The Fifty-Year War (Page 4)

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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