Afghanistan: LBJ, Obama and the Obvious

I have never been in the military. Never been to war.

On the other hand, you don't have to jump off a cliff to know you don't want to do it.

The fact is, I've seen this movie before.

I've seen it every evening during college, when I gathered with my classmates in the TV room of our college dormitory and watched Walter Cronkite and the daily clips from Viet Nam.  And what we saw there made the truth obvious. We could see it so clearly. We could not believe President Johnson could not see it. We thought he had to be lying because the truth was so obvious and he kept denying it. 

Later, listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes of his phone conversations in the Oval Office, it became apparent, actually, Johnson had been unable to see it. He was even more stupid than we thought he was. He was very smart when it came to farm bills and civil rights and a lot of other things, but when it came to Viet Nam, he was unfathomably obtuse.

He could not grasp what Walter Cronkite was telling him every single night: You cannot win a war when the enemy is embedded in the entire population, in fact derives from the population, unless you live there yourself.

We could win the Civil War because the South knew the Union soldiers were never going home. Well, maybe the soldiers were going back home, but that was just up the road, not half a world away.

Johnson asked his trusted friend, Senator Richard Russell, a good old boy from Georgia, what he thought Johnson ought to do about Viet Nam. And Russell replied, "Well, Mr. President, someday we got to come home."

"Yes," Johnson said. "We do."

"And the thing is, Mr. President," Russell said, benignly, "They know that, too."

Johnson clearly got the point.

Some far, smart as he is about some things, President Obama does not.