Bush’s original sin was to politicize U.S. intervention in Iraq. He used the war to transform an aimless presidency into one of Churchillian dimensions, and now that it’s all turned sour, he has nothing to fall back on. Bush is as beleaguered now as Lyndon Johnson was during Vietnam—with one key difference. The worse the news is from Iraq, the more positive Bush is that he’s right. As Vietnam raged on, Johnson became less certain he was doing the right thing.
Victory no longer appears possible in Iraq, yet Bush’s rhetoric is more bullish than ever about the correctness of his course. U.S. forces are not leaving Iraq as long as he’s president. His model is Prime Minister Winston Churchill, defeated by an ungrateful British public after leading the country through war, a lonely figure vindicated by history. To achieve stability in Iraq, Thomas Ricks, Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post and author of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq” (Penguin 2006), says U.S. forces can expect to stay for 10 to 15 years, on top of the three they’ve already been there. “And that’s the optimistic scenario,” he says.
We learned from tapes of phone conversations released years after the fact how skeptical Johnson was that the war in Southeast Asia could be won, and how he worried about the senselessness of sending people to die there. His dilemma, which he articulates, is that he didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. In the spring of ‘64, well before the major troop escalation, Johnson had serious doubts about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. “It just worries the hell out of me … I don’t think it’s worth fighting for,” he told his national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy.
In his public utterances Johnson talked of “the progress” made in Vietnam, describing things as he wanted them to be, as if he believed that by the force of his will he could transform what was or had already happened, writes Doris Kearns Goodwin in her 1976 biography of LBJ. He was spending long hours choosing among bombing targets and awaking at three in the morning fretting that some errant bomb might inadvertently spark war with China or Russia. Privately he was tormented, uncertain about the course he was on and unable to muster the political courage to change. The public knew nothing of his anguish until he abruptly withdrew from the presidential primaries in March of ‘68, coupling his stunning announcement with a statement that he would begin to de-escalate American involvement in Vietnam.
If Bush is experiencing any self-doubt about the course he has thrust upon the country, he didn’t show it in his nearly hour-long press conference on Monday. “Presidents care about whether people support their policies,” Bush said in response to a question. “Of course I care.” But he added, leaning into the podium and eyes blazing. “I’m going to do what I think is right and if people don’t like me for it, that’s just the way it is.”
The more we learn about the policymaking that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the more frightening the picture becomes. Bush’s policies did not undergo rigorous analysis. Dissent was equated with disloyalty, and young Americans were led into battle with the worst war plan in the country’s history, according to Ricks, who is extremely knowledgeable and no softie. Any leader who commits young men and women to battle must have private doubts. They wouldn’t be human if they didn’t. We know Johnson did and failed to act on them. Doesn’t Bush have any doubts?
Bush believes victory is possible in Iraq if only he perseveres. True enough, the history of the region is yet to be written, but in the short term—say the next generation—the prospects are grim. “The name of the game right now is not achieving victory—it is preventing a major defeat from becoming a catastrophic defeat,” says Dr. Ernest Evans, a military scholar who teaches at several schools connected to the U.S. Army Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “I would define a major defeat as pulling out of Iraq and leaving behind complete chaos. I would define a catastrophic defeat as attacking Iran in a desperate effort to salvage Iraq and igniting a regional war. These are the painful choices before the Republic.”