Can Obama Do in Iraq What Nixon and Ford Couldn't in Vietnam?

[Originally published on History News Network]

Practically every American intervention abroad since the 1960s has prompted comparisons to Vietnam. So it was hardly surprising when on October 8, in response to President Obama’s decision to expand the campaign against ISIS into Syria, Frederik Logevall and Gordon M. Goldstein authored an op-ed in the New York Times that asked “Will Syria Be Obama’s Vietnam?”

I’m not sure that’s the right question. The American concern over ISIS originated in Iraq, after all—an intervention that is now eleven years old. America’s air campaign against ISIS today reminds me less of the intervention that happened in Vietnam than the one that didn’t happen—in the spring of 1975.

This past June, when ISIS suddenly broke through America’s collective effort to forget about Iraq and seemed poised to take Baghdad, it was easy to wonder if we were about to witness a repeat of the fall of Saigon.

More than two years after the peace agreement that led to the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, a North Vietnamese offensive against South Vietnam met with little effective resistance, much like last June’s stories of Iraqi armed forces dropping their arms and failing to fight ISIS. Compare these passages from the New York Times coverage of the fall of Hue in March 1975 and Mosul in June 2014:

“By the thousands, the people are abandoning Hue…. The armed forces are also moving out, some by landing craft, some in military vehicles, some bundled into trucks with family members, furniture and food. No one seemed in the slightest doubt yesterday that Hue and the rest of the north were being left to the Communists.”

“Thousands of civilians fled south toward Baghdad…. The Iraqi Army apparently crumbled in the face of the militant assault, as soldiers dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms for civilian clothes and blended in with the fleeing masses…. ‘They took control of everything, and they are everywhere,’ said one soldier who fled the city.”

The political reaction this summer also eerily echoed the reaction to events of nearly 40 years ago.

In his Memoirs, Richard Nixon argued that he had won the Vietnam war and that American bombing of the North would have preserved the South Vietnamese government. It had survived for two years after the peace agreement. That meant Nixon’s Vietnamization had worked.

“When Congress reneged on our obligations under the agreements,” Nixon wrote, “the Communists predictably rushed in to fill the gap.” Nixon had privately assured South Vietnamese President Thieu that violations of the peace agreement by Hanoi would be met with renewed American bombing. But in June 1973, the Church-Case amendment forbade funding for any military operations in Vietnam. “The congressional bombing cutoff, coupled with the limitations placed on the President by the War Powers Resolution in November 1973, set off a string of events that led to the Communist takeover.” The war was “lost within a matter of months once Congress refused to fulfill our obligations,” Nixon said.

Henry Kissinger has also repeatedly argued that the peace agreement reached with Hanoi had secured the independence of South Vietnam, and that he and Nixon intended to use air power to thwart any North Vietnamese aggression against the South. But, he asserts, Watergate so weakened Nixon that they were unable to overcome the opposition of Congress. In a meeting with Singapore’s Lee Quan Yew on August 4, 1973, Kissinger said: “We have suffered a tragedy because of Watergate … We were going to bomb North Vietnam for a week, then go to Russia, then meet with [North Vietnam’s lead negotiator] Le Duc Tho. Congress made it impossible.”

Lewis Sorley, in his 1999 work A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, argued that “[t]here came a time when the war was won.” Due to the pacification efforts of Gen. Creighton Abrams, he writes, victory in in Vietnam “can probably best be dated in late 1970.” The countryside was pacified, and South Vietnamese forces were “capable of resisting aggression so long as America continued to provide logistical and financial support, and … renewed application of U.S. air and naval power should North Vietnam violate the terms of that agreement.”

The argument that continued American application of its air power against North Vietnam could have preserved South Vietnam has been thus been a staple of Vietnam War revisionism.

In June, Sen. John McCain made an argument about Iraq similar to the one that Nixon, Kissinger, and Sorley made about Vietnam:

"We had it won," McCain said. "Gen. [David] Petraeus had the conflict won, thanks to the surge. And if we had left a residual force behind, that we could have, we would not be facing the crisis we are today. Those are fundamental facts ... The fact is, we had the conflict won, and we had a stable government.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added: “There is no scenario where we can stop the bleeding in Iraq without American air power."

