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Tuesday, October 2. 2007
What is Enough?
Almost as if it were yesterday, I remember the fight over the Vietnam War. First it was the young people, those who were of draft age, and then slowly the rest of the country began to fall in line and finally a few congressmen and senators as well. Shirley Chisholm, newly elected in 1968 to the House of Representatives from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, was against the war from the moment she stepped into the political arena, but she was considered an outsider and agitator, not to be taken seriously by the political elite, which, at the time, was her own party — the Democrats.
In that same year, the Democratic primary went to Hubert H. Humphrey, the Vice President to Lyndon Johnson and one-time senator from Minnesota. Humphrey by default. Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California primary in June of that year; Kennedy being one of two Democrats looking to end the war in Vietnam. The other was Eugene McCarthy, a favorite of the anti-establishment, anti-war hippie generation, a fact that pretty much sunk his hopes for winning his party’s nomination.Humphrey campaigned on continuing the war in Vietnam, in effect, “staying the course” LBJ had set with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and General William Westmorland. Richard Nixon saw the changing tide of American opinion and announced he had a plan to get out of the war with honor. He had no plan but it was a campaign slogan the people were waiting to hear.
In 1968 I was too young for the draft, but my time was fast approaching and the looming specter of going into the military grew bigger with every spin of the lottery. Indeed, it wasn’t until I actually had a draft card in my wallet that Congress ended the draft — or at least the lottery — and even then we still had to have our draft card at all times, lest we face federal felonies if found not to have one.
For historical perspective, it was at this time when George Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Pat Buchanan, Dan Quayle and a host of other political figures were dodging the draft with their various deferments.
It was as if it didn’t matter the age of the American, the war didn’t escape anyone’s attention. If you were a teenage boy in our Southside Milwaukee neighborhood, you knew the draft — and the war — was probably in your future. No one was ending it and worse yet, none but a very few in Congress were talking of ending it in 1968. From 1965 to 1968, the number of American troops in Vietnam increased: from 184,000 at the end of President Kennedy’s administration, to well over 500,000 at the end of 1968.Think of that number: over half a million young men and women committed to fighting a war that we later learned, through the Pentagon Papers, no one managing it expected to win.
This reliving of the past came to mind and is important because of the current climate in Congress today. Two thirds of the American population wants our troops out of Iraq now or in the near future, and yet the Democratically-controlled Senate passed, without much debate or dissent, another 150 billion dollar spending bill with a 92-3 vote. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said, “Many of us have reached a breaking point on this. I’ve done this for too many years. I’ve waited for the president to start bringing this war to an end. I’m not going to sign up for this any longer.”
Well senator, talk is cheap. We heard this a year ago when your party was campaigning to wrest control of Congress from the Republicans. And yet we have witnessed an escalation of troops just since your majorities were sworn into office in January. We heard the all-important testimony from General David Petraeus that basically said the troop level would remain where it is until at least the summer of 2008.
Nearly 40 years after the Tet Offensive, after a landmark presidential election in which a proven loser won the presidency on a lie of planning to end the war in Vietnam, we are going through essentially the same motions, the same rhetoric as that era so many years before. And while the talking continues, our troops continue to serve in Iraq, getting severely maimed or killed for a war the planners and war supporters have already told us our troops cannot win.
“There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq, to the insurgency of Iraq.” General David Petraeus, March 8, 2007.
Are the young — and not so young — Americans getting maimed and killed in Iraq doing so solely for the vainglorious ambitions of a lame duck president? A man who doesn’t want to go down in history as having lost a war? The reasons for going to war in Iraq have changed with each passing month, the definitions of “success” and victory shifting to meet the evolving realities on the ground in the Middle East. Is there really 25% of the America population that still buys into the fantasy of winning in Iraq? Of our troops attaining victory?
We can’t call the war promoters a joke. Too many of our military people are coming home secretly in coffins, hidden from view by an administration that doesn’t want the American public to see the real cost of war.
Some morons contend the real mistake of Vietnam was letting the American public watch it on TV every night, so the philosophy of keeping it hidden from view, with news reporters tightly controlled and kept from the fighting and the blood and the human toll; a president who tells the American public to “go shopping,” much as LBJ assured Americans in 1965 we could have “guns and butter;” this attitude of secrecy and deceit has ruled the administration’s conduct of the war and now, four and a half years later, we are being told an escalation is having success when in reality, the country of Iraq is slowly splitting into warring factions with little—if any—real political progress being made to right this sinking ship.
Our troops are paying the price for this lost cause, this unnecessary war, this act of aggression—this failure of a policy thought up by a bunch of neocons who thought American muscle could reshape the world in their view of American-style democracy; and now even they don’t believe in the policy any longer — well, all except for William Kristol who thinks invading Iran is the answer to all our problems.Francis Fukuyama, one of the leading architects of this new “vision,” this new “American Century,” wrote this for the February 19, 2006 New York Times editorial page:
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America’s perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.
Nearly two years ago the leading neo conservatives had called this a mistake, a lost cause. And yet, here we are in October 2007, still signing check after check to continue this tragedy. Obviously, saying “oops” isn’t enough. Obviously, a Democrat-controlled Congress isn’t enough. What will be enough?
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