Chris Cillizza at The Fix:
52That’s the percentage of Americans who believe the war in Afghanistan has turned into a situation like the one the United States faced in Vietnam, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey.
That a majority of the CNN sample believe there is a direct correlation between Afghanistan and Vietnam should be of significant concern to the Obama administration given the lingering influence of the three-decades old conflict on the American psyche and the president’s upcoming decision regarding troop levels in the country.
The difficulties of “winning” the war in Vietnam — a hard-to-pin-down enemy, uncertain goals that changed frequently — turned that conflict into a political nightmare, playing a major role in President Lyndon Johnson‘s decision not to run for reelection in 1968 and vexing President Richard Nixon for years as well. These challenges are also frequently cited in describing the current situation in Afghanistan.
The specter of Vietnam shadowed the political process for decades after the war ended — with Democrats spending years trying to convince the American public that they could be tough on foreign countries when the situation demanded it.
Obama’s predecessor, famously, prided himself on not caring about public opinion while making decisions about Iraq. By contrast, we don’t really have a clear sense of how Obama views the importance of public opinion in making such decisions.
The other day, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs suggested that public opinion doesn’t weigh on Obama’s mind, saying that the President would make a decision on what’s best for Americans whether it’s “popular or unpopular.”
Obama, however, is a student of history, and he surely knows that public opinion is an actual factor in whether a war can be prosecuted successfully. My bet is that his view of the matter is far more complex than Gibbs implied — and that he does view public opinion as an important factor to weigh in determining the way forward.
Either way, one thing to watch for will be how the president himself addresses the importance of public opinion in explaining his eventual decision on how to proceed — and how he explains himself should he decide to defy the public’s wishes. It will give us an important glimpse into what this young and largely untested leader is made of and how he views his presidency.
Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic:
According to political science literature, war and public opinion intermix in several, fairly circumscribed ways. When a conflict begins, particularly as troops are leaving the homeland for the first time, people tend to support the Commander in Chief — a rally round the flag effect, as John Meuller of the University of Ohio calls it.
For a war of more than a brief duration, several theories have been put forth. One is that the public looks to elites for cues about how to react. The elite, right now, clearly believe that the war in Afghanistan is going poorly; ergo, the public’s growing opposition is just a reflection. Another theory holds that the public is capable of assessing risks and benefits and does so fairly independently of the elite. Mueller has written that, as the human costs of war inevitably accumulate, the public will inevitably come to oppose a war whose duration exceeds expectations. There is some evidence that support for a war is linked to — and the direction here isn’t clear — presidential approval more than it is to casualty levels or an appraisal of whether the war is going well or not. Peter Feaver, a Duke professor who served in the Bush administration, believes that “support for war is a function of two attitudes: the retrospective attitude of whether the war was the right thing in the first place, and the prospective attitude of whether the war will be won.”
In his mind, the Obama administration isn’t sending the right cues. If Obama doesn’t say that he thinks the war will be won — only that it must be fought — he is betraying a doubt that public opinion will come to reflect — and has come to reflect. In other words — is something in America’s interest if Americans don’t think it’s in their interest?
Bruce Drake at Politics Daily
Opposition to a second troop deployment order this year is high. Within that cohort, support for full withdrawal is a plurality. The contradictions heighten. Steve Biddle: the poll vindicates you!
Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman at WSJ:
The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books — both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts.
The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack Obama recently finished the book, according to administration officials, and Vice President Joe Biden is reading it now.
The second describes a different administration, in 1972, when a U.S. military that has finally figured out how to counter the insurgency is rejected by political leaders who bow to popular opinion and end the fight.
It has been recommended in multiple lists put out by military officers, including a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who passed it out to his subordinates.
I find the idea that senior military and civilian policymakers are debating what to do in Afghanistan primarily by reading different books about Vietnam depressingly plausible. But there’s really something quite perverse about the American tendency to want to turn every conversation about every military engagement into a rehash of debates about Vietnam.
I’ll note in particular that hawks’ obsession with Lewis Sorley’s A Better War is pretty pathological. Whether or not you buy what Sorley is saying about military operations in Vietnam, you can understand the war on a strategic level without ever worrying about Creighton Abrams. Vietnam wasn’t, after all, an abstract exercise in U.S. military prowess. It was part of the Cold War. The hawks’ claim was that Communist victory in Vietnam would imperil the credibility of US commitment to key allies in Europe and Japan and set off a “domino effect” that threatened US national security. The doves said that was dumb, and Communist victory in Vietnam would have no dire geopolitical consequences.
We left Vietnam, and the doves were proven utterly and completely right about the main strategic issue.
Meanwhile, it’s really not clear that thinking about Vietnam can tell us anything at all about Afghanistan. And not just because the countries are different but because the situations are so different. I’ve been reading about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, which is at least the same country, but the presence or absence of superpower competition makes an enormous difference.
I generally agree with Matthew Yglesias that comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam aren’t particularly useful. But I do think it’s quite useful to note that the hawkish arguments for Afghanistan and Vietnam are the same. (Likewise Iraq, Bosnia, Lebanon, etc.)
The argument goes: If we fail in [fill in the blank), the world will stop taking us seriously and the bad guys will be empowered. If (fill in the blank) goes down, then the whole region will soon follow. We have to send a message that we are drawing the line at (fill in the blank.)
Since none of these predictions have ever come to pass, regardless of whether or not we stayed or left, I feel fairly confident that those particular reasons can be filtered out. Unfortunately, they are still the reasons being touted today for an escalation in Afghanistan. Therefore, I am very, very, very skeptical. Those who don’t learn from experience are … dumb. Vietnam was huge object lesson in the power of the superpower. Likewise Afghanistan for the USSR. There are lessons to be learned.
On the other hand, if what we want is to create a central Asian outpost for the American Empire, then I suppose it makes some sense. But let’s not kid ourselves about the reasons anymore. At my age, I’ve heard them so often that it actually embarrasses me to have to listen to them again.
