Maybe I should stop reading...

I should probably stop reading about the Vietnam War era. It's too depressing to watch history repeat itself.

The current book I'm reading is The Time of Illusion, by Jonathan Schell, about the Nixon era. I remember watching the Watergate hearings at the time, and I vividly remember Nixon's resignation. I was reasonably familiar with the details of the Watergate burglary; what I didn't realize was that was just the tip of the iceberg. Everything the Bush administration knows about secrecy and deception, they learned from the Nixon administration. Nixon was secretly carpet-bombing Cambodia for 13 months before we found out, even setting up a separate chain-of-command to control it so the military wouldn't know what was going on.

Today I'm struck by another similarity between the administrations, as Bush has finally managed to find someone to be "war czar." Lt. General Douglas Lute will be named the assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan policy and implementation, where he will "have the power to direct the Pentagon, State Department and other agencies involved in the two conflicts." He will report to Bush and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. So, he has the power to direct Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates? From a sub-cabinet level position?

Nixon liked to do this sort of thing. He would reorganize to concentrate power in a few people close to him, and freeze out the less-cooperative or trusted cabinet members. From The Time of Illusion:

In January [1973], a "super-Cabinet" was set up, consisting of three Cabinet officers who assumed posts at the White House in addition to carrying out their regular duties, and divided up a large part of domestic policy among them. Above them was a "super-super-Cabinet", consisting of Secretary of the Treasury George Schultz, who was to coordinate economic policy; [National Security Adviser] Henry Kissinger, who was to oversee foreign policy; and [Director of the Office of Management and Budget Roy] Ash. And above them, of course, were Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who watched over everything. In 1971, President Nixon had told a reporter that the Cabinet system, which had served the country for almost 200 years, was "totally obsolete." Now he was abolishing it by executive fiat in favor of something else.

The biggest difference I see between the Bush administration and the Nixon administration is that the center of power in the Nixon administration was very clearly Nixon, who held the strings very tightly and oversaw things down to the smallest detail, while under a less-engaged Bush, two centers of power appear to have developed, one around Vice President Cheney and the other around Karl Rove. They share many goals, but they do have their conflicts, as the Scooter Libby trial threatened to expose. I don't know if that increases or decreases the odds that everything will unravel, though.

Finding a Scapegoat

When the whole Watergate mess was careening out of control, President Nixon tried desperately to find a scapegoat, someone whom he could blame the whole thing on, so that Congress and the media would be satisfied they had found the source and would stop looking. He tried John Dean, John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, but unfortunately, none of them were willing to take the fall alone. So they all came tumbling down, Nixon being the only one to avoid prison thanks to President Ford's pardon.

That same whiff of desperation is starting to emanate from the current administration. Attorney General Gonzalez today is attempting to hang the whole US Attorney scandal on his former deputy, Paul McNulty, who announced his resignation yesterday. Even if McNulty is willing to take the fall alone, which there is no sign he is, DOJ documents already handed over to Congress make it clear that McNulty was on the periphery of this scandal, at most. We're still a long way from impeaching a President, or even getting rid of the Gonzalez, but I don't think this attempt at scapegoating is going to satisfy anyone.

As this continues to unfold, we should get to see exactly where President Bush's loyalties lie, and I'm betting that Karl Rove has a tighter grip on them than Alberto Gonzalez.

We Never Learn...

From the New York Times:

What angers Afghans are not just the bombings, but also the raids of homes, the shootings of civilians in the streets and at checkpoints, and the failure to address those issues over the five years of war. Afghan patience is wearing dangerously thin, officials warn.

Change a name here and there...

and it's impossible to tell then from now. From The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam:

For machismo was no small part of it. He had always been haunted by the idea that he would be judged as being insufficiently manly for the job, that he would lack courage at a crucial moment. More than a little insecure himself, he very much wanted to be seen as a man; it was a conscious thing. He was very much aware of machismo in himself and those around him, and at a moment like this he wanted the respect of men who were tough, real men, and they would turn out to be the hawks. He had always unconsciouly divided the people around him between men and boys. Men were activists, doers, who had conquered business empires, who acted instead of talked, who made it in the world of other men and had the respect of other men. Boys were the tolakers and the writers and the intellectuals, who sat around thinking and criticizing and doubting instead of doing.

p. 531. Lyndon Johnson, or George W. Bush?

We would once again try to do something on the cheap, and yet, even though it was at a bargain-basement price, we would be conveying to Hanoi the intensity of our will and commitment, and they would thus quickly come to their senses. Perhaps the greatest illusion was the idea that we cared more for what was going on than they did, that we would pay a higher price, that they would feel the threshold of pain before we did. It was of course an obvious lie; but the principals had, in their desire not to come to real decisions, painted themselves into a corner where lie followed lie.

p. 578. Hanoi, or Baghdad?

...Johnson was impressed that Westmoreland was straight from West Point (that hope still burned, that myth that the problem with the ARVN was a lack of training; Americans had been training the Vietnamese army for a decade, and still held to the hope that more training was the solution.)

p. 560. Sound eerily like 'We'll stand down as they stand up'?

 So [Clark] Clifford repeated it: if we won, after all that time, with all that investment, "What do we do? Are we still involved? Do we still have to stay there?"

