Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Is Afghanistan another Vietnam?
From the RoundTable blog
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John Freivalds
Freivalds runs a communications firm in Lexington.
It was during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson that the term "guns and butter" was much bandied about. LBJ had an ambitious social agenda, called the Great Society (the butter), and there was the Vietnam War to fight (the guns).
Historians now look back and see the two were intimately connected. Looking forward, historians see how President Obama's expensive and complicated health reforms are connected to the endless war in Afghanistan.
Some background is in order. LBJ was an accidental president who came to the presidency due to the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963. He was in his heart a legislator and really a peacenik. Alvin Felzenberg, in his excellent history "The Leaders We Deserved (And A Few We Didn't)," wrote "enacting legislation was primarily how Johnson conceived of his job as president." He wasn't interested in bureaucratic turf battles, how well a bill was being implemented or whether the funds allocated were accomplishing something. "Speedy passage of bills was Johnson's primary concern."
Oh, yeah, we had a war going on in Vietnam he inherited from Kennedy, and Johnson's main concern was not the spread of communism (the so-called domino theory -- if Vietnam fell, then Hawaii would be next), but "he didn't want to be the first U.S. president to lose a war."
In addition, he wanted to get conservatives to back his Great Society. He told one writer "I knew from the start that ... if I left the woman that I really loved -- The Great Society -- for that bitch of a war on the other side of the world then I would lose everything at home."
So to get conservatives on his side, he did all the things he said in the 1964 presidential campaign against Sen. Barry Goldwater. He said he wouldn't go "bombing North Vietnam, mining harbors, et al.," and then agreed to every surge of troops proposed by the military until; three years into his term, there were 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, up from 60,000.
The other thing he did was hide the true cost of the war, saying in his State of the Union speech in 1966 that we had enough funds to pursue guns and butter. We did not.
Fast forward to today. Obama has deferred much of the management of the health care bill to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who like LBJ is a policy wonk and has the short attention span of a representative who is elected every two years. And quietly the promise of a surge of troops is being given to conservatives in return for help with the passage of health care reforms.
It took a Republican president to end the war in Vietnam, and this is what I predict will happen with the conflict in Afghanistan.
To end this, I think I will go back to the Middle Ages when the following proverb was used by a French King: "Plus ça change plus c'est même chose." The more things change, the more they stay the same.
