The Agony and the Clarity -- Iraq is Not Yet Vietnam?

Iraq is not yet Vietnam, but neither was Vietnam when the USA began military operations in 1956. When Americans today use the word “Vietnam,” we are mainly referring to the ideological civil war that erupted ten years later, and finally achieved armistice in 1973 when American troops were withdrawn. Few of the combatants in that ideological war have withdrawn from their positions.

If God is unwilling or we are unlucky, before Americans go to the polling booths on November 2, 2004, we will have to ask and answer again the “Vietnam” questions of means and ends, moral imperatives and appeasement. The similarity between the moral, policy and political issues that are now arising from the invasion of Iraq and the issues as they were framed and fought during 1965-73 is simply too great to ignore.

Rationale Creep

In both Vietnam and Iraq, USA’s rationale for initiating military operations was based on national security. Sooner (Iraq) or later (Vietnam), however, the rationale for sustaining military action shifted to the defense of the American values of freedom and democracy.

Eisenhower sent military “advisors” to Vietnam in the mid-1950’s because his administration saw that country through the Cold War lens of the global confrontation between communism sponsored by Russia and China, and capitalism sponsored by the democracies of the west. Looking into the future through this lens, advocates of military action in Vietnam saw all the nations of Asia falling -- like dominoes -- under the heel of communist dictatorships. This could only be prevented by drawing a line and defending it, as had been done in North Korea a few years earlier.

This rationale won the day in the mid-1950’s, and still prevailed in 1964-65 when LBJ sent 130,000 combat troops to Vietnam. But during the late 1960’s, many of us began to understand that the struggle between the North and South Vietnamese was but the latest outbreak of ancient ethnic warfare in the region, with a post-colonialist twist. More significantly, we began to understand that this struggle had very little geo-political importance. Yes, the North Vietnamese were being supplied by our Cold War enemies, Russia and China, because it was in their interest to exhaust us. However, unlike Fidel Castro, who in 1962 had allowed his patron to use his country to stage a move of staggering geo-political significance, North Vietnam’s leadership gave Russia and China no geo-political advantage whatsoever, apart from dragging us into the quagmire. Vietnam had no oil, no useful ports or air-bases, and offered no offensive missile siting advantages over existing sites in Russian and China.

As American fatalities rose (some 25,000 by the time LBJ declined to run for a second term in March of 1968), this national security rationale was crumbling in the eyes of more and more Americans. It was simply too theoretical to justify the rising American body count.

In response, the Johnson administration articulated the “freedom and democracy” rationale. In Fog of War, the recent documentary of Robert McNamara’s career trials and triumphs, there is TV news footage of LBJ leaning towards his audience and declaiming in his Texas drawl, “Make no mistake [sound familiar?], we will never waiver in the defense of freedom and democracy in Vietnam.”

The Johnson Administration’s new message to the American people was, “Even if the North Vietnamese aren’t a threat to our national security, they want to impose their evil dictatorship on South Vietnam and neighboring countries. And even if this is a civil war, it’s a civil war between a side that believes in American ideals, and a side whose only objective is to conquer and rule with the iron fist of Ho Chi Minh’s politburo. The American people have a moral obligation to stand up and fight for what we believe in.”

A problem for the Johnson Administration in making this case was that the institutions of democracy in South Vietnam were pretty unimpressive. For most of the American period in Vietnam, the south was a police state ruled corruptly by a succession of strong men. Given the internal and external security threats, of course, the Administration could hardly protest the absence of democratic institutions. Nevertheless, those of us who started focusing on Vietnam in the late ‘60’s couldn’t help noticing how little we had to show for the ten years we had spent trying to bring democracy to South Vietnam. We had succeeded in keeping the South Vietnamese free from rule by the North, but what it had made them free for was not pretty, and not getting prettier.

As we weighed the “freedom and democracy” rationale against the rising death count, every day more of us decided that the war policy was wrong and should be abandoned, even if that meant surrender. We concluded that the benefit of eventually establishing a free and democratic Vietnam did not justify what it would eventually cost in American lives to achieve it.

The Cheney/Bush administration’s rationale for initiating military operations against Iraq in March 2003 was that our national security was threatened by the “gathering storm” of Saddam’s WMD program, and that “the dangers of inaction exceed the dangers of action.” This argument won the day in the US Congress and with a majority of Americans, though it failed most everywhere else in the world, including with people whose governments had been persuaded to join the Coalition.

