Learning the lessons of war policy

Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations and international diplomacy professor at Columbia University writes an excellent piece on lessons to be learned from the Korean and Vietnam conflicts for the current war.

The Right Strategy Isn't Enough

Sestanovich is right that abandoning the South Vietnamese, if a winnable strategy to beat back the Communists who slaughtered and politically imprisoned their own people following American withdrawal, seems shocking to anyone genuinely concerned with the aspirations for some alternative to Communist imposition of those who were left deserted in that withdrawal.

But Sestanovich is right that if abandoning the role of providing nominal security to Iraqis is to be avoided, then the President will have to make the case in terms of the larger policy discussion and engaged Democrats rather than stubbornly following his own path.

As Sestanovich writes:

"Henry Kissinger has long insisted that Watergate kept the United States from helping South Vietnam, but President Bush should know the more dispiriting truth. Americans simply wanted nothing further to do with the place. The struggle between the president and Congress had become so bitter, so corrosive -- such a grudge match -- that the two sides ceased to agree on even the most basic goals. Today it seems shocking that people preferred to let South Vietnam go down rather than help it. But Congress was not solely responsible for this result. The president had done much to undermine his own policy.

Bush may be right that Americans will not long support policies that don't involve trying to succeed. But if he wants to do better than Truman, he'll have to do better than Nixon, too. His debate with Congress on Iraq will unfold much as the Vietnam debate did, and that means it's not enough to have a military plan that could work. Richard Nixon's plan "worked," too, but in four years of implementing it, he lost the political support he needed to keep South Vietnam afloat once our troops were gone.

If this is how Bush succeeds, if he focuses entirely on what's needed to improve things in Iraq in the short term without making his policy more sustainable in America in the long term, we'll have to call it a failure. There's no point learning from the one war unless you learn from the other as well."

The more sustainable path that Sestanovich is speaking of would involve engaging the debate and discussion about how to proceed in Iraq with more intellectual honesty and openness, listening to Democratic concerns and accounting for them, better, in a a policy discussion that works to do right by the Iraqi people while giving assurances to Americans that soldiers' lives will not be sacraficed in vain.

That is a discussion that is not taking place, right now, as Democrats and the Administration and its supporters speak past one another, each vying for political control of the situation rather than engaging with more genuine intellectual honestly and openness about the difficult choices to be made in Iraq.

That is the problem with substituting power for engagement, debate, discussion, and thought. It avoids substantive problems with assertions of authority that miss the point, which is that better policy needs more discussion and thought, not more assertions of authority. Assertions of authority don't account for people's concerns. In fact, they shut down the conversation, as has clearly happened between the President and Congress at this point.

At some point, you would think that one of these smart people would learn this lesson already.

One thing is for sure, though. If this thing goes down as a pissing war rather than as an engaged policy discussion, everyone loses. Everyone fails. It's not just the President's failure, at this point. Democrats control Congress. Failure or success are on their watches, at this point. Things go sour in Iraq, the fingers of blame do not just get pointed at the President. Plenty of fingers to go around the Democratic table as well.

And the most tragic thing is that for 3 years the blame-shifting, finger-pointing, pressure-tactics and other efforts to force this issue have failed, on both sides, so clearly, while many, many Iraqi and American lives have been lost in the effort.

Power is not a substitute for thought. And thought is not advanced by control of any branch of government. Thought is advanced by engaged discussion and debate about how to do right by Iraqis and American soldiers and to clean up the mess that we are now all responsible for, whether we like it or not.

Perhaps Sestanovich's warning will be headed and a more sustainable policy based on genuine and bipartisan efforts to listen and engage one another will be taken seriously. Perhaps some good can be snatched from already so much tragedy in Iraq.

Either the political environment will take a cue from Gerald Ford and take on a more forgiving, open-minded and open-hearted tone and a better policy will be developed out of that discussion and the disagreements that make up that discussion or we will all go down with this ship and forgiveness and open-mindedness and open-heartedness will be necessary to get us through the bitterness and division that will undoubtedly follow that mess.

Why is it so hard to listen to one another and learn from one another independent of political stripes, I wonder?

Because of the need to develop the one thing that political leaders struggle with most, generally:

Humility. The propensity to assume that you might be wrong rather than always assume that you know or that your ideological colors are some kind of substitute for better policy.

Humility is not in strong supply in Washington, D.C. as a general rule, it's true.

But it's what's needed, right now. And perhaps Americans, including our elected officials can dig deep to find some of it. For the sake of Iraqis, Americans, and everyone who has Iraq on their hearts, right now.

This political moment is too sober a season to be lost in the lightning storm of ungrounded polarized politics. There are too many peoples' lives at stake to act like anyone has figured anything out completely. Only a more engaged, humble, open-minded and open-hearted discussion will point us in a better direction.

