American History

No one likes to have the wool pulled over their eyes. No one likes to go into a situation thinking they are in the right, only to find out that they were in the wrong the entire time.  Yet Americans have been put into that position by their politicians in several wars, only to have the truth exposed to them by the media at a later date. Aside from the current war, one of the most notable examples of this action was the Vietnam War. As far as the American people knew, their soldiers were sent over to protect a country from communism.  The government was telling its people what was going on, we would protect our interests and our allies, then bring our soldiers home. But after the war was over, reveals of the duplicity of the government brought the opposition to Vietnam intervention to a boil.
    At the time of the first significant American intervention, Americans were as afraid of communists as modern day Americans are of terrorists. Communism could bring down the American way of life as surely as the airplanes brought down the Twin Towers. There was already proof of it in the terror brought on by the Red Scare. So Americans were ready to fight, to protect their way of life. Of course, there would be dissenters. And the draft, which forced people to fight whether they believed in the war or not only made the dissenters case a bit stronger. But all in all, the war was just.
    But as the war dragged on, the people wanted their politicians to bring the soldiers home. Hundreds of Americans were dying by the day, and American politicians were promising that they were trying to bring them home. But the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to the media proved very strongly that their claims were untrue. They showed that Lyndon Johnson, a proponent for peace, had been planning to bomb Vietnam even before his election. They showed that the U.S. had expanded its war with carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks which were never reported to the American people.  And the attempted suppression of the papers only proved the claims right in the eyes of the people.
    The Watergate Affair only further eroded the peoples trust in their leaders and with it their support of the war. The people had supported the war because they supported and trusted their leaders. When this support died, so did support for the war.