Trump Isn’t The First President To ‘Stay The Course.’

The first meeting that Lyndon Johnson held when he came back from Dallas in 1963 as President was a meeting that had been scheduled by his predecessor to figure out what to do about Viet Nam. The problem was very simple: despite a regime change engineered by the CIA and despite a growth in U.S. troop strength from roughly 1,200 to 15,000 between 1961 and 1963, the government in Saigon was unable to maintain even the slightest control over large swatches of the countryside and without additional U.S. forces the country was going over to the Viet Cong.
These troops were still classified as ‘advisors’ and direct combat activity by U.S. forces would not begin until the following year. But the fact is that at every meeting held between Johnson and various military or civilian experts on Viet Nam, the one issue which was never seriously discussed was whether the U.S. should have been in Viet Nam at all. In 1966, when Johnson’s popularity began to plummet he said, “I will not be the first American President to lose a war.” And this statement would remain the basic foundation of our Viet Nam strategy until we were chased out in 1973.
You would think that after we lost thr lives of 60,000 young men as well as causing the deaths of maybe a million inhabitants of Southeast Asia that we might actually learn something from such a mistaken approach. But when Trump went in front of his teleprompters to tell us about what he’s going to do in Afghanistan, which was a quick and easy way to avoid talking about what he didn’t do after Charlottesville, it was as if they went into the closet, dusted off an old LBJ or Richard Nixon speech on Viet Nam and trotted the same, mistaken crap out again. Here’s what Trump says will happen:
- “Our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives.” Ever hear Nixon talk about peace with honor?
- “A hasty withdrawl would create a vacuum for terrorists.” An updated version of the domino theory. Didn’t Trump host Henry Kissinger at the White House in May?
- “I concluded that the security threats we face in Afghanistan and the broader region are immense.” Remember the 1970 ‘incursion’ into Cambodia? That one really stabilized the Southeast Asian region.
Behind the newest version of smoke and mirrors, however, trhere lies an even greater parallel between what happened in Viet Nam and what may well happen in Afghanistan. We were told again and again that the reason the Viet Cong controlled the countryside was because they forced residents to do what they were told. They used physical and mental coercion, often brute force, and we were ‘liberating’ the country from what was otherwise a punitive and vicious military force.
Isn’t that the same story we are being sold on Al Queda, ISIS and the Islamic State? Those are the ‘bad’ guys; we’re the ‘good’ guys — our job is not to invade but to protect and save the people from an otherwise terrible fate.
There’s only one little problem. This wasn’t true in Viet Nam and it’s not true in Afghanistan now. The latest estimates place the Taliban in control of perhaps as much as half the country, and whatever the actual percentage of territory under their sway, this number has been going up, not down. And the reason it keeps going up is because the only reason the Kabul government exists at all is because of the United States.
Which was the only reason why the South Vietnamese government lasted until 1973.
