Escalations
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/magazine/01fob-wwln-t.html
By MATT BAI
Published: October 29, 2009
"Are we going to give up in South Vietnam?" That was the question
President Kennedy posed, then tried to answer, in what would be his
final news conference in 1963. "The most important program, of
course, is our national security. But I don't want the United States
to have to put troops there." Kennedy was killed eight days later,
giving rise not just to 40 years of grassy-knoll conspiracy theories
but also to a lingering debate over whether he might have averted his
successor's tragic plunge into the jungles of Southeast Asia. Kennedy
came to public life as a staunch anti-Communist, but his experiences
as president most notably the failed invasion of Cuba and the
perilous standoff over Russia's missiles there reinforced in him a
natural skepticism of go-get-'em generals and armchair extremism. In
a 1995 memoir, a repentant Robert McNamara at last concluded that
Kennedy most likely "would have pulled us out of Vietnam." For
liberals of a certain age, this is a comforting version of history,
because it places some reassuring distance between the president who
first inspired their idealism and the war that shattered it. The left
would prefer not to believe that modern American liberalism, defined
by an unshakable faith in the social justice and antiwar movements,
derived from a martyred hero whose commitment to both causes was, in
fact, considerably more nuanced.
As it happened, Kennedy would turn out to be the last Democratic
president of the era who demonstrated an obvious comfort with war and
foreign policy. In the decades after Vietnam, despite having been
proved right about the war itself, a generation of Democrats who
opposed the war nonetheless struggled mightily to find a credible
response to armed conflict, to reconcile the breach that separated
the antiwar left from the broader swath of Americans who disdained
reflexive pacifism. Democratic policy groups preached the term
"muscular" so often over the last decade, in describing the kind of
image their candidates needed to project, that it sometimes seemed
they were trying to market a health drink rather than a foreign policy.
This problematic legacy explains, in part, why another young
Democratic president now finds himself at a crossroads similar to the
one Kennedy was preparing to negotiate in 1963. Barack Obama's
dilemma in Afghanistan has its roots in the conundrum that Democrats
faced during the last two presidential campaigns: how to oppose the
war in Iraq without being fatally caricatured, yet again, as feckless
heirs to the McGovernite left. Their solution was to stress their
fervor for a different war. Sure, they wanted to withdraw from Iraq,
but they wanted to shift more troops and treasure to Afghanistan,
where the true aggressors of Sept. 11 were still evading capture. Who
could call that weak? It was a sensible policy that also made for
irresistible politics.
Now that Democrats are in firm control of the nation's foreign
policy, however, the prospect of stepping up a war in Afghanistan is
conjuring the ghosts of men like McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. A
recent book about Bundy's view of Vietnam is practically required
reading in the West Wing these days. As in those early days of
Vietnam (like Afghanistan today, a war-hardened country with a
history of expelling foreign powers), no path seems especially clear
or promising. The generals want an infusion of 40,000 more troops a
move that could lash Obama's presidency to Afghanistan almost as
tightly as George W. Bush's was bound to Iraq. Liberals in Congress
are equally adamant about cementing a plan for withdrawal, which
would most likely lead to the return of the Taliban. (The 1960s left
might have believed that the Viet Cong was, in fact, a people's
uprising, but no one can make that case about the Taliban, whose
violent repression of women and nonbelievers while in power alienated
most Afghans and shocked the world.) Judging from a recent poll by
ABC News and The Washington Post, war-weary American voters are
divided almost evenly on a course of action. The only thing they
agree on is that they want the president to act soon.
Obama's response to all this, instead, has been to slow down and
reassess what had seemed, back in the spring, to be a steady march
toward escalation. In doing so, according to the poll, he has
disappointed a fair number of voters who used to support him on
Afghanistan. But Obama has also demonstrated, not for the first time,
two things about his emerging governing style that contrast sharply
with that of his predecessor. The first is that he means to draw a
distinction between useful campaign rhetoric and the realities of
governing, even if it makes him look inconstant. The second is that
he doesn't seem especially bothered by the perception that he's
dithering. Bush often seemed to measure leadership by the number of
seconds it took to make a decision. Obama displays a different kind
of spine the capacity to take his time, even when allies and
critics are pounding at the door.
Ultimately, Obama's course in Afghanistan is likely to reaffirm
something else about him too: despite the Republican hype about his
radical nature, Obama is a leader who instinctively seeks the center
lane of American politics. And in this way, more than any other,
Obama is very much like the John Kennedy who emerges in historical
accounts today, a self-confident president who governed at a time of
heightened insecurity and proved himself insufficiently doctrinaire
for both bellicose cold warriors and the new generation of liberals
who considered him their own. (Perhaps Kennedy would have pulled the
plug on Vietnam, but it seems just as likely that he would have
chosen a more subtle option, moving ahead slowly and with greater
caution than those who followed.) Since November 1963, through a
succession of politicians who inspired and then dashed their hopes,
boomer liberals have been pining for a leader who would reignite the
spirit of their youthful idol. With Obama, they may yet end up closer
to the reality of Kennedy, as opposed to the ideal, than they
actually might have wished.
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