Some like to discount comparisons between U.S. policy in the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan.
But a recent look at some presidential archives makes a good case for history repeating itself — and not in a good way.
President Barack Obama takes a hiatus on Tuesday night from the healthcare reform brawl to make a major policy speech on Afghanistan, a war he inherited from President George W. Bush and one Obama pledged to end.
The Vietnam War and a decision to significantly increase U.S. troops for it sealed the fate of President Lyndon B. Johnson. In the election preceding that policy move, Johnson won 61 percent of the popular vote and took every state in the Electoral College except Arizona and a swath of five states in the Deep South.
Four years later and with his own party in full retreat from his administration’s policies in Southeast Asia, Johnson stunned America and the world by announcing that he would “not seek” or “accept” his party’s nomination in 1968.
Before Johnson, John F. Kennedy made the fateful move of endorsing the removal of the corrupt and incompetent South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem. “Removal” meant Diem’s assassination by the Central Intelligence Agency. That revelation in the “Pentagon Papers” published by the New York Times and other media outlets led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case ruling in favor of the media and pushed along growing criticism of the Vietnam War from the American public. The recently released Kennedy archive includes conversations between Kennedy and his staffers about getting rid of Diem.
Something tells me that conversations about what to do with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai have not escaped the Obama team.
Johnson’s conversations with Robert McNamara, his secretary of state at the time, reveal the president’s personal struggle with trying to justify a war that looked more and more unwinnable and less and less like a war — and more like an insurgency.
Obama, like all his predecessors, knew the likely outcome in Afghanistan. The lessons came from the former Soviet Union (1979-1989), three Anglo-Afghan Wars (1839 through 1919) and ongoing Afghan civil wars. It’s a bloody take on history with no winners.
It appears Bush dealt Obama the “Dead Man’s Hand” in a high-stakes game. If Obama chooses to go “all in” in Afghanistan, what little support he might get, likely might come from Republicans.
Resources:
- http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/index.htm
- http://www.historynet.com/president-lyndon-b-johnsons/...
- http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/lbj/
- http://www.cfr.org/publication/20018/
I think some analogies also apply to the Carter administration. The flawed policy in Iran that led to the overthrow of the shah and the American hostage situation, and the economic freefall that accompanied it, led to Carter's one-term reign — and the high hopes that came with the election of a grassroots D.C. "outsider."
Sending extra troops to Afghanistan just so the U.S. can be out of the region in three years is absurd. President Obama may have inherited the war from George W. Bush, but Obama promised to end the war, and so far, he has not. This likely will be Obama’s downfall. And I had high hopes for a “new” Washington.
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