After regime elimination came a frantic but fruitless search to prove Cheney/Bush had been right about the “gathering storm,” but what they actually found was that for years Saddam’s WMD programs had been gathering dust. Then, as security began to deteriorate in most parts of the country, the Cheney/Bush team shifted ground to embrace three new rationales for the invasion: two based on national defense, the third being the “freedom and democracy” rationale.

The first new rationale was that the enemy resisting us in Iraq is the same as the enemy we declared war on the day after 9/11: terrorism. At his April 13, 2004 press conference, President Bush said, “the terrorist who takes hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid and murders children on buses in Jerusalem and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew. We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on September 11, 2001.”

This attempt to equate all Iraqi resistance to American occupation with terrorism improperly conflates two kinds of action which are fundamentally different from a moral standpoint: attacks against my enemy’s armed forces (road-side bombs near Baghdad, the Beirut attack, the attack on the Cole) is military action, while attacks against my own or my enemy’s civilian population (everything else Bush mentioned) is terrorism. It is incorrect to say that both kinds of attack are “serving the same ideology of murder,” because the ideology behind attacks on enemy soldiers is entirely different from the ideology behind attacks on the enemy’s civilian population. When a Palestinian blows himself up while standing next to an armed Israeli soldier, this is military action. When he blows himself up in a bus full of school children, it is terrorism.

There have been a number of terrorist acts (as I have defined them) in Iraq since the invasion. They may be mostly the work of non-Iraqi terrorist actors (i.e. al-Zarqawi) who have been attracted to that country like flies to fly-paper (a Pentagon image, I believe). The fact that terrorists have shown up in Iraq after the invasion is hardly a persuasive rationale for the invasion. The fact that they are now in Iraq is also not a persuasive rationale for us to remain in Iraq, since they will leave if we leave. They don’t care about Iraq. They care about us, and will follow us wherever we go.

Cheney/Bush’s second new rationale rests on a series of propositions that weaves in the third, “freedom and democracy,” rationale as well. It goes like this: a) the American people will not be truly secure until the creed of Jihad is defeated; b) this creed is bred in the streets, mosques and schools of Arab societies whose autocratic rulers frustrate their democratic aspirations; c) the way to defeat the creed is to replace monarchy and one-party rule with freedom and multi-party democracy in the Arab states; d) the way to do this is to establish freedom and democracy in Iraq whence it will spread (domino-like?) to surrounding Arab states.

A very useful thing about this rationale for Cheney/Bush is that it will take years to test it. A year after regime change in Iraq, things still look pretty much the same in matters political and ideological in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iran. It is a bit worrisome that many more young people in these countries are now wearing Osama bin-Laden T-shirts than before the invasio, but we have to be patient. We’re still a year (or more…) from seeing a proper democracy set up in Iraq. Only after this will it be possible to start testing the validity of this particular domino theory.

Which brings us to the “freedom and democracy” rationale itself. The Weekly Standard and the right-wing core of America now maintain that this is the only rationale that ever really mattered, or was ever needed, to justify regime change. By contrast, the Administration didn’t really step up to this rationale until gathering storm became gathering dust.

The Deputy Secretary of War has offered a candid explanation of how this rationale muddle came about. “Freedom and democracy,” rather than WMD, was always Cheney/Bush’s real reason for the invasion of Iraq, according to Wolfowitz. However, “for bureaucratic reasons,” the White House decided to advance a national security rationale (i.e. WMD) to win Congressional approval for the invasion. We can guess this means that Colin Powell wouldn’t support an invasion based on “freedom and democracy.”

The effort to set up democratic institutions in Iraq began the day hostilities ceased in April, 2003. There have been no elections, and the June 30 transfer of “sovereignty” will not apply to internal security, national defense, foreign policy or the economy (including taxation and the use of oil revenues). An interim constitution has been signed by a number of leaders selected by the US, but key provisions are sharply contested by Ayatollah Sistani, the most influential Shiite in a country that is 60% Shiite. Sistani’s principal demand reportedly is that Islamic law (sharia) and courts should have exclusive jurisdiction over family law and women’s rights. It may turn out that a sovereign Iraqi government cannot succeed without Sistani’s support, and that Sistani will not give his support unless his position on the issue of sharia is accepted.

