As Iraq effort drags on, doubts mount at home

More simply, "We are not a patient nation when it comes to war," says David Segal, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who specializes in the armed forces and society. In his talks with those close to conduct of the war, he says, he's hearing a lot more references to Vietnam now - from those in Congress of both parties as well as privately from officers at the Pentagon.

The shadow of Vietnam may be seen in recent opinion surveys as well.

Asked in a Washington Post/ABC poll last week whether the US "is making good progress" or "has gotten bogged down" in Iraq, 65 percent chose the latter. Meanwhile, the number describing US casualty levels there as "unacceptable" has risen to 73 percent, the highest point since the US-led invasion of Iraq began.

Interviewed outside a Kroger grocery store in Nashville, Tenn., Billy Vinson, an electrician and Navy veteran, says he supports President Bush and the war effort. Still, he laments the loss of American lives and says, "I wish the war was over."

"I personally probably would have brought our people home by now," he adds.

Not everyone feels that way.

Bratton DuBose, a financial adviser in Bozeman, Mont., says he's supported the war in Iraq all along, and he still does, even though the outcome is unclear. "Now that we're there," he says, "we have to see it through to the end."

Yet increasing numbers of Americans apparently disagree. Recent news out of Iraq, the Pew Research Center reported this week, "is significantly undermining support for the US military operation there."

The evidence? The level of support for an "immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq," according to Pew, has grown from 36 percent last October to 42 percent in February to 46 percent today.

Dr. Segal and other experts cite several reasons for this.

One is that what the White House dubbed "the global war on terrorism," which began with the attacks of September 2001 and has become centered in Iraq, now has lasted longer than the period from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, ending World War II in the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the all-volunteer force, begun in the wake of political opposition to the Vietnam War, means that fewer and fewer Americans have any direct connection to the armed services.

"It's not so much an estrangement as it is a distance between the military and society," says political scientist John Allen Williams of Loyola University Chicago.

In particular, says Dr. Williams, who's also a retired US Naval Reserve captain, "There is less willingness of the elites in society to have their children serve or to regard military service as a worthwhile career for movers and shakers."

As he took his troops back to Iraq last year, Marine Lt. Gen. James Mattis reportedly told them, "Our friendly strategic center of gravity is the will of the American people."

Put another way, "US public opinion is the critical factor in the war, as it is in any guerrilla war," says national security analyst Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.

As Iraqis and Americans seek to prevail in a type of conflict where "victory" is hard to gauge and the time for an occupying force to leave is even harder to decide, that critical factor - for now, at least - seems to have gotten shakier.

• Anne Stein in Chicago, Amy Green in Nashville, Tenn., and Todd Wilkinson in Bozeman, Mont.,contributed to this report.

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