Commander in Chief

Introduction This is a story of three unwinnable wars in an age of unwinnable wars: Harry Truman and Korea, Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, and George W. Bush and Iraq. The end result will be that in another generation, roughly twenty-five years from now, the Global War on Terror (or GWOT) will still be under way. The answer to the suicide bomber will still be sought. When the inhabitants of John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" gaze around from their place on the high ground as the world burns, they will wonder, Whatever happened to American power? They may well ask. The last classical war was World War II. For more than two hundred years major wars had clear beginnings and clear endings. Since 1945, we have had a new kind of revolutionary warwars that develop rather than erupt, wars without declarations of war, wars without surrenders. Their beginnings are murky, their conclusions unclear. They are tests of stamina rather than strength, more likely than not to sow the seeds of future wars. And since 1945 the United States has chosen to place itself in the forefront of fighting them. As it did so, the role of commander in chief was thrust at critical moments onto men who took counsel of their fears, beginning with Harry S. Truman. In three wars of choice, Truman, Johnson, and George W. Bush followed what was essentially the same script. At a time of high emotion they acted on their own visceral responses, ignoring the advice of the military and of major allies. Truman made the decision to intervene in Korea without consulting anyone, and when he did so, he also intervened in the Chinese civil war, something he had vowed not to do. Why? Because in June 1950 the White House was facing something close to hysteria in the mainstream press and on Capitol Hill over "Who lost China?" and over Senator Joe McCarthy's claim that there were "205 known Communists" in the State Department. Truman was also under direct attack from Republicans in Congress for being indecisive in fighting the Cold War. When the North Koreans thrust across the 38th parallel, a deeply emotional president struck back, for all the wrong reasons. Similarly, the assassination of John F. Kennedy had an impact on the American psyche that had to be lived through to be understood. That impact affected the emotionally volatile Lyndon Johnson as much as anyone. Without believing for a moment that the United States could win in Vietnam, Johnson chose to turn a small brushfire war into one of the twentieth century's biggest conflicts. Emotion was stronger than judgment, and in the end, not even Johnson could make sense of why he had done what he did. Yet the answer was not hard to find: once again domestic politics had overruled national security. Finally, after September 11, Americans needed an Arab and Muslim country on which to take revenge. George W. Bush's visceral response was, "Can we attack Iraq?" For him, Saddam Hussein was a long-standing obsession, dating from before his presidency. He believed the story that Saddam had tried to assassinate his father during a visit George H. W. Bush made to Kuwait in 1993. Saddam, to him, became "the guy who tried to kill my dad." He resented, too, the criticism of his father for leaving Saddam in power at the conclusion of the Gulf War. Overthrowing Saddam would, finally, put that right. Bush was also trapped by an inflated paradigm. "We are at war," Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld told him, and Bush agreed. A war in which America could bring all of its military power to bear would have appealed to any president at that moment. But not every president would have acted on it. Bush had trapped himself by believing in an assassination attempt that maPerret, Geoffrey is the author of 'Commander in Chief' with ISBN 9780374531270 and ISBN 0374531277.