To most Americans, “freedom and democracy” means “freedom and democracy and a constitution with a bill of rights like ours.” Cheney/Bush are right when they say that most Arabs aspire to freedom and democracy. But they are wrong if they think most Arabs aspire to a bill of rights like ours. So it will surely be interesting to watch what happens to the Iraqi constitution as we go through the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. And if Sistani wins on sharia, it will be interesting to hear Cheney/Bush explain why women’s rights was never really an important of what they meant when they called for “freedom and democracy” in the Arab lands.

A Short Taxonomy of Surrender Monkeys

During the 1965-73 Vietnam War period, the American people could be divided into three groups: the first felt it was good policy for the USA to go to Vietnam in the first place, and good policy to stay there as long as it took to achieve the “freedom and democracy” objective (call this group “whatever it takes.”). The second group felt it had been a mistake to go to Vietnam in the first place, but that we could not leave now because this would be a demonstration of weakness and a betrayal of our allies (call them “quagmire”). The third group felt it was bad policy to stay any longer even if this meant surrender (“cut and run”).

After 1965, as the credibility of the rationales for the war declined while the body count rose, “whatever it takes” folks steadily defected to “quagmire,” then migrated on to “cut and run,” while some folks moved directly from “whatever it takes” to “cut and run.” At the same time, people like me who had started the war in “quagmire” were defecting to “cut and run.” Cheney/Bush are rightly wary of this political history lesson from Vietnam. The vehemence with which they and the core reject the Vietnam = Iraq equation shows just how wary they are.

In the Vietnam days, the “cut and run” crowd were known popularly as “cheeseburger-eating surrender monkeys” (cercopithecus surrendans pax nunc). Recently, to the horror of Cheney/Bush and “whatever it takes,” two new species of c. surrendans have appeared on the scene: cheese-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans gallicus) and paella-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans hispanensis). Many political taxonomists expect the appearance soon of other new species: green curry-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans thaiensis), kielbasa-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans polensis) and, most feared of all, borscht-eating surrender monkeys (c. surrendans russus).

The Agony and the Clarity

Ironically, the biggest difference between then and now will almost certainly turn out not to be the difference between Vietnam and Iraq, but the difference between Cheney/Bush and Johnson/Nixon.

The most telling moment for me in Fog of War was the audio replay of a phone conversation between Johnson and McNamara in which Johnson was responding to McNamara’s request for a further troop increase. Johnson says, “My answer is yes, but my judgment says no.” One would have hoped that McNamara would have responded by saying, “Mr. President, if your judgment says no, then your answer should be no, because the American people have a right to expect that the President will not make decisions against his better judgment.” But he didn’t.

The judgment in question, I think, was the judgment that the cost in lives of escalating the conflict was not worth the benefit either in relation to national security or freedom and democracy for the South Vietnamese. I have not read any of the Johnson biographies, but I can guess that by time LBJ decided not to run for re-election, he had realised he should have followed his judgment much earlier.

Cheney/Bush are, or course, determined to stay the course “for as long as it takes” to achieve freedom and democracy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. While neither of them has publicly said that we should stay the course no matter what the cost in American lives, this is obviously the central question arising from the Vietnam experience. Well-trained politicians “don’t do hypotheticals,” so we shouldn’t expect Cheney/Bush or anyone around them to go there on this question, even or especially when it is posed by journalists or the Kerry campaign.

But if you listen to “whatever it takes,” they clearly do want to go there, and their answer is: “Yes, absolutely, we must stay the course no matter what the cost in American lives, because no cost in blood or treasure is too high to pay to bring freedom and democracy to societies whose rulers subject them to mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation. Along with America’s right to unchallenged, global military supremacy comes the moral obligation for America to use this military power unilaterally to uphold these principles wherever we must.”

So long as Cheney/Bush don’t have to answer the “how-many-lives” question, they can retain the posture of moral clarity on which they pride themselves, and which so delights the core. However, the core will be horrified if cracks appear in the wall of moral clarity and the fog of war begins to seep through. The most feared crack is the one through which it becomes morally legitimate and necessary to weigh means and ends, and worry about achieving the proper balance between the two. Once this genie slips through, moral clarity is shot, moral ambiguity is unleashed, and it will be Vietnam déjà vu all over again.

