Obama's decision to escalate and make the war in Afghanistan his own.
The critiques will come this morning, without mine. Here is something
different, quite meaningful and not generally discussed. It's the 2nd half
of the original article and I urge all to buy the Nation, or access the
rest.
I did just hear Dennis Kucinich on Democracy Now deliver a brilliant,
moving critique which will be encouraging to anti-war efforts, despite
Obama's firm position. Very worth-while listening to.
Ed
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/schell/single
The Fifty-Year War
By Jonathan Schell
The Nation: November 11, 2009
This article appeared in the November 30, 2009 edition of The Nation.
We are accustomed to thinking that hard experience in Vietnam taught certain
lessons that then, for a while, became cautionary principles. But this
record reveals that most of those lessons were known--though not publicly
admitted--before the big Vietnam escalation. The difference is important. If
the disaster was launched in full awareness of the "lessons," then we
shouldn't expect that relearning those lessons will be potent in stopping a
similar disaster now. If they didn't prevent the disaster the first time,
why should they the second or third time? Some other lessons seem to be
needed. Why, we therefore need to ask, did Johnson and his advisers steer
the country into a war that even to them was looking more and more like a
lost cause, or at best a desperate gamble?
In Bird's book and in a more recent one--Lessons in Disaster by Gordon
Goldstein, who helped McGeorge Bundy to prepare a book reconsidering the
war--another factor moves into the foreground. Bundy's death prevented
completion of that book, but Goldstein makes use of Bundy's notes in his own
book. Seeking to understand the origins of the war, Bundy was impressed with
the salience of domestic politics. In 1949 the Communist Party had come to
power in China, and ever since, Republicans and other right-wingers had been
accusing Democrats of "losing" China. The belief that the United States
could have prevented the communist victory was a fantasy; yet the charge
became one of the principal themes of Senator Joe McCarthy's attacks on
Democrats, which sent currents of fear far beyond the government and into
society at large, intimidating and paralyzing a generation. The dread of
being accused of lacking patriotic toughness--and above all of being accused
of losing a military venture--cast a long shadow. Even Kennedy, who
according to Goldstein showed remarkable independence in refusing the nearly
unanimous advice from his advisers to send large numbers of combat troops to
Vietnam, expressed his fear of being called a "communist appeaser." As he
said to his aide Kenny O'Donnell in early 1963, "If I tried to pull out
completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on
our hands, but I can do it after I'm re-elected." That re-election, of
course, never came.
Johnson was more deeply frightened by the right. Urged by Senator Mike
Mansfield to withdraw from Vietnam, he answered that he didn't want another
"China in Vietnam." Bundy fueled Johnson's fears. In a 1964 memo he wrote
that "the political damage to Truman and Acheson from the fall of China
arose because most Americans came to believe that we could and should have
done more than we did to prevent it. This is exactly what would happen now
if we should seem to be the first to quit in Saigon." In another memo, Bundy
outlined a moderated version of the domino theory and went on to argue that
neutrality would be viewed by "all anti-communist Vietnamese" as a
"betrayal," thus angering a domestic constituency powerful enough "to lose
us an election."
Did Bundy and Johnson's other advisers push the country into a disastrous
war in order to win an election--or, to be more exact, to avoid losing one?
Motivations are never easy to sort out. On the one hand, Johnson, Bundy and
the others surely gave sincere credence to the domino/credibility theory,
just as Obama probably believes that the war in Afghanistan is "necessary,"
in his words, "for the defense of our people." (Unfortunately, impossible
missions do not become possible because they have been dubbed necessary; on
the contrary, they become quagmires.) On the other hand, that theory also
meshed with suspicious ease with the perceived domestic political need,
always on the president's mind, to appear tough to the domestic audience--to
do everything he could to avoid appearing "less of a hawk than your more
respectable opponents," in Bundy's retrospective words. After thinking the
matter over for thirty years, Bundy would declare the domestic
considerations uppermost. In his words describing Johnson's frame of mind at
the time, "LBJ is not deeply concerned about who governs Laos, or who
governs South Vietnam--he's deeply concerned with what the average American
voter is going to think about how he did in the ball game of the Cold War.
The great Cold War championship gets played in the largest stadium in the
United States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses,
how does he do in the next election? So don't lose. Now that's too simple,
but it's where he is. He's living with his own political survival every time
he looks at these questions."
