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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, March 22, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, March 22, 2010 |
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Presidents Are Only As Good As Those To Whom He Listens
I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling rejected by the American people. I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about the war.
Lyndon B. Johnson
36th President Of
The United States Of America
Our nation, and our president, find themselves at yet another crossroad far from our shores. At issue is a war of clear origins whose mission creep and foggy purpose occupy an increasingly embarrassing void between American ambitions and Afghani realities. Previous administrations brought us to this place by over-weighting what America must do while under-weighting what America can do.
The last time this happened, the administration of origin was that of John F. Kennedy and the ensuing administration, also young and untried, was that of Lyndon Baines Johnson. No matter that the Johnson administration was borne on the hope of a Great Society and aspired to be decisive in civil rights, it became bogged down in a war that destroyed his presidency.
Today’s new president, steeped deeply in the ideas and courage of Abraham Lincoln, need look no further that Lyndon Johnson to learn how easy it is to identify America’s perceived needs and how difficult it is to know its very real limits.
Thus today’s polity finds itself face to face with unwanted and intractable problems whose solutions are beyond our understanding and whose achievement lay far beyond military power. As a result, no matter the Obama administration’s good intentions and massive effort, whatever the president’s decision on Afghanistan mission and troop commitments, that decision will eventually come face to face with reality. For having power, and knowing how to manage it wisely, are as different as distinguishing what must be done from what can be done. Lyndon Johnson found the presidency and his nation powerless in his war to win hearts and minds of people he did not know who lived in a land he had not trod and whose culture was beyond his ability to imagine. What he learned was prophetic, for on this issue he later spoke,
The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.
Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck’s decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor . . . is squandered.
Only one recent president, George Herbert Walker Bush, (41) chose to abandon the desirable in order to achieve the possible. When the opportunity to overthrow Saddam Hussein appeared within easy reach, George Bush (41) did what Lyndon Johnson had failed to do. The Gulf War mission was not expanded. Troops were not dispatched to Baghdad.
The president and his military commanders were criticized for their decision to leave Saddam Hussein to his own fate. President Bush was resolute in his decision to limit military intervention to what was realistically certain. The voices of must were not satisfied — nor will they ever be — but his decision to accept what was possible saved thousands of lives.
In the last six decades American administrations have arrived at similar crossroads: Truman in Korea. John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam. Once Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur he had to agree to a stalemate that has left Korea divided and 50,000 troops along the 49th parallel.
Only twenty years later Lyndon Johnson was destroyed by his belief that American military might could turn Vietnam into a friendly democracy. On this, Lyndon Johnson argued against dissenters,
Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.
But the ensuing escalation was mindless, driven entirely by an American need to do what was needed absent questioning whether such a goal was attainable. Johnson’s inability to turn Robert McNamara’s must into a Vietnamese reality eventually broke his spirit. Failure drove Lyndon Johnson to quit the presidency, badly tarnished his administration, and revealed the immense power wielded by a profit-driven military-industrial complex.
Our polity drives unrealistic demands in all areas of modern American life. Some are so glaringly obvious they take on the character of an elephant in the room about which no one dare speak. We cannot defeat the drug cartels because we choose to confuse what we’d like American society to be like with what it really is. Nor can we defeat the over-reaching of banks who abdicated their responsibility to their countrymen while recklessly speculating on trading markets and derivatives. Nor will our military might transform a nation of war lords and poppy growers into a Jeffersonian democracy.
What Lyndon Johnson said, and what he eventually agreed to do, were sometimes very different. When it came to spending the lives of young Americans, he proudly told his countrymen,
We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
Presidents, we have come to know, are only as good as those to whom they listen. What’s to be learned from Lyndon Johnson’s successes and failures today are valuable and expository of the pitfalls and opportunities which ride on the White House decision on Afghanistan troop deployments.
It is on this point that Americans best ask their president, “Who speaks for Lyndon Johnson in today’s White House?” Clearly, in all his study and contemplation, our president must seek out and listen to what Lyndon Johnson said — for Johnson’s is the only voice of experience — for he too faced similar issues only to make the wrong choices. Aids, policy wonks and study groups have opinions, but Lyndon Johnson underscored what was his most difficult task:
“A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.”
If Lyndon Johnson’s voice goes unheard, then the pain he suffered, and the defeat he and his nation endured, will have gone in vain.
What Importance Have Taliban To American Interests
Earlier this year, president Barack Obama described the eight year war in Afghanistan “a war of necessity.” History will decide whether his judgment is right or wrong, but whether or not it is necessary is only relevant as long as the power exists to successfully wage such a war. What we have learned from our experiences in Afghanistan is the classic outcome of a policy that equates need to can.
Clearly the spread of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists is a clear and present danger to the United States. Whether caused by our own actions, or by Islamic zeal, terrorism must be confronted and exterminated — if such should be possible. But the Taliban are at best only a symptom, for it is Al Qaeda that threatens western democracies and our middle eastern friends and allies.
A war of necessity would seem to suggest that the overthrow of Taliban in Afghanistan is fundamental to protecting this nation and its peoples. The unsophisticated foundations of Afghan society, Taliban support within that society, and what has become a corrupt and failing puppet government headed by Hamid Karzai, all point to eventual failure that adds little or nothing to the protection of the American nation and its people.
We found the words of George Kennan, former diplomat and scholar, quoted by George Will, to be insightful and on point. It was 1966 when Mr. Kennan implored the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country. … This is not only not our business, but I don’t think we can do it successfully.”
Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is a quagmire whose principal value is to a military-industrial complex that depends upon foreign involvement for its continued profitability. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned his countrymen of this risk before leaving office in 1960. Failure to deal with these forces seriously damaged the Kennedy presidency and doomed that of Lyndon Johnson.
The president’s serious-minded internal analysis of its Afghanistan policy is folly — in the sense that there is no right answer — only a multitude of wrong answers. Adding more troops will not change the nature of Afghan society or those forces that seek to subjugate its citizens. Maintaining the present troop level is an equally bad choice for it trades American lives for the illusion of Taliban interdiction. Abandoning the Afghan war and calling home our troops is no less bad an outcome.
The problem for the Obama administration is having to choose from a list of options all of which are bad. For no matter what we need to accomplish in Afghanistan is not in our power to achieve.
Mr. Obama’s folly is not of his making. The bad choices were made earlier, by others, but just as fate befell Lyndon Johnson, Mr. Obama must now deal with unwanted complications and political pressures that complicate his presidency and endanger his success in other areas both foreign and domestic.
The lesson taught by the failed Johnson administration, fighting a must-driven war in Vietnam that was never winnable, while facing a separate war at home waged by Americans unwilling to pay the price, is that whatever choice is made by Mr. Obama, it will define, and possibly destroy his presidency.
Best we remember Lyndon Johnson’s painful admission of defeat and withdrawal — delivered to a distrusting nation — on March 31st, 1968:
What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.