So many people with liberal educations. You'd think that one of them would have figured out, by now, that all that discussion and debate and reflection they engaged in college was not some form of mental masturbation. That is means something. That this is the reason why intelligent people engage debates and discussions and dialogue. Because they always have much more to learn.

Washington needs a lot more people genuinely talking with each other, right now, and a lot fewer people talking and strong-arming at one another right now.

This is why I have a "Would I want to drink a beer with this political leader?" test. Because better policy is formed when people with some humility and with some sense of their own and others' humanity, good and bad, sit down with one another and hash things out like grown-ups. Rather than forcing themselves upon one another like less evolved primates.

Force is the way of the jungle. Might makes right, and all that.

Civilized people talk with one another. And the most civilized people do it over beers or hot chocolate and in the context of people who have families and loved ones they care about that they are trying to look out for.

That's what Washington needs right now. Stephen Sestanovich is totally right. It needs more sustainable policy, which is found out of engaging one another like friends and human beings and fellow travelers in the great discussions of life, including "What the hell are we going to do about that mess in Iraq?"

That is the humble conversation that most Americans are engaged in, I hope.

And that is the conversation that Congress and the President need to join.

Love,
Ben

Who would have guessed that disillusionment would come in the form of a Democratic majority?

I've been growing old.

I've been settling down quite a bit, lately. Not that my life was really ever all that exciting. But I've been getting more grounded, lately. Many ways nice.

One way not so nice.

I'm learning to live by the rules. All of them.

And I am growing old, quickly.

This is not a favorable way to grow old. It's just something over which you have very little control as a mature adult. You learn to compromise with all the petty ways that others seek to control you, whether they have an business controlling you or not.

This is why people talk so badly about growing old. It may be the reason why so many peoples' music sounds so uninspired in their old age or why they often get meaner and more defeated as they get older.

Because there is nothing inspired or inspiring about this kind of growing old.

The sad thing for me is that now I get to join the millions of other old people who harken back to their freer days of youth and wait for young people to inject inspiration in their lives because they've had all the winds taken out of their sails, ironically, by the very rules and controls that they so passionately advocate and self-righteously believe to signify their still passionate commitment to...something.

Most adults are kind of petty and small-minded, is the truth. But knowing that about others and less about themselves, they advocate all kinds of stupid shit in their lives that creates cynicism for all of them.

I say them because I barely feel like an adult, in this sense. I've definitely made peace with the idea that mature adulthood involves learning to compromise with the power-hunger of my fellow and far wiser grown-ups.

But I have no interest in wanting to control others in the way that my wiser brethren advocate. I think it's because I'm naive about people. I just don't recognize just how much wiser my fellow countrymen are than me and how much better position they are to know what is good for me and everyone, really, than I am myself. I'm trying to learn to do the bidding of others better. I'm just not a very grateful servant, I suppose.

And the irony is, really, that the time when my disillusionment and cynicism would be most pronounced in my life is when I became a servant for the party that presumably wants to lift everyone from servant status.

The Democratic Party.

(Except when you stop to consider that it was the Democratic party that defended slavery and segregation in the Old South. They were much wiser than those servants too. Some things never change, I suppose).

It's terribly ironic, really, except when you consider that Democrats have always wanted to liberate every servant but their own. Something tells me that Teddy Kennedy does not do his own laundry. But thank goodness I have him and President Bush to look after me and other ordinary Janes and Joes like myself who just wouldn't know what to do in this big bad world without them. That's why those guys deserve the big bucks and the big power. Because house slaves like me just wouldn't be able to survive outside of the plantation without their generosity.

And just like when I was a kid and the only thing I could do to maintain any kind of sanity with adults who were barely literate and who barely hid their hypocrisy always telling me what to do and what was good and right in the world, the only way I can maintain my sanity as an grown man is to comment on the bizarre and yet curiously similar state of affairs of adults who are barely literate and who barely hide their hypocrisy always telling me what to do and what is good and right in the world.

Who knew that disillusionment would come in the form of a Democratic majority, the party that I have identified with for, by far, the largest proportion of my life (I voted Republican in my first election, out of identification with my conservative friends and coach, at the time. Otherwise, my life has been as liberal as a John Lennon's male hairdresser smoking crack; except for this next election, so it looks.)

Hope springs eternal in a democracy, I suppose. That's what makes it the best worst form of government. Even as you sit through Robert Byrd's Democratic bloviations or Jesse Helms' Republican bullheadedness, there is always hope that blowhards and bullies don't run the show.

Until being a blowhard and a bully becomes the central governing philosophy for the majority party, that is.

Here's to one of the most important qualities of a democracy: the capacity to throw the bums out.

Democrats. I'm already sick of them.

Love,
Ben