Former Defense Secretary McNamara agreed. Johnson, he said in an interview
with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post in 2007, "didn't want to listen" to
McNamara's growing doubts about the war. Why? Domestic politics: he was
"more afraid of the right than the left. And he was afraid that if he did
anything to in any way appear to appease the North Vietnamese, he would be
severely criticized by the right wing of American politics. Therefore he
didn't do it." Johnson later confided the same. To his biographer Doris
Kearns Goodwin he said, "I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost
their effectiveness from the day that the communists took over in China. I
believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe
McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were
chickenshit compared to what might happen if we lost Vietnam." Or, as Bundy
put it to Goldstein in words that could serve as an epitaph for the era,
"For LBJ the domino theory was really a matter of domestic politics."
Are these events too distant from the present to be relevant to Obama's
deliberations regarding Afghanistan? On the contrary, what is uncanny about
the current debate is precisely the degree to which it displays continuity
with the Vietnam debate. The Obama administration knows it. A few months
before he became special envoy, Holbrooke, who was an official in Vietnam in
the mid-'60s, favorably reviewed the Goldstein book in the Times, praising
it for offering "insight into how Bundy, a man of surpassing skill and
reputation, could have advised two presidents so badly." We can imagine that
Holbrooke would not like this to be said of him a few decades from now.
Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal have revealed
that the Goldstein book has become required reading at the White House.
Lessons of Vietnam are flowing through other channels as well. Petraeus's
counterinsurgency manual, with all its talk of winning hearts and minds, is
pure Vietnam. To most Americans, Vietnam taught one big lesson: "Don't do it
again!" To today's military, Vietnam has taught a host of little lessons,
adding up to "Do it better!" The military has in effect militarized the
arguments of the peace movement of the 1960s. Are the hearts and minds of
the local people arrayed against the United States? Then be nice to them.
(In a Washington Post column supporting a troop increase in Afghanistan,
David Ignatius cited the fact that US troops are issued petty cash to buy
Afghans soda and other goodies.) Are civilian casualties discrediting the
American effort? Cut them to a minimum, as General McChrystal is seeking to
do (with mixed success). Is corruption in the client government rampant?
"Pressure" it to be honest.
Along the political track, the lessons of the past have also been
transmitted down to the present. The experience of Senator George McGovern,
the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, was decisive. He proposed to end
the war, which by then was unpopular with the public, yet lost the election
in a landslide. The defeat seemed to confirm the fears that had haunted
Johnson: those who oppose or lose wars lose elections. That lesson instilled
in the Democratic Party a bone-deep fear of "McGovernism," which has
continued to this day.
And so, hanging over the scene, still, are the political pressures that go
back almost fifty years, to Vietnam, or even sixty years, to the myth that
the United States lost China. There is an unmistakable continuity that runs
from McCarthy's attacks on Truman and his administration for "appeasement"
and even "treason" clear down to Dick Cheney's and Karl Rove's and Glenn
Beck's refrains assailing Obama for opposing the Iraq War, not to speak of
Sarah Palin's charge during the election that he had been "palling around
with terrorists." (The Republicans even call Obama a "socialist," as if the
cold war had never ended.) We have no internal records of the
administration's decision-making, nor of course any
thirty-or-forty-years-later rethinking and bean-spilling, so we cannot know
how much domestic factors weigh in the deliberations. It might be hard to
tell even if we did possess these. Yet it is no secret that Obama's support
for the war in Afghanistan served as protection against charges of weakness
over his policy of withdrawing from Iraq. (We might go as far as to say that
in having a second war to support while opposing the war in Iraq, Obama had
a political opportunity never available to Johnson, all of whose eggs were
in the Vietnam basket.) In the words of foreign policy old hand Morton
Abramowitz to Packer, "Obama...to show he was tough, made Afghanistan his
signature issue because he wanted to get out of Iraq."
In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed
down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is
whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged.
Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut
losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge
unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these
questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the
crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like
Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It
would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have
done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is
the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents,
Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions
will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American
history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers
what to do in Afghanistan.
Recently Obama paid a night visit to Dover Air Force Base to view the
homecoming of the remains of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. The event, as
these returns always are, was minutely choreographed, every step and gesture
planned in advance, as if molded and slowed by the pressure of death. Obama
saluted in slow motion, in unison with four uniformed soldiers, then walked
in step with them past the van that had just received the remains from a
cargo plane that had brought them home. No one spoke. On the one hand, it
seemed that Obama might have been absorbed more deeply into the military, to
have been caught in its somber spell. On the other hand, his presence seemed
a silent public vow, as he makes his decisions, to keep his mind fixed on
matters of life and death, not on the next election. His actions in the
weeks and years ahead will tell which it was.
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