When the Yes Men Have It
MSI,
Here's a thoughtful opinion piece on the nature of hubris that envelopes imperial presidencies. The lessons from our Viet Nam experience are probably lost on a gunslinger like Imperator George. He's got a Central Asia dream that just won't be saddled with sanity......
washingtonpost.com
When the Yes Men Have It By Richard Cohen
Thursday, May 23, 2002; Page A33
On a recent Saturday, an infinitesimal number of Americans sat down to watch "Path to War," a nearly three-hour TV movie about how Lyndon Johnson became a casualty of the Vietnam War. This admirable and absorbing HBO movie begins with Johnson's exuberant hootin' and hollerin' inaugural ball and ends, dismally, with his White House speech announcing that he would not, as expected, seek reelection. Instead, he was actually planning to go home to Texas and die.
I saw this movie at a screening that was followed by a panel discussion about whether Johnson had been accurately portrayed. Richard Holbrooke, the longtime diplomat and old Vietnam hand, said the movie was right on target. David Halberstam, a historian of the war and much else, said LBJ had been treated too kindly.
Who's right? For the sake of this column, I don't particularly care. What matters more to me is how policy is made -- step by step -- sometimes by yes men with no views of their own, sometimes by strong advisers who are on intimate terms with certainty. In either case the outcome is the same: a smug unanimity, an aversion to dissent, a tendency to conflate the good of the president with the good of the nation and, in all but the most comfortable ranges, an acute loss of hearing.
Now, once again, we have a president from Texas who always cared more about his domestic program than anything to do with foreign policy. Now, once again, we have a president who neatly divides the world into good and evil -- and is amazed that others don't see it that way. Now, once again, we have a president who has set us on a course -- confrontation with Iraq -- that may or may not be the wise course of action but that seems to have nearly universal support within the administration and Congress.
What's more, we also now have an administration that is intent on keeping congressional busybodies at bay. Whether it is the names of the gas and oilmen Dick Cheney met with or a willingness to invoke the word "war" as a way of stifling debate, this White House does not like to be questioned. I get the sense the wagons are being circled around a president who, as we all know, is incurious enough to begin with.
At the moment, the administration is fighting a proposal to have an independent commission investigate how the government handled the terrorist threat before Sept. 11. The preliminary conclusion such a commission presumably would make is: not well. This is not to say that Bush himself was negligent or incompetent but rather that various government agencies bobbled the ball. The goal of such a panel would not be to assign blame or punish but merely to find out what went wrong and ensure it does not happen again. Maybe -- who knows? -- it would conclude that after years of trying to starve the government, conservatives got precisely what they paid for -- agencies, such as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, that barely functioned.
All administrations zealously guard their secrets -- and, of course, all mistakes are secret. But where this administration reminds me of the one HBO put on the screen the other night is in its swaggering arrogance. Especially in foreign policy, it came into office with a cockiness produced by ideology, a Kennedy-esque quality of being born for the moment. Multilateralism was bad. Most treaties stink. Rogue states were the real enemy. Missile defense was the top priority. And, oh, yeah, Bill Clinton was a dummy for getting so involved in the Middle East.
Now much of that has been junked. But the same group of supremely smug advisers still motors to the White House for Cabinet and other meetings. They still clutch their secrets away from prying eyes and invoke the war to reject inquiry. They pretend that they always knew what they were doing even though, manifestly, they did not. Maybe no one could. Probably that is the case.
Often nowadays, when Vietnam gets mentioned, the word gets coupled with another: syndrome. The war left us too cautious, unwilling to use force, crippled by second-guessing and a fear of taking casualties. Evil triumphed because good men trembled. In Vietnam, we lost more than the war -- we lost our nerve.
And yet, if there is such a thing as a Vietnam syndrome, it has to apply not only to the war's aftermath but also to what caused the war in the first place -- a president who heard almost nothing to make him believe he was on the wrong course and who saw his critics only as political opportunists. This is the path George W. Bush must not take. |