And [Gen. Earle] Wheeler answered yes, we would have to keep a major force there, for perhaps as long as twenty or thirty years. Whereupon the conversation again when in different directions and the question of the figure [of how many soldiers needed] was dropped.

p. 596-597. The "then what" question that was never answered then, and has never been answered now.

In his attempt to keep the planning for the war as closely held as possible, Lyndon Johnson would not give accurate economic projections, would not ask for a necessary tax raise, and would in fact have his own military planners be less than candid with his own economic planners, a lack of candor so convincing that his economic advisers later felt that McNamara had seriously misled them about projections and estimates. The reasons for Johnson's unwillingness to be straightforward about the financing were familiar. He was hoping that the worst would not come true, that it would remain a short war, and he feared that if the true economic cost of the war became visible to the naked eye, he would lose his Great Society programs.

p. 604. Substitute "tax cuts" for "Great Society programs", and this could have been written about Iraq.

Both GWB and LBJ refused to face reality about a military conflict, lied to the American public about the casus belli, surrounded themselves with supporters and shut out dissenters, and accused reporters and anyone else criticizing their policies as unpatriotic and harming the troops. Maybe the lesson we should learn from Vietnam is don't elect Texans to the White House! (Even faux Texans like GWB.)

Not yet history, no longer current event

When David Halberstam died in a car wreck recently, I was reminded that I hadn't yet read his most famous work, The Best and the Brightest, so I ordered it. While waiting for it to arrive, I picked up Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for several years. Reading these two books has shown me how little I really knew about Vietnam.

My real political awareness only goes back to 1973 or so. I graduated from high school 5 years after the fall of Saigon, and though I had a very good AP American History class in high school, Vietnam was in the gap between current event and history. I don't remember much about Vietnam as it happened, and I never studied in a history class in either high school or college.

So I'm correcting that now, but it's a depressing process. The story of how we came to be involved in Vietnam is all too similar to our current situation in Iraq; we seemed to have not learned much from our experience in Vietnam. What are those similarities, and what should we have learned? From my reading, I gleaned the following:

We assumed that there was a larger, unified conspiracy threatening our very existence and way of life. In Vietnam, it was Communism. It was inconceivable to us that Ho Chi Minh could be both a Communist and a nationalist; he had to have been nothing more than a puppet of the Soviet regime. We assumed that we were fighting the Viet Cong as a proxy for the Soviets, rather than understanding that they really did have the support of the population, that they were fighting a war of revolution and independence, and we were just taking the place of the French as a colonial power.

In Iraq, that larger force we're presumed to be fighting is Islamic jihadism. We don't even have the excuse of a Soviet equivalent, a nuclear power believed to be driving the larger conspiracy, but we still assumed that there's a larger force that we must defeat in Iraq or face dire consequences.

We couldn't tell the difference between friend and foe. In Vietnam, we could tell who was Viet Cong and who wasn't. In Iraq, we can't tell who's Sunni and who's Shi'a, or what difference that makes. If you don't know who you're shooting, maybe you shouldn't be shooting.

We thought we could impose a stable government from the outside. We've tried this over and over again. We bring in some exile who's been telling us what we want to hear, but has no base of support in the population, and then are surprised when the government turns out to be about as stable as a house of cards on top of a moving car. At least we didn't waste as much time propping up Chalabi as we did Diem in Vietnam, but we're missing the same critical factor that we missed in Vietnam. The only place the country of South Vietnam existed was in our heads; the people actually living there didn't have a nationalist concept of South Vietnam. Similarly, the various tribes and factions in Iraq don't share a nationalist vision of a unified Iraq. Iraq was not a nation; it was arbitrary boundaries imposed by Western powers decades ago held together by a strongman. Take away the strongman, and there's no center to hold.

The more people you kill, the more insurgents you create. This one seems obvious, but we keep acting as if it's not true, that it's possible for us to eliminate the insurgents. Violence breeds more violence; escalation leads to more escalation.

It is possible to get Congress to pass a vague and broad resolution authorizing military action based on lies; it's just not a good idea.  From Tonkin Gulf to weapons of mass destruction, lying to Congress may get you around the War Powers Act in the short term and give you the illusion that you have some control over what's going on, but reality always wins in the end. Once you start using force, you can't control the outcome.

The really depressing thing about all this is that it's impossible to point to a particular side and say, that's the problem, we just need to keep them out of power. It's not about Republicans or Democrats, or even conservatives and liberals. Kennedy, he of Camelot, increased our involvement in Vietnam, and Johnson dramatically escalated it. It's not even about intelligence or stupidity. Maybe Rumsfield really is as stupid as he sounded, but Robert McNamara was not stupid, and the end result was not any different: a quagmire.

Until we learn that we really can't just impose our will on the world, and remake it in whatever image strikes our fancy, we will likely repeat this fiasco again some time in the future. The ideas of manifest destiny and "speak softly and carry a big stick" are still deeply imbedded in our culture, and it's political suicide to appear "soft" or "weak."

We did eventually leave Vietnam, but without 58000 soldiers who died there, and with millions of Vietnamese dead. We were defeated there, Vietnam became Communist, and more people died in the chaos we left behind. But the dominos didn't fall, we didn't become Communists, and we were a little slower to invade other countries for a while. It's probably not a coincidence that most of the decision makers in this administration didn't serve in Vietnam; had they done so, maybe some of them might have learned some of these lessons.