The Will to Win
BELL, JEFFREY
The Will to Win Our wars are always a test of who we are. BY JEFFREY BELL My two years as a U.S. Army draftee expired, as it happened, during the Tet offensive, in early February 1968. The South...
...The American people are now in a mood to rally behind President Bush in the aftermath of September 11...
...All historians of the period write about the breaking of American will...
...The Arabs, black Africans, and Chinese can rest assured: Nothing is being said about them that was not said about Germany, Italy, and Japan 60 years ago, or about Ireland 120 years ago...
...After all, history suggests there is nothing like stark, violent aggression to make a military buildup politically feasible...
...But many write as if the breakdown in national will had been universal, and make hardly any distinction between the will of political elites and the will of ordinary voters...
...By the time Saigon fell more than seven years after Tet, Jeffrey Bell is a principal of Capital City Partners and the author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality...
...The end of the Cold War was the end of an era for the Soviet Union and its 15 federated republics, for the nations of the Warsaw Pact, for Albania, and (with an ugly, unpleasant lag) Yugoslavia...
...Nothing I saw, or subsequently learned, justified such a verdict on military grounds...
...foreign policy...
...Jackson believed it...
...It did not prove to be the end of an era for U.S...
...When the roll was called for those scheduled to be on the chartered plane to San Francisco, I remember answering "dead" to the name of a sergeant from my operational area who I knew would not be making this flight or any other...
...For all the many differences in content and context between the Tet offensive and the attack on September 11, there is a fundamental element in common: the motive...
...foreign policy...
...withdrawal slow enough to provide a "decent interval" before what he saw as the virtually inevitable collapse of the government in Saigon...
...If the president and Congress decide we are in a "wholly new" war with something called "terrorism," we will be falling short of where we need to be...
...Whenever we show signs of forgetting this, our enemies will be sure to remind us...
...The South Vietnamese Army base in the Mekong Delta I had called home for eleven months was attacked, but not with any great effectiveness, so when the time came to return to civilian life I was picked up by a helicopter and ferried to Tan Son Nhut airfield for the flight home...
...The question of the sustainability of the American war effort in Vietnam after 1968 is a complex one...
...The scale of the violence, as well as its unprovoked nature, make such a step as appropriate as it was after Pearl Harbor...
...And the most banal, yet most salient, aspect of who we are—the world's leading example and advocate of democracy—goes a long way to explaining the continuity of American foreign policy, and why, again and again, the pronouncement that a foreign policy era is over has proved premature...
...Jefferson believed it...
...foreign policy...
...Our nation is a kind of wrecking ball that seeks out the despots, oligarchs, and genocidal maniacs of the world, whoever they happen to be or whatever they are calling themselves at any given time...
...The generation or so after World War II proved to be the end of an era for the far-flung overseas empires of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal...
...Military methods have changed and will change, but the challenge facing American foreign policy has not...
...In some deep, unarguable sense, America's worst enemies are right...
...That is why there is more of a feeling of continuity than discontinuity from Pearl Harbor to the Tet offensive to the appalling events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001...
...The next day, to get to my office, I drove past the largest fire I have ever seen, burning in the Pentagon...
...Today, the neo-realists inform us that Arabs, or sub-Saharan black Africans, or Confucian-influenced Chinese cultures, are incapable of democracy...
...The aim of last week's enemy assault was identical to that of January-February 1968: by a coordinated, surprise attack few thought possible, to break the political will of the United States, in order to achieve their war aims...
...What now...
...We are the nemesis of the world's mass murderers and dictators because we are the archetypal, irreplaceable democracy...
...From the beginning, long before we had the military reach to do much about it, American presidents thought of America's foreign influence in terms of the global spread of the idea of political equality, that is, of democratic self-government...
...As Max Boot has put it, this Kissingerian mode of analysis "boils down to little more than the proposition that the absence of democracy in a country means democracy is not relevant there...
...Yet the flight left on time...
...The end of World War I, for example, was the end of an era for the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, and the Ottomans...
...I knew I had been a minor witness to the most damaging attack on United States forces since World War II...
...And that, in turn, points out how a serious national debate on a congressional declaration of war could help us clarify the nature of our peril and better define our war aims...
...foreign policy...
...Terrorism on the scale we have just witnessed could not happen without the active instigation of nation-states...
...There is a strong case for a declaration of war by the United States, a step we haven't taken or even seriously considered since 1941...
...At the dawn of the Cold War, North Korea's invasion of South Korea led to a prompt tripling of our defense budget...
...That huge airfield near Saigon had been the objective of a strong North Vietnamese attack, the scars of which were still visible...
...The most frequently cited arguments against a declaration of war—how do we define our enemy, and what can we list as our war aims?—are possibly the best arguments in favor of a decision by President Bush to ask Congress for a declaration of war...
...Despite all the efforts of reductionists, economic determinists, and neo-realists from John C. Calhoun to Charles Beard to Henry Kissinger, this universal aspiration has never really been absent from America's self-image, or from the foreign policy of the United States, for more than a brief span of time...
...Within weeks, Johnson, the leader and symbol of the American war effort, had dropped out of the presidential race and turned the bulk of policy over to Clifford, who had favored a negotiated American withdrawal even before Tet...
...In fact, it was the end of the era of ruling monarchy...
...We could end suicide hijackings, even in some sense "defeat" terrorism, only to learn our enemies have moved on to a far more lethal phase of their battle plan...
...What our wars are about always winds up having a lot to do with who we are...
...The end of World War II was the end of an era for the Nazis, the Fascists, and Shintoist militarism...
...There is no way to know whether the American people could have been rallied to victory, because none of the presidents who served in the relevant years made any serious attempt to rally them...
...The man Nixon picked after the election as his preeminent foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, favored a U.S...
...This makes it awkward for them to explain why our nation's Vietnam debate lasted another seven years, or why in 1972 voters showed every sign of preferring Nixon's war policy to that of George McGov-ern—or why a candidate could be elected in a landslide in 1980 even after making the "gaffe" of calling America's losing effort in the war a "noble cause...
...The logic starts with its effect on the political leadership of the target nation...
...It is not proving to be the end of an era for U.S...
...In the 1970s, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter said little as a succession of countries fell under Communist control in the wake of our defeat in Indochina...
...For the debate on a declaration has a good chance of forcing us to decide what this war is about...
...The front-runner for the Republican nomination and Johnson's eventual successor, Richard Nixon, had earlier been a hawk, but became at least as much of a Vietnam pessimist as Clifford, in part because of Tet...
...public opinion and among U.S...
...In 1968, with President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, the effect desired by the enemy could hardly have been more fully realized...
...The dramatic, heart-stopping success of the enemy's strike at our military assets and our people, which far exceeds Tet and rivals Pearl Harbor, makes it easier for the popular will to be deeply engaged...
...It was the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan—the first (and, it turned out, only) deployment of the Red Army beyond the boundaries of the Warsaw Pact—that triggered a tectonic shift in U.S...
...elites, paving the way for the Reagan buildup...
...Lincoln believed it...
...The enemy had been ejected, but sporadic mortar attacks caused us to interrupt our paperwork to take cover...
...Thirty-three years later, there came a day when no passenger flights were leaving Washington on schedule, or at all...
...I had driven past the same spot nearly 24 hours earlier, one hour before a hijacked commercial airliner smashed into this vast building, the awesome symbol of American military power...
...But despite our opting out of the League of Nations, it did not prove to be the end of an era for U.S...
...But successful psychological warfare has a logic of its own...
...It did not prove to be the end of an era for U.S...
Vol. 7 • September 2001 • No. 2
