chimera wrote Yesterday at 8:24am:
'In 1968, 32% of Americans approved of President Johnson's handling of the Vietnam war.'
When the American public was asked about the Vietnam-era Anti-War movement in the 1990s, 39% of the public said they approved, while 39% said they disapproved.
'About 61% Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict, while 37% approve.'
As Robert Osgood, who advised presidents Nixon and Reagan, concluded, the US “was in an inferior position in any contest of wills” because its interests were less absolute, and its reliance on public support far greater, than Hanoi’s.
The Tet offensive of January 1968 had proved the point. A military rout for the Communists, it was a political catastrophe for the Johnson administration – all the more so as North Vietnam timed it to resonate in the primaries and the upcoming elections.
The president’s own advisers – the “Wise Men” – told him the war was unwinnable. “If they had been so deeply influenced by Tet,” Johnson noted, “what must the average citizen be thinking?” Giap sensed the change: “Until Tet they thought they could win the war, now they knew they could not.”
From Vietnam, America drew two lessons. First, if you fight, fight to win. “When we commit our troops to combat, we must do so with the sole object of winning,” Reagan’s defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, declared in 1984, articulating the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine of “decisive force” that marked a return to pre-Vietnam practice.
Second: don’t try to remake foreign nations in America’s image. Entanglement in civil conflicts has a grim internal logic – costs mount, resolve withers – and Tolstoy’s two great warriors, Time and Patience, will outlast any occupier whose electorate tires of deaths and pain.
George W. Bush heeded the first lesson and ignored the second. “Shock and awe” – the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine’s direct progeny – was devastating on the battlefield. But as the second lesson had predicted, “nation-building” turned into a politically unsustainable fiasco.
Reeling from that outcome, Barack Obama abandoned the first lesson too. Nothing made that clearer than the absence of the word “victory” in his 2009 West Point address on strategy. Limited war theory returned under new branding – “strategic patience” – repeating the failed logic of its previous application: a decision in favour of indecision.
Joe Biden then applied that logic to Ukraine, barring Kyiv from striking Russian soil and rationing weapons in cautious – “sufficient but not escalatory” – tranches. That gifted the initiative to Vladimir Putin and turned the conflict into a blood-soaked quagmire.
The Ukraine conflict should have made one thing unmistakeable: graduated escalation is not a strategy; it is a way of avoiding one. But Iran is an even less promising context for the doctrine’s application. Where Hanoi and Moscow each pursued strategic ends, the Iranian regime frames the conflict in categorically different terms: not a contest to be managed but a Holy War, fuelled by an apocalyptic theology of redemptive martyrdom.
Against such an adversary, half-measures are futile. Victory requires the decisive force Obama and Biden would not countenance: a sustained campaign aimed at crippling critical infrastructure, paralysing the regime’s capacity to function and obliterating its offensive capabilities.
Instead, after a strong start, Donald Trump drew a red line and then, seemingly seduced by the lure of the “deal”, deferred the reckoning.
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