Two Strange, Faraway Wars: A Comparison

By John Martin Meek

            It’s interesting that of the countless columns, articles and editorials written attacking the Bush Administration on the war in Iraq, I have not seen one that draws a comparison with the Johnson Administration and the Vietnam War.

          So, what comparisons can we make?

          Let’s start with what now seems to be the current feeling that the war in Iraq is no more winnable than the 1959-1975 conflict in Vietnam. 

          Then there is the difference between LBJ and his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, and George Bush and his No. 2, Dick Cheney.

          Humphrey certainly was not more dominant than Johnson, as we have the perception that Cheney is the tutor-in-chief for Bush, the commander-in-chief.

          Johnson, like Bush, was a Texan and to some extent had to be brought dragging and screaming to take leadership on the so-called liberal issues such as civil rights.

          There is an old story that it is very difficult to teach an elephant to dance. But once the elephant learns to dance, it really wants to dance. And so it was with LBJ once he recognized that civil rights for the country were right even if, as he predicted at the time, it meant the end of the Democratic Party in the south.

          Humphey was a renowned liberal and civil rights advocate, having established his turf with an emotional speech on the subject at the 1948 Democratic National Convention. That was the event that sent Strom Thurmond off as a third-party presidential candidate trying to preserve segregation in the country and especially the south.

          When Admiral William Crowe was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Washington reception he told a story about the great World War II General Mark Clark’s introduction before he spoke at a national convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

          The woman introducing the general got her notes mixed up and finally threw up her hands about a foot apart above the lectern.

          “Oh, you ladies all know about General Mark Clark,” she said. “Why, he’s got a Who’s Who that long.”

          So did Johnson and Humphrey, former colleagues in the Senate with long histories of public service. Johnson even left Congress briefly during World War II to serve in the Navy and was a recipient of the Silver Star.

          Cheney also has a “Who’s Who that long.” For all his years in Congress, White House chief of staff and secretary of defense, he never seemed to me to have the image of a warmonger. Just where this transformation took place is a significant mystery.

          In his previous political positions, he was somewhat the younger and the learner. Perhaps the transformation came about when he found himself as the older and the tutor.

          I don't think it is generally known whether Cheney, as secretary of defense during Operation Desert Storm, felt we should have marched on to Baghdad. But as Bush 41 has written in his book, that commander-in-chief somehow was brought to the decision that chasing the Iraqi troops to the capital would be a huge mistake. We now know he was not just right, he was dead right.

          Meanwhile back in Texas during his father’s later years in politics, his son George was tossing back shooters at the country clubs dominated by Texas oil industry studs.        

          In that West Texas neighborhood where I began my journalism career, it doesn’t even take a few drinks for some Texas men to use ridicule with an edge as sharp as Gillette blades.

          My guess is George W. bluntly was told many times that his father’s not chasing Saddam Hussein all the way to Baghdad just confirmed the wimp image often used by the media describing the Bush 41 governing style.

          People who have not been deeply involved in the Washington, DC mix tend to think that when men and women reach that higher level in politics, their behavior also rises as do all boats with the tide.

          Wrong. Pettiness in the White House, for example, may be just as bad or worse than in the state house, courthouse or your house.

          So, my theory is George 43 heard his father directly or indirectly ridiculed so many times for not “finishing the job” in the Middle East, he decided if he ever got to the Oval Office he would make taking down Saddam his priority. Coincidentally, he found partners in crime with Cheney and Don Rumsfeld over in DOD.

          The events of 9/11 fell into George W. Bush’s lap like a winning Powerball ticket. .

          Instead of focusing our military and nation-building efforts on Afghanistan where Osama and the Taliban controlled the country, George put that mission on the back burner to show the boys in the country clubs back in the Texas oil patch that if his dad didn’t have the big ones the by God he did..

          Another major difference between LBJ and GWB is that during his presidency Johnson, while carrying on the war in Vietnam, conceived and tried to carry out the most significant social legislation program, called the Great Society, since FDR’s New Deal.

           The list of Johnson domestic achievements is long and impressive. But regardless of your age, just consider two pieces of Great Society legislation – Medicare and the Voting Rights Act. Need I say more?

          The Bush domestic programs after six years fall into one of two categories: pathetic or designed (again) to please those guys still sitting around the big country club in Midland, Texas.

          LBJ did not start the Vietnam War. He did as commander-in-chief escalate it to a very high level which in the end brought about more than 58,000 deaths.

          What was his motive in approving the ever-increasing troop strength asked for by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara with his generals and admirals?

          I think, and it is entirely speculation, that two factors led LBJ to support the little conflict he inherited after JFK was assassinated.

          An overriding issue in politics in the 50s and 60s, largely forgotten now that the Soviet Union has been dissolved, was an accepted political foreign policy embraced by both Democrats and Republicans.

          I would call it the Quemoy-Matsu Syndrone.

          After World War II, our country made the mistake of essentially dissolving the vast military force assembled to defeat the Axis powers. It was a mistake because Stalin and the Soviet Union in the 1950s loomed almost as large a threat in  Europe as Hitler and Germany had in the 1940s. With his incredible success in defeating the German army sent to conquer the Soviets, Stalin had developed a new greed to enlarge his already impressive communist empire.

          Stalin’s first post-war move was in 1948 to blockade West Berlin. Trying to stop the Soviets there and giving up West Berlin to Stalin, which may seem mind-boggling today, was opposed by the chiefs of the military services at the Pentagon.

          But Harry Truman was the commander-in-chief. He decided that even without adequate forces to take on Stalin, we would somehow supply West Berliners until the blockade could be broken. And we did, almost impossibly but successfully.

