Everybody is looking for a Vietnam connection.
Bush's War Strategy Looks Like a Steal of Nixon's
James P. Pinkerton
November 18, 2003
The Republican president knew that the unpopular foreign war was hurting him politically. Indeed, the Democrat challenging him in the upcoming national election had based his come-from-nowhere campaign on a strong anti-war message.
So the Republican in the White House devised a two-part strategy to win re-election.
First, he would arrange for U.S. troops to be mostly withdrawn before Election Day. In doing so, the Oval Office holder was abandoning all the reasons for going to war in the first place, but that was the way it had to be.
Second, he kept the Republican base pumped up by promising "victory." That also helped to keep the remaining American troops motivated, since the administration couldn't afford to lose the war before the election.
These two messages were, of course, completely contradictory. On the one hand, the White House said, America would be getting its troops out of harm's way. On the other hand, the United States was going to win. Just a few days before the election, the incumbent sealed the deal; his top diplomat came home from negotiations with the enemy, bringing news of an honorable end to the war. That peace pledge cut the legs out from under the anti-war Democrat. The Republican was overwhelmingly re-elected.
We don't know yet if this is the scenario for the 2004 presidential campaign, but we do know that it was the scenario for the 1972 campaign, in which the Republican president was Richard Nixon, the Democratic challenger was George McGovern, and the war was Vietnam. Today, it looks as if Nixon's role will be played by George W. Bush, McGovern's by Howard Dean - and Iraq is the new Vietnam.
Interestingly, the mastermind of Bush's '04 campaign, White House politico-in-chief Karl Rove, remembers that '72 election contest quite well. He was a young Nixon campaigner back then, but he was old enough to see what worked.
So let's go back in time three decades, so that we can know what Rove knows - and maybe guess what his Bush White House will do. By the early '70s, the American public had turned against the Vietnam War. So Nixon embarked upon "Vietnamization" - the idea was that the South Vietnamese would take over the fighting.
The official line was that a democratic South Vietnam would repulse the Communist North Vietnam. It was all a lie, of course, because the South Vietnamese government was neither democratic nor effective on the battlefield. But the prospect of American withdrawal played well in what would later be known as the "blue states," those more liberal, dovish places in the North and along the Pacific Coast.
Yet at the same time, Nixon had to keep the "red states" happy, too. So he declared that America would never "cut and run," that the United States would insist on "peace with honor." Those words always got cheers from red staters, from the Okies from Muskogee, to draw upon the title of a popular country-and-western song of the day.
Nixon clinched his re-election on Oct. 26, 1972, when his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, returning from talks with the North Vietnamese, announced, "Peace is at hand." That was good enough to sew up both red and blue states; Nixon won 49 of 50 a week later.
Of course, since it was all a fraud, it wasn't long before the peace treaty unraveled. Less than three years later, in April 1975, the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam.
Today, echoing "Vietnamization," the Bush administration touts "Iraqification." Mysteriously, that process keeps accelerating as the election draws nearer. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), who voted for the war, recalled recently, "When I was in Iraq in June, I was told it would take five years to recruit and train 75,000 cops and three years to recruit and train a 40,000-man army." And now, just five months later, the administration claims that it has 130,000 Iraqis under arms. Is that huge improvement a miracle of nation-building, or is it a miracle of election-spinning?
Like Nixon before him, Bush insists that the war is going well, that our ally is democratizing. And maybe Bush, who is no Nixon, really believes it. But Karl Rove, ex-Nixon man, believes in re-election, and that means getting out of the war before Election Day 2004. It's a plan that's worked before.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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