To this day “whatever it takes” despises LBJ and Nixon equally for cutting and running from Vietnam. They point out correctly that the USA was not defeated militarily by the Vietnamese enemy, but politically by its own failure of will, especially the will of leaders like LBJ and Nixon who, lacking moral clarity, sat in a fog of moral ambiguity and agonised over how many American lives were worth freedom and democracy in Vietnam. (I imagine LBJ agonised more than RMN.)

“Whatever it takes” also despises ordinary “quagmire” types like me who, if things get worse in Iraq, are liable to wobble, weaken, flip-flop, and turn “cut and run” in the same way as LBJ, RMN and the majority of Americans had done by 1973. They despise anyone who believes that no-matter-what-the-cost is an irresponsible approach to public policy, and that leaders who pursue it blindly will eventually put the nation into the kind of morally indefensible position epitomized in Vietnam by the policy of saving villages by destroying them. “Whatever it takes” knows that “quagmire” is out here getting ready to agonise, and that as the body-count rises in Iraq, some of us, and then more and more of us, will demand that our government abandon the cause of freedom and democracy for Iraqis on the grounds because it’s not worth it.

The Dangers of “Inaction”

C. surrendans gallicus is a French species that appeared on the scene in the fall of 2002. The idea of invading Iraq had been mooted by Cheney/Bush, and was taking withering criticism from James Baker and Brent Scowcroft in the op-ed pages. The Vice President chose this decisive moment to utter the clarion credo that “the dangers of inaction exceed the dangers of action” against Saddam Hussein.

Cheney is of course a grand master of straw. No serious critic of his regime-change-by-invasion proposal in the fall of 2002 was advocating a policy of inaction. Not American critics, not French critics, not Patagonian critics. No-one, nowhere was calling for inaction. C. gallicus was advocating a policy of continued containment of Saddam Hussein based on progressively more intrusive UN inspections. What Cheney really meant was that “the dangers of inspection exceed the dangers of invasion,” but to say it that way wouldn’t have had quite the ring he needed. So why not spin a little straw?

It is now clear that the policy of containment-by-inspections was working well, and that if we had continued the policy advocated by c. gallicus, Iraq today would be about as dangerous to Americans and the world as Syria. Furthermore, Iraq tomorrow would be about as dangerous as Libya is today.

Unlike Saddam’s Iraq, which has never instigated any terrorist activity outside its own borders (though it has waged plenty of conventional war across those borders), Moammar Gadhafi’s Libyan regmine carried out the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard. The international response was containment-by-sanctions.

By 2001, after years of defiance, the Colonel had decided to sue for peace, rehabilitation and the lifting of sanctions. Gadhafi negotiated terms with the British, and by the middle of 2002 had agreed to pay the price demanded by the international community: acknowledgment of guilt for Lockerbie, payment of compensation to the families of the victims, and renunciation of WMD. (A message to the core: Gadhafi’s change of heart preceded the invasion of Iraq by at least two years, so please do not claim it as a first fruit of that policy.)

So much for the “dangers of inaction.” As for the “dangers of action,” it is now clear that these included not only the dangers in Iraq: 828 coalition fatalities and thousands of Iraqi fatalities to date, and the growing danger that liberation-turned-occupation will involve American soldiers in urban warfare against an ever-increasing proportion of the Iraqi people for many, many months to come. Cheney’s “dangers of action” also now include many things that have happened outside of Iraq as a consequence of that “action.” These include:

· Madrid commuters experienced one of the dangers of action as they rode to work on March 11, 2004. And if the Vice President believes that London is safer as a result of the invasion, he should spend an afternoon at the recruiting stands that jihadist radicals have set up on Dunstable Road in the suburb of Luton. Business is reportedly brisk, and it takes little imagination to grasp that the same scene is unfolding in thousands of cities throughout Europe and the Middle East.

· The invasion of Iraq has made Afghanistan a more dangerous place than it would have been. If the 130,000 US troops now tied down in Iraq had been deployed to Afghanistan instead, the Taliban would not have regained control over 1/3 of the country’s provinces, and the other 2/3 of the country outside of Kabul would not once again be ruled by warlords.

· The invasion of Iraq has made North Korea a more dangerous place. The diplomatic capital which the Administration spent to keep China on-side in Security Council votes for Iraq invasion would have been better spent pressuring the Chinese to pressure the North Koreans to come to their senses, as would the time and energy of our government’s diplomatic and national security personnel. Since this Administration took office, the North Koreans nuclear weapons count has gone from zero to 4-8, and by 2007 they will be producing six new weapons each year.