There are no do-overs in history, and no one can say for certain whether the renewed application of American air power after the 1973 peace agreement might have prevented the fall of Saigon—or if it did, for how long. But we are currently seeing why Congress sought to limit the executive branch’s options back in 1973.

The fear then was that, despite the peace agreement, Nixon and Kissinger would continue to fight a war that the country overwhelmingly wanted to be over. Kissinger’s repeated statements indicate that they in fact intended to do just that, not just in Vietnam but possibly in Cambodia, too. The Church-Case Amendment was how Congress expressed the national consensus against reviving the war.

Today, there seems little will in Congress to restrain the president’s war-making powers. If anything, the loudest voices have been those arguing for even greater military action. In response to such pressure, the president has already expanded the air war to Syria.

Just last week, McCain argued that “pinprick” airstrikes were proving ineffective, and called for further expansions of the war: “They’re winning, and we’re not,” McCain told CNN. “The Iraqis are not winning. The Peshmerga, the Kurds are not winning.” Thus, he argued, there was a need for “more boots on the ground … in the form of forward air controllers, special forces and other people like that…. You have to arm the Peshmerga … Buffer zone in Syria, no-fly zone, take on Bashar al Assad the same as we have ISIS.”

McCain’s vision of a renewed, ever-expanding war is precisely what Congress in 1973 meant to prevent Nixon and Kissinger from doing. After nearly a decade of war, Americans had decided that the fall of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos would not be a mortal threat to American security.

Today, what stands between the United States and the full-scale revival of a war Americans thought was over is not Congress, but the president himself. Obama has repeatedly stated that he will not re-introduce American combat troops to Iraq, and he is trying to maintain a sense of balance about the nature of the threat: “While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, these terrorists have threatened America and our allies. And the United States will meet this threat with strength and resolve.”

McCain, however, is doing the opposite, hyping the threat the U.S. Back in June he said: “We are now facing an existential threat to the security of the United States of America.” Last week he said: “it is a threat to the United States of America if they are able to establish this caliphate.”

A September CNN public opinion poll suggests that Americans agree with McCain about the threat, while siding with Obama on the limits of the U.S. response. Ninety percent say ISIS represents a threat to the U.S., with 45 percent calling the threat “serious,” 22 percent saying it is “fairly serious” and 23 percent saying it is “somewhat serious.” (Two years after 9/11, in 2003, 49 percent considered Al Qaeda a “serious” threat to the U.S.) Seventy-one percent believe ISIS terrorists are already in the U.S. But at the same time, by a 61-38 margin, Americans oppose using American ground forces to defeat ISIS.

ISIS has succeeded in making Americans think that Iraq matters again, and that U.S. interests require its defeat, but it has not yet convinced them that it is worth Americans doing the fighting and dying. That's Obama's dilemma. If air power is not enough, does he take the chance that Iraq (or Syria) falls to ISIS, or does he break his promise?

In the spring of 1975, Congressional and public opinion meant that President Ford had little choice but to watch as the North Vietnamese Army rolled into Saigon. Nearly 40 years later, President Obama faces a far more difficult task: prevent the collapse of the Iraqi government (and, increasingly, the Syrian opposition) without fully reviving a war he spent years trying to end—all in the face of an opposition that is intent on proving that the Iraq war it supported was won until the president lost it.

Whether Obama will be able to keep his promise not to send American ground forces back to Iraq is very much an open question. Having taken the first step to save Iraq by applying American air power—what Nixon, Kissinger and Ford could not do in Vietnam—it may be increasingly hard to resist subsequent steps if air power proves to be not enough.

"Politics End at the Water's Edge"--Yeah, Right

The old maxim "politics ends at the water's edge" has always been an exaggeration, if not a flat-out falsehood. The idea is that while Americans may quarrel among themselves about domestic politics, when it comes to foreign affairs, there is no partisanship. Americans show a united face to the rest of the world.

