The escalation in the number of American forces was just underway, the antiwar movement was still in its infancy and the word "quagmire" was not yet in common usage.

At the time, the Gallup Poll found that just one in four Americans thought sending troops to southeast Asia had been a mistake. It would be three years before public opinion turned decisively, and permanently, against the war.

Four decades later, the passing of the 1,000-death benchmark in another war against insurgents has been accompanied by considerably more public unease. Polls registered a steady increase in the number of Americans who believe the war in Iraq was not worth it, peaking at over 50 percent in June. Americans, it seems, are more skeptical about this conflict than about Vietnam at roughly the same moment, as measured in body counts.

How many casualties will Americans tolerate? Will continual insurgencies, like the uprisings in Falluja and Najaf, break down Americans' already tepid support for the war?

For a variety of reasons, military experts and historians say that for now, support is likely to remain steady. The stark experience of Sept. 11 and the belief among many Americans that the fighting in Iraq is part of a global conflict against terrorism have made this war seem much more crucial to the nation's security than Vietnam, they say.

"The Vietcong didn't so much as toss a firecracker into the United States," said Maurice Isserman, a history professor at Hamilton College and co-author of "America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960's."

"There was fear of nuclear war and Communist subversion and espionage," he said. "But the reality is, no American died in the continental United States during the cold war. There was nothing comparable in the 1960's to that image of the twin towers falling."

Moreover, American patience with the war in Iraq is likely to endure significantly longer because there is no draft, historians say. As long as the military remains an all-volunteer force, they say, war and death could remain distant abstractions for most Americans.

"When people don't face the decision of having to fight, it's pretty hard to get mass support for an argument that we should get on boats and leave tomorrow," said Melvin Small, a history professor at Wayne State University and author of "Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds."

There are also broad differences in the scope of the two wars that could affect the tide of public opinion.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson began a huge escalation of the Vietnam War that eventually brought American troop levels to over half a million. By 1968, the weekly death toll was over 500.

No such escalation is envisioned in Iraq, where the deadliest month was last April, when 134 troops were killed. And though the 1,000-dead milestone was reached faster in Iraq, it seems unlikely the toll will keep pace with Vietnam, where it exploded after 1965, reaching over 58,000 by the war's end.

But if Americans are likely to remain supportive of war for the near future, how long will their patience last? The same military experts and historians say the tipping point in Iraq could come well before it did in Vietnam, in part because of the memory of Vietnam itself.

"The crucial point comes when the country feels it is not going to achieve its goals," said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. "People say it took years to build opposition to Vietnam. But the difference is that the war in Iraq stands in the shadow of Vietnam, and people remember Vietnam. And so there already begins to be widespread feeling that this is a quagmire."...