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PDF FormatIn the December 1, 2009 speech to the American people announcing his decision to boost the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Obama made no mention of Kennedy, and certainly not of Johnson. In fact, the only president he quoted was the Republican who preceded them, Dwight Eisenhower. Nor did he select a particularly stirring quote (“Each proposal must be made in the light of a broader consideration”). In fact, he may well have deliberately chosen to cite a lackluster remark. Finding himself in the unenviable role of “war president,” Obama seems to have deemed it best to steer clear of comparisons. He certainly does not want his reinforcement in Afghanistan to be gauged against Bush’s surge in Iraq or Johnson’s troop buildup in Vietnam. He thus told himself, and his constituents, that this is a different kind of war altogether. “There are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam,” said the president. “They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we’re better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history.”
It was a speech that left Obama’s listeners confused. Some pronouncements were downright contradictory—for instance, a promise to pull out by a predetermined date (July 2011) alongside a statement that withdrawal was dependent on making progress. But the core message—the decision to continue the war until victory is achieved—demonstrates that Obama has chosen to follow Johnson’s path rather than act as Kennedy would have done, at least according to Goldstein’s supposition.
The big question, then, is what if anything Obama has learned from the book making the rounds among his advisers. The obvious answer is the danger of sending more troops into Afghanistan, and the wisdom of withdrawing them. If Afghanistan is Obama’s Vietnam, then clearly he should have put a halt to the escalation process as quickly as possible. The fact that he did the opposite points to one of two things, or perhaps both: First, the president is indeed convinced, as he declared in his speech, that Afghanistan is not today’s Vietnam, and that the differences between the two military campaigns are too significant to warrant any comparison; second, despite what historians might like to think, decision makers do not often take their research into account when shaping policy.
This conclusion is likely to disappoint many people, especially those raised on the mantra that we must study the past lest we be doomed to repeat it. Indeed, Obama seems to have disregarded the lessons of Bundy’s soul-searching. The more he ignores Bundy’s later insights—as described by Goldstein—the more he appears inclined to adopt Bundy’s earlier, real-time recommendations, such as the one that, following a visit to Vietnam in 1966, he wrote to President Johnson: “The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating… without new U.S. action, defeat appears inevitable.… Any negotiated U.S. withdrawal today would mean surrender on the installment plan.”
In any case, there are many ways to read Bundy, just as there are many ways to “read” Vietnam. Perhaps, for example, Obama reads both as a call for action only within a framework of consensus—that is, as an obligation constantly to ensure that the public is with him. Obama’s speech manifested his desire for just this type of public support—much more so, for instance, than the Bush announcement of the troop surge in Iraq. The latter’s decision was widely perceived as an act of defiance, a kick in the pants of the political establishment and a slap in the face of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which presented an opposite set of recommendations. Obama’s resolution, by contrast, came across as a responsible, carefully weighed, and laudably centrist move.
This contrast between Bush and Obama illustrates just how hard it can be to apply the lessons of the past to the present, not only in the case of events that took place decades ago (Vietnam), but also those that transpired much more recently (Iraq). The fact that those who led the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw them as part of the same campaign (Donald Rumsfeld called it a “global struggle against violent extremism,” and Obama “a struggle against violent extremism”) means very little in this regard. Both Bush and Obama made similar decisions under similar circumstances, but neither they nor those who analyzed their respective moves want to stress this similarity.
In many ways, the American failure in Vietnam is a sort of Rorschach test: Every commentator sees a different picture. During the Bush administration, for example, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Richard Cheney presented two diametrically opposed interpretations of what transpired during that ill-fated war. Powell, who experienced the horrors of the jungles of Southeast Asia firsthand, deduced from his personal experience the need for prudence; Cheney, on the other hand, believed the Vietnam generation drew the wrong conclusions from that war and as a result is now overly hesitant. Powell feared that Iraq would turn out to be another quagmire, while Cheney saw in the secretary of state the same lack of resolve that had led to the fall of Saigon to the communists. Hence Bush’s decision to reinforce the soldiers in Iraq rather than withdraw them—as foreign policy veterans had recommended he do—was, to Cheney, nothing less than a triumph over the Vietnam syndrome at precisely the time that detractors lambasted the move as a repeat of Johnson’s historical error.
Obama, apparently, did not conclude from Goldstein’s book that American intervention in faraway countries necessarily ends in failure. Nor did he infer from Bundy’s (and Goldstein’s) musings that the United States has no chance of overcoming local guerrilla forces. He did not even seem to be alarmed by the fact that he, like Johnson, was raising the level of U.S. action in an arena he himself had not chosen, or by the possibility that his military commanders would keep asking for more, and he would be hard-pressed to refuse.
If the path Obama has chosen does not lead to the desired outcome, future historians will surely write books discussing the lessons of yet another “failed war.” And if they agree with Bundy, the blame will be laid squarely at the feet of the person who sat in the Oval Office. Unfortunately for Obama, however, it will not be the president who started the campaign who takes history’s fall, but rather the one who continued and intensified it.
Shmuel Rosner is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and Maariv. He is the nonfiction editor for Kinneret-Zmora-Bitan-Dvir and a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute.