As a historian of American diplomacy, I can tell you that, as a rule, nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, there is a tendency to "rally around the president" in moments of crisis, but that usually ends as soon as the crisis does. And yes, there are some moments when it is true, as when Democratic president Harry Truman convinced the Republican Congress in 1947 to approve the Truman Doctrine aid to Greece and Turkey, as well as the economic development program known as the "Marshall Plan."

More often than not, however, foreign policy has proven divisive in American history. Even the most prominent example of bipartisan cooperation noted above, the Marshall Plan, proves that point. It was packaged by the Truman administration as Secretary of State George Marshall's plan precisely because, as a former general, Marshall was seen as a nonpartisan figure. They were afraid the "Truman Plan" would get voted down.

This all came to mind while watching the events in Tripoli last night. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham released a statement, part of which reads as follows:

This achievement was made possible first and foremost by the struggle and sacrifice of countless Libyans, whose courage and perseverance we applaud. We also commend our British, French, and other allies, as well as our Arab partners, especially Qatar and the UAE, for their leadership in this conflict. Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower.

As Andrew Sullivan's Dish points out, they make a point of "Praising Everyone But The Commander In Chief." President Obama's name does not appear at all in the statement. The only reference to him is the critical dig at "the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower."

The slight is reminiscent at how many conservatives pointedly refused to credit the president for getting Osama bin Laden. Conservative billionaire David Koch, for example, said "all that Obama did was say 'yea' or 'nay,' we’re going to take him out or not. I don’t think he contributed much at all." Sarah Palin credited "all the brave men and women in our military and our intelligence services" without mentioning the president, which the Guardian called "both churlish and in character."

Current Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain all issued statements that pointedly ignored Obama. (To their credit, Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and Newt Gingrich, as well as Speaker of the House John Boehner, did congratulate the president.)

It is perfectly reasonable to question the president's policy. I had my own doubts about Obama's intervention in Libya, but it was indeed "churlish," on the day the rebellion reached Tripoli, for McCain and Graham to reiterate their policy criticism. At this point, it seems that Obama's policy, which has often been ridiculed because aides used the phrase "leading from behind" to describe it, has helped produce the successful toppling of one of the world's worst (and most bizarre) dictators. At the cost of not a single American life.

You might think that, at such a moment, the president's critics could actually let politics end at the water's edge. But you'd be wrong.

The Highwaymen of South Carolina

[Y]ou will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"--Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860, Address at Cooper Institute

Lincoln was speaking of the secessionist fire-eaters who would, with South Carolina in the lead, try to destroy the Union later that same year. Last night, that same attitude was on vivid display in the United States Congress, and once again, South Carolina played a prominent role.

All seven Republican members of Congress from South Carolina voted against Speaker John Boehner's debt ceiling bill. The bill passed the House by the bare minimum, with 22 Republicans voting against it and no Democrats voting for it. It then went to the Senate, where Senators Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham joined the Democrats in voting it down.

Although they voted with the Democrats, they did so for different reasons. The Democrats opposed the bill primarily because it would return us to this debt ceiling nightmare again in another six months. The highwaymen of South Carolina did so because its spending cuts were not draconian enough, its demand for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution not iron-clad enough.

On the CBS Evening News last night, the four freshmen Republican House members from South Carolina (the veteran Joe "You lie!" Wilson excepted) were featured in a story about opposition to raising the debt ceiling.



They spoke with apparent sincerity about the need to make fundamental change. Jeff Duncan spoke about the potential problems of the future: "I've got three young boys ... and I don't want them ten years from now to say, 'Dad, when y'all were at the brink, what did you do?' ... I don't want to have to answer him, 'I didn't do enough.'"

Touching as that is, it shows no concern at all for the very real consequences of failing to compromise. When asked about the potential disaster of failing to raise the debt ceiling, Trey Gowdy, who is my representative from the 4th Congressional district, rather self-righteously dismissed the question: "What is one person's intransigence is another person's deeply held conviction."