· The invasion of Iraq has made the Darfur region of Sudan a more dangerous place than it would have been. It is becoming clear that the (Arab) regime that rules Sudan from Khartoum is in the early stages of a campaign of genocide against the four million blacks who live in Darfur. As a consequence of the Iraq invasion, the USA does not have a spare division to prevent this, and this danger of genocide will therefore have to be ignored.

· Health experts have estimated that a $25 billion malaria prevention program in Africa would save five million lives by 2015. If we also include money to fight tuberculosis, measles, dysentery and cholera, we could probably save fifteen million lives for less than the first $87 billion instalment on the cost of Iraqi freedom. Africa is today a far more dangerous place to live in than it would have been if we had spent this money there rather than in Iraq.

The Vice President is now fond of tarring John Kerry with the brush of c. gallicus by saying that if Kerry were President, Saddam would still be ruling the roost in Baghdad. This is a hard hypothetical to do, but since Cheney started it, I will take up the challenge. For purposes of argument, let’s assume that if Kerry had been president instead of Bush from January 2001, Kerry’s policy towards Saddam would have been the one advocated by c. gallicus.

This policy would have been one of progressively more intrusive inspections by Hans Blix’s UNMOVIC team of experts. The policy would have been that Iraqi obstruction or harassment of UNOMOVIC of any kind would have resulted in the immediate introduction into Iraq of a large UN military force to accompany UNMOVIC in its work. The policy would have been that each further incident of Iraqi obstruction or harassment of the UN presence would lead to an immediate further increase in the size of the UN force. The policy would have been that the any use of arms against the UN presence by any Iraqis, uniformed or not, would have triggered an invasion and regime change.

Who knows if Saddam would still be ruling Baghdad if we had pursued this policy? But if he were, he would be ruling on our terms. And if he weren’t, he would have been eliminated by the same UN coalition that threw him out of Kuwait in 1991. And the world would be less dangerous than it is.

Before leaving c. gallicus, a word on genocide. While we have not found WMD in Iraq, we have found mass graves that testify to Saddam’s genocidal/sectarian brutality in suppressing Kurdish and Shiite uprisings in 1991-2. However, I have not read any reports suggesting that since 1992, having suppressed the uprisings, Saddam’s brutality against his own people has exceeded that of other thugs, for example rulers in places like Burma, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe and Cuba, who cling to power with one-party rule, a ruthless state security apparatus, imprisonment and torture of dissenters, and suppression of press freedom.

The core’s assertion that further genocide in Iraq was one of the “dangers of inaction,” and that the Cheney/Bush invasion was a war to prevent genocide, is totally without merit. If anything, the invasion was a war of retribution. The moral basis for these two kinds of war is entirely different. A war to prevent genocide is a moral imperative, whereas a war of retribution is at best a just war, and by no stretch a moral imperative. We must therefore reject the core’s assertion that c. gallicus is morally culpable for turning a blind eye (again) to genocide. And if you think I’m spinning straw, read the Weekly Standard.

Appeasement

The Spanish species c. surrendans hispanensis appeared in March 2004 following the murder of 191 commuters in Madrid by a cell of Moroccan al-Quaeda sympathisers. Following the blasts, the group issued a statement saying their action was retribution for Spain’s support of the Iraq invasion. A few days after the bombings the Aznar government was defeated in a national election. The new Prime Minister immediately announced that Spanish troops would quickly be withdrawn from Iraq.

The core’s outrage at c. hispanensis is founded on a charge of appeasement. But facts are friendly. In the winter of 2002, some 90% of the Spanish people firmly opposed Aznar’s decision to join the US invasion coalition. They thought it was a bad policy, a distraction from the war on jihadist terror, a policy that would make Spain and the world less safe, not safer. When the Spanish rejected Aznar at the polls, they were reaffirming their position that the invasion had been a mistake. No WMD had been found, and the 191 dead and 2000 wounded Spaniards were ample evidence that the policy had not made Spain safer.

