David Halberstam, in the introduction to The Best and the Brightest's 1992 reissue (p. xv-xvi):
I did not see [President] Kennedy as a romantic figure [...] but rather as a cool, skillful, modern politician, skeptical, ironic and graceful. The best thing about him, I thought, was his modernity, his lack of being burdened by the myths of the past. Because I saw him as cool and skeptical it always struck me that he would not have sent combat troops into Vietnam [...] But that having been said, it should be noted that he significantly escalated the number of Americans there, and the number of American deaths; that his public rhetoric was often considerably more aggressive than his more private doubts [...]
Reuters, March 30, 2011:
President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.
Obama signed the order, known as a presidential "finding", within the last two or three weeks, according to government sources familiar with the matter.
Such findings are a principal form of presidential directive used to authorize secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. This is a necessary legal step before such action can take place but does not mean that it will.
As is common practice for this and all administrations, I am not going to comment on intelligence matters," White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. "I will reiterate what the president said yesterday -- no decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya."
The CIA declined comment.
I grant that it's far from an exact parallel, but I've nevertheless been truly struck--and disturbed--by the increasing degree to which this nation's foray into Libya has come to resemble its disastrous stumbling in Southeast Asia a generation ago. While it would appear that the current President, unlike the predecessor to which he's perhaps most frequently compared, speaks softly and placatingly in public, while girding for aggressive warfare in private; and while it's true that the war in Libya is not one of inheritance, as was Vietnam for Kennedy, there's still an eerie resemblance in how the two Commanders in Chief have tried to control that most chaotic and unwieldy of things: war.
Part of what's surprised me so much about the events in Libya and their relation to Vietnam is that I was certain Obama had already fallen into the trap described by Halberstam--but in Afghanistan. Right before the President made his fateful decision to drastically increase the number of troops in that mountainous and barren country, Bill Moyers--who was then still on the air--broadcast a fascinating show in which he played audio tapes from Lyndon Johnson's White House, offering the viewers a chance to hear that President grapple with a seemingly no-win decision. But with the added bitterness of hindsight, knowing that he was making a colossal, tragic mistake.
For those of us, like myself, who saw little more than politics and wishful thinking behind Obama's doubling-down in Afghanistan, hearing LBJ complain bitterly about how the right-wing had forced him into escalation in Vietnam was disheartening. It seemed as if Johnson's anachronistic fear of resurgent McCarthyism, of being accused of "losing" Vietnam just as Truman "lost" China, was little different than Obama's fear of being labeled as "soft on defense" through his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both.
And I suppose there's still more than enough time for those fears to be proven well-founded; it's hardly as if the war in Afghanistan is going well.
But more than that war, the decisions that have so rapidly led us down a slippery slope to a quagmire in Libya have reminded me of the dysfunction which characterized so much of Kennedy-Johnson Administrations' actions vis-á-vis Vietnam. For one thing, there's the undemocratic, unaccountable decision-making. Americans had no way of knowing just how increasingly significant were the commitments Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy made in Indo-China; and by the time the full story was made clear to them, it was far, far too late. Similarly, this nation was given its first real address on the decision to intervene in Libya on Monday, more than a week after the decision had been made and hostilities had commenced.
For another, there's stories like this one, about the "fierce debate" occurring within the executive branch as to whether or not to arm the Libyan rebels:
The Obama administration is engaged in a fierce debate over whether to supply weapons to the rebels in Libya, senior officials said on Tuesday, with some fearful that providing arms would deepen American involvement in a civil war and that some fighters may have links to Al Qaeda.
The debate has drawn in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, these officials said, and has prompted an urgent call for intelligence about a ragtag band of rebels who are waging a town-by-town battle against Col.Muammar el-Qaddafi, from a base in eastern Libya long suspected of supplying terrorist recruits.
[...]
While Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration had not yet decided whether to actually transfer arms, she reiterated that the United States had a right to do so, despite an arms embargo on Libya, because of the United Nations Security Council’s broad resolution authorizing military action to protect civilians.
In a reflection of the seriousness of the administration’s debate, Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he was keeping his options open on arming the rebels. “I’m not ruling it out, but I’m also not ruling it in,” Mr. Obama told NBC News. “We’re still making an assessment partly about what Qaddafi’s forces are going to be doing. Keep in mind, we’ve been at this now for nine days.”
For anyone whose read
The Best and the Brightest, the epic bureaucratic struggles that preceded Johnson's decision to bomb Northern Vietnam rush to mind. Johnson thought that if he could just give the military
half of what they wanted--every time yielding, but never totally--he could keep himself in front of and in control of events. Of course, not long after every half-victory, the Pentagon came back to LBJ demanding more: more troops, more bombings, more leeway.
Soon enough Johnson gave just a little less so many times that he woke up one morning with an American presence in Vietnam that far surpassed that very first request.
It's a dynamic--a President desperate to avoid conflict, acting too clever by half--that repeated itself in Obama's handling of Afghanistan as he raised troop levels while simultaneously establishing a "firm" withdrawal date (which gets pushed back further and further with each passing year).
And I worry we're to see it soon in Libya.
A war that was supposed to be no more than a No-Fly Zone, established in "days, not weeks," has seemingly already transformed into an effort towards regime change with American operatives leading the charge. An overreach beyond the UN Security Council's resolution--which Obama himself has claimed would "shatter" the coalition--has perhaps already occurred. And once we've dropped our bombs, sent our weapons, and given our word--how then, if things don't go as planned, can we do anything but send "boots on the ground." Maybe they'll be peacekeepers at first. Maybe even Frenchmen. But every week, the Pentagon will need just a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more...
And what is possibly the most nauseating distinction between the best and the brightest of the 1960s and today, is that the argument for war in Libya is far less cogent than what was presented for Vietnam. Sure, the "domino theory" proved to be a canard; and, yes, there never really was such a thing as South Vietnam. But the argument--proffered with no evidence whatsoever--that Gaddafi's triumph in Libya would imperil the fledgling democracies in Egypt and Tunisia; is it really so much better? Without the murderous, iron fist of Gaddafi, are we sure there's even such a thing as Libya? And, again, what exactly are we fighting for?
I hope this is all a bunch of overwrought agita on my part. But throughout his term, the President has shown himself to be disconcertingly wedded to a vision of politics that is jarringly at-odds with what many of us expected following such an imaginative and fearless campaign. Despite his Kennedy grace, during these past two-plus years he's been nearly as "burdened by the myths of the past" as LBJ.
After all, what myth is there greater, and more burdensome, than that of the Good War?