What Gowdy is really saying is that he values his own "convictions" above the national interest. He will follow his convictions, and if the result is financial disaster, and another Great Depression, that's not his responsibility. He is only responsible to his personal convictions.

Gowdy's refusal to accept any responsibility for his actions is stunning, and as I've noted before (here and here), typical of the baneful influence of South Carolina's most famous senator, John C. Calhoun.

In the same speech quoted above, Lincoln succinctly summed up this mindset:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is, that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This attitude is deeply, fundamentally, undemocratic. That is what is so dangerous politically about the situation in which the United States finds itself today. Above and beyond the financial dangers, we are facing a test of our political system. That system values process over any specific outcome.  Whether they realize it or not, these freshmen representatives, and the rest of the Tea Party radicals, value results over process.

There is no need for the nation to be staring into the abyss of financial chaos. Like the pre-Civil War fire-eaters, they have created a crisis, confident that they can get their way--one, by the way, which they know--they know--they cannot get through the normal democratic process--by putting a gun to the nation's head.

They blithely, like Lincoln's highwayman, tell us that the rest of us will be to blame if we force them to wreck the economy because our "deeply held conviction" tells us compromise, not blackmail, is the right way to go.

There is an extremely important principle at stake here: that the American government should not be forced to function with a gun to its head. If the highwaymen get their way, they will do incalculable damage to the nation's political system. It is well past time for leaders in both parties, not just one, to recommit to process over results, and put an end to this unnecessary, dangerous, and manufactured crisis.

Judicial Filibuster Flip-Floppery

Flip-flops are fairly common in politics, but this one is a doozy.

Eight years ago, shortly after joining the Senate, Lindsey Graham considered filing a lawsuit against the Senate to challenge the constitutionality of filibustering judicial nominees.

Last week, Graham voted to filibuster a judicial nominee.

Eight years ago, of course, there was a Republican president.  So Graham, along with Georgia's Saxby Chambliss, led "a charge to file a lawsuit against the very Senate they now serve in, challenging the constitutionality of Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominees."  Roll Call reported:

"Lindsey Graham and I have talked seriously and extensively about this," Chambliss said, noting that it would be some time before a final decision is made and the lawsuit actually filed. "We’re thinking through it, we’ve got people researching it."

In 2005, Graham said that "if the filibuster becomes an institutional response where 40 senators driven by special interest groups declare war on nominees in the future, the consequence will be that the judiciary will be destroyed over time."

Last week, Graham and 42 senators (41 of them Republicans) voted to filibuster President Obama's nominee, Goodwin Liu.  South Carolina's other senator, Jim DeMint, who in 2005 said “denials of simple votes on judicial nominees” are “unconstitutional,” joined Graham in this "unconstitutional" vote.

This nominee has become a litmus test on the radical right.  A website, Impeach Obama Campaign, has made much of this nominee, noting with outrage that "Liu has spent the last few years lecturing about his disdain for the U.S. Constitution. ‘[S]trict construction,’ he wrote in the Stanford Law Review, '[doesn't] make a lot of sense.'"

The constitutional originalists might be shocked to learn this, but you know who else thought that strict construction doesn't make a lot of sense? Alexander Hamilton.  In his 1791 argument for a national bank, Hamilton skewered the Jeffersonian case based on strict construction.  Writing of the necessary and proper clause, Hamilton argues that “the whole turn of the clause containing it, indicates that it was the intent of the convention, by that clause, to give a liberal latitude to the exercise of the specified powers.” Somehow the posers who claim to venerate the Founders always seem to forget that.

The assertion that opposition to strict construction is somehow radical is laughable, so Liu's opponents have take to citing Liu's strong opposition to Justice Alito's confirmation as justification for blocking an up-or-down vote.  The New York Times reports that this is Graham's excuse for his hypocrisy:

“These statements about Judge Alito and the decisions he’s rendered and his philosophy are designed to basically say that people who have the philosophy of Judge Alito are uncaring, hateful and really should be despised,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and one of the architects of the 2005 judicial compromise. “That is a bridge too far, because I share Judge Alito’s philosophy.”

