Written by Gordon M. Goldstein is the author of
“Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam.”Lessons in Victory
How J.F.K.'s approach to Vietnam is a model for President Obama.PRESIDENT OBAMA recently told Congressional leaders something many of them did not want to hear. It was time to “dispense with the straw man argument that this is about either doubling down or leaving Afghanistan,” he is said to have declared, frustrating those on both sides of the aisle who have sought to portray the choices in Afghanistan as just such a simplistic dichotomy.
The emerging picture is of a commander in chief trying to chart a middle way through one of the most complex challenges of his young presidency. If so, instructive lessons can be found in the contrasting ways two of his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, navigated a perilous way ahead in Vietnam.
Kennedy’s Vietnam strategy was informed by a pair of harrowing foreign policy crises in 1961 that sobered him to his responsibilities as commander in chief. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion was a humiliation that Kennedy believed would have driven him from office if he had been a British prime minister. He vowed never again to be “overawed by professional military advice.”
That same year, Kennedy was shocked by the half-baked recommendation of his generals to use tactical nuclear weapons against the Communist Pathet Lao movement in Laos, a proposal he decisively dismissed. In this context,
Kennedy was deeply skeptical when his most senior advisers argued in the fall of 1961 that only substantial numbers of American forces could prevent the government of South Vietnam from collapsing. Kennedy nonetheless rejected the deployment of combat troops. But he also rejected the notion of abandoning Saigon. Instead, he chose to chart a middle course.Kennedy favored a strategy of arming and reinforcing the South Vietnamese Army, and of teaching them new counterinsurgency tactics. He increased the number of military advisers assigned to Saigon but maintained a ceiling of about 16,000 men.
By October 1963, operations were deemed sufficiently successful for the White House to announce the withdrawal of 1,000 advisers and its expectation that the advisory mission would be concluded by the end of 1965. At the time of Kennedy’s assassination the following month, the Pentagon had recorded only 108 American military personnel killed.-snip-
There are four lessons from these presidential decisions that remain relevant to Afghanistan today:
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Counselors advise but presidents decide: Kennedy’s ability to execute a middle way in Vietnam led him to reject military strategies he did not find plausible or persuasive. It is the president as commander in chief who must rigorously evaluate and define strategy, not the commander in the field.
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Politics is the enemy of strategy: In a polarized political environment, some constituencies will necessarily be left dissatisfied. Kennedy chose to antagonize the hawks in his administration. Johnson chose to antagonize the doves. Presidents should pick the loser in the debate on strategic grounds, disallowing politics from clouding military decisions.
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Command the generals: A president does not benefit from public disagreements with the military, but his position may be worse if he backs down. Kennedy’s generals in 1961 tried, and failed, to box him in by publicly leaking their proposals to the press. Johnson, in contrast, was so fixated with avoiding a public rift with Westmoreland that he subverted the deliberative process. Dissent should be encouraged in debates about strategy but articulated privately.
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Never deploy military means in pursuit of indeterminate ends: Westmoreland advocated a strategy of coercion in Vietnam in which American forces would inflict such disproportionate costs on the Communist insurgency that its leadership would eventually capitulate. That outcome never came close to occurring. Military force is the wrong instrument for achieving imprecise objectives based on unrealistic goals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18goldstein.html It is amazing to consider how much damage one bullet can do to a country and the world. If JFK wasn't killed... If Lincoln wasn't killed... how different would Reconstruction have been and how that could have changed what followed.
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