After he is permanently back at the ranch in Crawford, George Bush's presidency will bequeath us a legacy rich in bold policy choices that have spawned a series of odd and unintended consequences. Among the most ironic of these will be the fact that the 43rd president, of all people, will have been responsible for resurrecting in the American psyche a weary outrage and painful second-guessing that came to be known disdainfully as "Vietnam syndrome."
If the failures in Vietnam produced a generation of Americans who no longer took the word of the government at face value, they also generated a conservative -- small "c" -- backlash among some who saw in this ethos of questioning and mistrust the dangerous seeds of American weakness. The self-examination, introspection, and -- much worse -- the acknowledgment of mistakes were roadblocks to bold and decisive action.
These arguments were at their most persuasive during the Carter years -- the malaise period -- and reached their climax during the Iran hostage crisis, a drama which cast America in the role of feckless Superpower. So in 1980 Ronald Reagan won the election, promising to end to all that.
In many ways George W. Bush's presidency was the overarching triumph of that conservative counter-punch, and he emerged as one of the great champions of the Vietnam-Never-Again School. He not only supported the war in Vietnam, he says, but saw it enlarged as an issue of patriotism. On Meet The Press in 2004, Tim Russert asked Bush about Vietnam.
Russert: Were you in favor of the war in Vietnam?
President Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
Set aside the defensiveness about his service -- it was an election year, after all. Bush's frame of the question as one of fealty to "his government" or not, is the same frame through which he would like Americans to view the continuing the campaign in Iraq. But that is a lost cause; it did not work for Lyndon Johnson, and it's hard to see how it'll work for Bush.
Proselytizing comparisons are nefarious and often unhelpful in actually solving problems, so there has never been much point in comparing Iraq to Vietnam either militarily or geopolitically, but what the Iraq war has produced in the American people is surely an echo of what Vietnam produced in its time -- a profound erosion trust in the people leading the war and an overwhelming sense that what we are doing no longer makes sense.
Ironically, Bush had won that war before he lost it: Vietnam, the Syndrome, was dead. After Grenada and Nicaragua, after the first Gulf War, Bosnia and Rwanda, there were very few question marks left over America's willingness to use force in the world.
After the 9/11 attacks, none questioned our right to do so. With 9/11 in his sails, Bush had the chance, unprecedented in U.S. history, to remake the world without much worry about challenges on the home front. We were willing to fight and kill those who hated us just because of who we were. American flags were flying off of porches and out of apartment windows in red states and blue, and the president was enjoying a 90 percent job approval rating on the day he began the war in Afghanistan.
From there, he could have done anything. He chose Iraq. His 70 percent approval rating at the start of that conflict is now less than half that. Iraq is not Vietnam, but for a lot of Americans, the questions raised by both wars have begun to merge. In the final analysis, the fight over Vietnam came down to who was leading and whether they were going the right way. Were they doing the right things in the right ways?
When it became clear to a majority of Americans after the Tet offensive in 1968 that the answer was no, Lyndon Johnson was forced to close up shop on his re-election campaign.
The Bush administration has gone to great lengths to discredit any kind of parallels between Iraq and Vietnam.
In 2004, before the presidential election Condoleezza Rice told Bill Sammon of the Washington Times that those hippies and baby-boomers have wrongly internalized the whole Vietnam thing: "For people of that generation, it became the lodestar for the questioning of authority. And authority was never to be trusted again," Rice said. "And so whenever people say 'Vietnam,' what they mean is 'Authority is not to be trusted. Because the government had lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, they must be lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
Maybe yes, maybe no. I think the more important calculation that the American people have made, and not just those with calcified Vietnam-era disgruntlements, but a majority -- is that we are blowing it in Iraq. We are over-invested with too much exposure to disaster and with no hope of a reasonable return on the investment. Our purposes have grown too ambiguous.
"The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back," Bush told Russert in 2004, "was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions, and it is lessons that any president must learn, and that is to the set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective. And those are essential lessons to be learned from the Vietnam War."
Americans may not think Iraq is Vietnam, but they now believe that it is a political war.
