The World in Words
Obama’s Vietnam Syndrome
Jonathan Schell
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NEW HAVEN – There can be no military resolution to the war in Afghanistan, only a political one. Writing that sentence almost makes me faint with boredom. As US President Barack Obama ponders what to do about the war, who wants to repeat a point that’s been made thousands of times? Is there anyone on earth who does not know that a guerilla war cannot be won without winning the “hearts and minds” of the people? The American public has known this since its defeat in Vietnam.
Americans are accustomed to thinking that their country’s bitter experience in Vietnam taught certain lessons that became cautionary principles. But historical documents recently made available reveal something much stranger. Most of those lessons were in fact known – though not publicly admitted – before the US escalated the war in Vietnam.
That difference is important. If the Vietnam disaster was launched in full awareness of the “lessons,” why should those lessons be any more effective this time? It would seem that some other lessons are needed.
Why did President Lyndon Johnson’s administration steer the US into a war that looked like a lost cause even to its own officials? One possible explanation is that Johnson was thoroughly frightened by America’s right wing. Urged by Senator Mike Mansfield to withdraw from Vietnam, he replied that he did not want another “China in Vietnam.”
His national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, fueled Johnson’s fears. In a memo of 1964, 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 be seen to be the first to quit in Saigon.” In another memo, Bundy argued that neutrality would be viewed by “all anti-communist Vietnamese” as a “betrayal,” thus angering a US domestic constituency powerful enough “to lose us an election.”
Did Johnson’s advisers push the country into a disastrous war in order to win an election – or, to be more exact, to avoid losing one? Johnson, Bundy, and the others of course believed the “domino” theory, which says that one country “falling” to communism would cause others to fall. But that theory meshed with suspicious ease with the perceived domestic political need for the president to appear “tough” – to avoid appearing “less of a hawk than your more respectable opponents,” as Bundy later put it.
What is uncanny about the current debate about Afghanistan is the degree to which it displays continuity with the Vietnam debates, and the Obama administration knows it.
To most Americans, Vietnam taught one big lesson: “Don’t do it again!” But, to the US military, Vietnam taught a host of little lessons, adding up to “Do it better!”
Indeed, the military has in effect militarized the arguments of the peace movement of the 1960’s. If hearts and minds are the key, be nice to local people. If civilian casualties are a problem, cut them to a minimum. If corruption is losing the client government support, “pressure” it to be honest, as Obama did in recent comments following President Hamid Karzai’s fraud-ridden re-election.
The domestic political lessons of Vietnam have also been transmitted down to the present. George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, proposed to end the war, which by then was unpopular, yet lost the election in a landslide. That electoral loss seemed to confirm Johnson’s earlier fears: those who pull out of wars lose elections. That lesson instilled in the Democratic Party a bone-deep fear of “McGovernism” that continues to this day.
There is unmistakable continuity between Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on President Harry Truman’s administration for “losing” China, and for supposed “appeasement” and even “treason” and Dick Cheney’s and Karl Rove’s refrains assailing Obama for opposing the Iraq war, not to mention Sarah Palin’s charge during the election campaign that Obama had been “palling around with terrorists.”
It is no secret that Obama’s support for the war in Afghanistan, which he has called “necessary for the defense of our people,” served as protection against charges of weakness over his policy of withdrawing from Iraq. So the politics of the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue is whether the US is able to fail in a war without becoming 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 over every cliff that it approaches?
At the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right over national security? What is the source of this right-wing veto over presidents, congressmen, and public opinion? Whoever 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 over Afghanistan.
Recently, Obama paid a nighttime visit to Dover Air Force base to view the return of the remains of 16 soldiers killed in Afghanistan. The event was minutely choreographed. 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 the cargo plane that had brought them home.
No one spoke. Had Obama become caught in the military’s somber spell? Or was his presence a silent public vow, as he makes his decisions, to keep his mind fixed on matters of life and death, rather than on the next election?
Obama’s actions in Afghanistan will provide the answer.
Jonathan Schell is a Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale University. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org
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dbaldwin 08:30 20 Nov 09
“[M]ust liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right over national security? What is the source of this right-wing veto over presidents, congressmen, and public opinion?”
In tracing the matter back to McCarthy and the “loss” of China,, Schell omits the Korean War. The Korean War began with a conventional warfare invasion of the south by the north. Truman had his own strong anti-communist policy and didn’t need McCarthy to push him into that war, and Pres. Eisenhower ended it and was re-elected. The real puzzle, then, stands more at the entry than at the exit, with Johnson and George W. Bush and their reasons for taking us into those very different wars that we knew we could not win.
The explanation rests with the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.
That revolution destroyed the status of America’s white males as white males, and in doing so it undermined the legitimacy of the white male power that had run the country. Johnson was especially aware of the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on his domestic political position. In spite of his land-slide victory over Goldwater, he was running scared because of it, and strong military action was an effective psychological counter-balance.
Beginning with Nixon’s pandering to racial and gender fears in the election of 1968, the source of political legitimacy has been the central issue in American politics. Both Nixon and Agnew resigned. Reagan reaffirmed white male status by exploiting the sentimental power of Western imagery, but then he experimented with shifting the entitlement to power that white men had lost to wealth. Until 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pressures of the cold war kept the lid on. Thereafter our domestic tensions intensified, with the myriad Republican efforts to de-legitimize the Clinton presidency and the fraudulent election of George Bush in 2000.
George W. Bush had the weakest claim to political legitimacy of any American President, and he got us into Afghanistan and Iraq for the same reason Johnson got us into Vietnam: weakness arising from a perceived lack of legitimate sovereign power.
Once in, getting out involves a very different calculus.
IvotedforKodos 10:34 19 Nov 09
"What is the source of this right-wing veto over presidents, congressmen, and public opinion?"
There's actually a fairly compelling psychological answer to this question. The short version is that what the psychologists call mortality salience (the suggestion of death, either as explicit as 9/11 or as implicit as walking by a mortuary) has been shown to increase authoritarian attitudes -- the very same attitudes that form the philosophical bedrock of right-wing extremism. So military engagement increases mortality salience increases authoritarian attitudes increases de facto credibility of the hawkish right.
That doesn't mean everyone loses their head and supports authoritarianism every time something bad happens, but I do believe it explains the otherwise mysterious way people magically cede the rhetorical high ground to the extreme right-wing over military matters.