And there Graham gives it away: he opposes the nominee because he disagrees with the nominee's philosophy (and he thinks the nominee insulted his own philosophy).  Does he expect Barack Obama to appoint judges who share his views?  Elections have consequences, and Graham's man McCain was decisively defeated in 2008.

Almost exactly six years ago, on May 24, 2005, Graham said: "we can treat our judicial nominees better, because if you institutionalize a filibuster, if every nominee is subject to having their life treated like these people have been treated, good men and women will not want to be judges; and that'd be a great loss for this country."

Evidently Graham only considers it a great loss if Republican men and women don't want to be judges.  Or, perhaps, he just felt the heat from conservatives in South Carolina and decided he had to appease them with this vote.  Either way, he's shown that when it comes to judicial nominations, he has no principles, just political interests.

14th Nervous Breakdown

My last post noted that the coverage of the Delaware senate debates had unfairly characterized Christine O'Donnell's comments on the First Amendment.  Perhaps even more egregious, however, was the lack of attention given to another of O'Donnell's answers to a constitutional question.

O'Donnell was asked in the same debate if she agrees with calls by other Tea Party candidates to repeal all or part of the 14th, 16th, and 17th Amendments to the Constitution.  O'Donnell was quick to deny any interest in repealing the 17th amendment—which is not a bad idea for someone running for senate, since it is the amendment that gave the voters, rather than state legislators, the right to choose senators. (For an earlier discussion of this issue, see here.)

What is noteworthy is the rest of O'Donnell's response.  She did not know what either the 14th or 16th Amendments were.  Laughing nervously, she said: “I’m sorry, I didn’t bring my Constitution with me.”  Doing her best impression of Sarah Palin, she tried to laugh off her ignorance and quipped: “Fortunately, senators don’t have to memorize the Constitution. Can you remind me of what the other ones are?"

That's true enough, memorizing the Constitution isn't a requirement for office.  But when you premise your candidacy in large part on your superior fidelity to the Constitution, is it too much to ask that you know what is actually in it?

After all, these are hardly the most obscure amendments.  I'll admit that I don't have all the amendments committed to memory either.  I could not tell you off the top of my head what, say, the 8th Amendment says (it bans excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment).  But these two I know, as should someone like O'Donnell who self-identifies with the Tea Party.

The 16th empowered Congress to levy the income tax, the relevance of which to Tea Partiers is self-evident.  And the 14th Amendment has been much in the news, ever since Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) proposed repealing its provision for birth citizenship.

But the 14th Amendment does far more than that.  It arguably represents the most important single change in the Constitution in American history.  It made clear that the states did not have the power to deny citizens any of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.  It guarantees all of us due process rights and equal protection of the laws.

It was, in many ways, an answer to the states rights doctrine of the Confederacy, and it created one nation.  As Eric Foner writes in his authoritative account Reconstruction, 1863-1877, some amendments

are broad statements of principle, giving constitutional form to the resolution of national crises, and permanently altering American nationality.  The Fourteenth Amendment was a measure of this kind.  In language that transcended race and region, it challenged legal discrimination throughout the nation and changed and broadened the meaning of freedom for all Americans.

The reason that this amendment is so important, and the reason some radical conservatives might not be entirely comfortable with it, is that in the words of a contemporary observer, "the powers of the States have been limited and the powers of Congress extended."  It meant that the states "could no longer infringe upon the liberties the Bill of Rights has secured against federal violation."

Although it took nearly another one hundred years, the foundation established by the 14th Amendment is what made possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (whose constitutionality has been challenged by another Tea Party candidate, Rand Paul).

It is bad enough that a senatorial candidate today could be ignorant of what the 14th Amendment is.  It is even worse that a sitting senator from one of the states whose wholesale disregard of civil rights prompted it in the first place is proposing that we tamper with this essential amendment.  But worst of all is the fact that, in this bizarre election year, neither of these things seems to merit any notice at all (much less outrage) from the electorate.