My turn for a hypothetical: if a terrorist threatens to blow up a bus full of school children if I don’t stop beating my wife, is it appeasement if I decide to stop beating my wife? The answer is “yes” if I think there’s nothing wrong with beating my wife, but stop beating her because I’m afraid the terrorist will come after me when he’s finished with the school children. But the answer is “no” if I think it is wrong to beat my wife, and decide to stop for that reason. My dictionary defines “appeasement” as “the policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace.” If I grant a concession that my enemy is demanding because I decide it is the right thing to do, peace or no peace, this is not appeasement. Conversely, if I refuse to do what I think is right because my enemy is demanding that I do it, I am a fool.

A large majority of the Spanish people always thought the invasion of Iraq was the wrong thing to do, and they still do. The core disagrees with the Spanish majority on this point, but they cannot legitimately level the charge of appeasement against those Spanish who rejected Aznar because they think his policy was wrong. The charge can fairly be levelled at those Spanish who had neutral or supportive views on the Iraq war, but who voted against Aznar in the hope that the Moroccan jihadists would then leave them alone. But this applies to a small minority of the Spanish people.

Questions Before Entering the Polling Booth

In March of 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. I think he did this because he no longer believed that the goals of the war were worth the cost. I think he also understood that he could not seek re-election on a new policy – a policy of withdrawal, surrender, “peace-with-honor” or whatever you want to call it – because he had the wisdom and honesty to realise that he could not ask the American people to trust the judgment of those who had gotten the country into this mess to get them out of it.

Since Cheney/Bush show no signs of imitating LBJ’s wobble, Americans have the opportunity to join a new group that was not available in 1968 after LBJ’s withdrawal. It is called “cut and replace” and membership is for those of us who are currently in “quagmire” but not yet ready to join “cut and run.” The credo of “cut and replace” is: “to get us out of this mess, cut the people whose judgment got us into it, and replace them with people in whom we have more trust.”

Between now and Election Day, in addition to hearing a lot more from Cheney/Bush and the Weekly Standard about how Saddam Hussein would still rule Baghdad if Kerry were president, we will hear other nonsense from them:

• A vote for Kerry is a vote for Osama bin Laden. Even if you have no confidence in the team that crafted the war policy, it would be irresponsible to vote them out of office because this will reward terrorism.

This argument will be a lot harder to dismiss if al-Quaeda kills another 3000 Americans in simultaneous poison gas attacks in Grand Central Station, Union Station (Chicago) and Union Station (DC) the week before the election. But even after another such horror, the argument should be rejected, and for the same reason that we reject the core’s charge that c. hispanensis was guilty of appeasement: to those of us who believe that Cheney/Bush’s foreign and anti-terror policy judgment has been hopelessly discredited by the Iraq adventure, the fact that al Quaeda wants Cheney/Bush out of office is no reason to keep them in.

• A vote for Kerry is a vote against our troops in Iraq and against the cause for which they are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. Even if you have no confidence in the team that crafted the war policy, it would be irresponsible to vote them out of office, because this will undermine the morale of our troops, and give comfort to our enemy.

The merit of this argument will depend very much on Kerry’s position and on the military situation on Election Day. If the battle of Fallujah is entering the decisive phase, and Kerry is fool enough to say “if I am elected President, I will cut and run from Iraq ASAP,” the argument will be valid. But somehow I don’t think this is what Kerry would say in those circumstances.

Kerry turned c. pax nunc in 1970 after fighting in Vietnam. I imagine he would not have turned if he had believed that victory was within sight. Presumably he believed that victory was nowhere in sight, and that freedom and democracy for the South Vietnamese was not worth the enormous price the American and Vietnamese people would have to pay to stay the course to achieve it. Kerry had participated in the agony of the war, and so had a much clearer understanding of that price than those of us who avoided Vietnam by going to graduate school or serving in the Air National Guard.

On November 2, my vote will go to Kerry because I know he will wobble on Iraq if God forbid the time should come when it is the right thing do so, and because I know that Cheney/Bush will not. If the military situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate after Kerry is elected, and an ever-increasing portion of the population take up arms or rocks or suicide belts against us, Kerry will agonize. He will struggle to weigh means against ends, to get the right balance. His head will hurt.

On the other hand, if Cheney/Bush are re-elected and things go from bad to worse, they will not agonize and their heads will not hurt. They will blindly pursue “whatever it takes” until either they have saved Iraq by destroying it, or a rebellion within the Republican party brings them down.

This will not be moral clarity. It will be dereliction of duty.