Some historians believe that had Stalin been able to take over West Berlin, he would have continued a conquest of Europe. And the only real weapon the Allied powers had to stop him was this country’s atomic bomb capability that in the end had forced Japan to surrender.

The next chess play by the “red threat” was in 1950 when North Korean troops began to roll though South Korea largely unopposed.

          Again, the communist leaders underestimated Truman. He immediately began to mobilize our military to go to the aid of the South Koreans. It was a short but bloody war taking some 50,000 lives of our forces even though the United Nations and several of its members joined with the Americans.

          The next effort by the communists started in 1959 in Vietnam, and the U.S. committed a small effort to stop the North Vietnamese in their quest to take over the South.

          So it was in this politically charged foreign policy atmosphere that the Kennedy-Johnson Democratic ticket in 1960 took on the Nixon-Lodge team for the Republicans.

          And it did not take long for the question about where the new occupant of the White House would draw the line on communist aggression.

          In the third Kennedy-Nixon debate on October 13 during the 1960 presidential campaign, this “communist-behind-every-bush” policy emerged over whether a Democratic president would defend the little islands of Matsu and Quemoy off the coast of Taiwan should the Chinese decide to take them over.

          To show the intensity of this issue, here is part of Nixon’s statement during the debate:

          “Now, what do the Chinese Communists want? They don’t want just Quemoy and Matsu. They don’t want just Formosa (now Taiwan). They want the world. And the question is, if you surrender or indicate in advance that you’re not going to defend any part of the free world, and you figure that’s going to satisfy them, it doesn’t satisfy them, it only whets their appetite.”

          Then, after discussing President Eisenhower’s similar position on halting Communist aggression, Nixon continues:

          “And I say that those of us who stand against surrender of territory, this or any others, in the face of blackmail, in the face of force by the Communists, are standing for the course that lead to peace.”

After JFK won the 1960 election, we came near having a nuclear holocaust with the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba, less than 100 miles off the Florida coast. Can you imagine a president drawing a line in the sand, as JFK did over the Cuban missiles, to start a war with China if it moved to take over those two little islands? Well, from Nixon’s statements during the third debate it obviously was a possibility had he been elected.

          A second factor that could have influenced LBJ to make the huge commitment in Vietnam was because he came to serve in Congress from Texas during World War II. There is no doubt LBJ was in great awe of the charismatic FDR and his role as commander-in-chief of the greatest U.S. military force ever assembled.

          With the U.S. effort to help South Vietnam barely underway when LBJ became president and commander-in-chief on Nov. 22, 1963, he very shortly had the opportunity to emulate FDR’s “Doctor Win the War.” LBJ even had his own metaphor for winning the war in Vietnam. He called it “nailing the coonskin on the wall.”

Except he and his advisors did not clearly see that what the French had not been able to do against Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam was not doable. No wonder France refused to join the “coalition of the willing” by avoiding another quagmire in Iraq.

          In fairness to Bush, and he won’t let us forget it, is that the Al Queda attack on the World Center buildings and Pentagon on 9/11 provided ample excuse to go first to Afghanistan.      

          It seems to me a president also cannot be faulted for receiving greatly faulted intelligence from the various government agencies and departments, and from other friendly countries such as Great Britain and Israel.

          However, at the time Bush decided to invade Iraq as a threat with its weapons of mass destruction, he had the options of perhaps more serious threats from Iran and North Korea. So far as we know General Tommy Franks was never asked to draw up plans to invade any other country besides Iraq.

          Back to the Vietnam War, LBJ had his Tonkin Gulf Resolution which gave him new Congressional power to continue the buildup of American forces. The historical perspective is that the action by North Vietnam that brought about the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was no more valid than the CIA’s “slam dunk” assurance that Saddam had WMDs.

          Then, probably the most significant difference between the Vietnam and Iraq wars and how two commanders-in-chief managed them is that one had a draft for military service and one does not.

          At a recent weekly coffee group discussion of the Iraqi War, one man asked this question, “Why aren’t we having hundreds of thousands of war protestors in Washington?”

          The answer is that so far the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has been done by volunteer military units, not by kids with wealthy and influential parents. I believe if Bush had a military draft for the war on terrorism, his buddies back in the Texas country clubs with draft-age children might just not given a damn about whether Saddam Hussein was in power or in jail.

          And I do think that if there were a draft there would be major protests against the war in Iraq as there was our presence in Vietnam..

          A final comparison might be the so-called “bunker” attitude at the White House during the Johnson administration and the Bush war on terrorism era. 

          This is difficult. LBJ was and Bush is the recipient of a daily media blitz over conduct of their wars. But there is a vast difference otherwise.

          Imagine if you can what your own reaction might be if you had hundreds or protestors in Lafayette Park across from the White House shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids have you killed today?”

          As with the potential for pettiness, presidents feel the need to be liked or loved as much as most of us do.

          When presidents have the burden of leading us in directions they feel is best for our nation, they naturally want empathy if not sympathy.

          Thus, when under attack they tend to circle the wagons only with the John Waynes that agree with them.

          Bush’s meeting with former secretaries of State and Defense in the first week of January 2006 was not a serious effort to pick the brains of hundreds of years of experience in foreign policy and heading our vast military forces. It was just a public relations gimmick. He has shown no signs of flexibility in both his domestic and foreign policies, and no one in that group with advice contrary to his actions would have seen him change his mind. 

          He is in the figurative bunker – not the one occupied by Cheney -- and we can expect him to stay there.

          Probably most of us would very much like to see some light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq and passage into law of significant domestic programs such as health care for all who need it.

          Instead, what we face are two more years of leadership at the top by two men – Bush and Cheney – who as Republicans ironically resemble the symbol of the Democratic Party. Mules. Known primarily for their stubbornness.