Beware the "Secret Plan"

There's no mistaking the resemblance these days of Barack Obama's chameleonic statements on withdrawal from Iraq to Nixon's coy campaign promise of having a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam. Nixon never used the phrase, "secret plan" -- the phrase was a reporter's description -- but he never disavowed it either. It was tailor-made to lure voters sick of the disastrous war yet loathe to align themselves with the dirty fucking hippies.

Of course, Nixon had no secret plan:

Nixon's secret plan, it turned out, was borrowing from a strategic move from Lyndon Johnson's last year in office. The new president continued a process called "Vietnamization", an awful term that implied that Vietnamese were not fighting and dying in the jungles of Southeast Asia. This strategy brought American troops home while increasing the air war over the DRV and relying more on the ARVN for ground attacks.

Bush is heavily invested in "Iraqi-ization" and all signs point to Obama being prepared to put his chips on the same lame strategy. And he's preparing his supporters to swallow it.

His demurrals yesterday on Iraq withdrawal timetables aren't just nuanced love calls to the center-right. They are hints of what's to come.

It's instructive to recall our prolonged exit from Vietnam:

From the time Richard Nixon took office on January 20, 1969, to March 1973 when the last American combat troops left Vietnam, was over four years. And we still weren't truly out of Vietnam; military advisors and Marines protecting U.S. installations remained. We weren't completely out of Vietnam until April 30, 1975. That day, the North Vietnamese rolled into Saigon, just hours after the last dawn airlift out of the U.S. Embassy. Before dawn, two Marines were killed by rocket attack at the Saigon airport and became the last Americans to die for a mistake. It was more than six years after Nixon had been elected to end the war and secure "peace with honor."

To be fair, Obama has always said his 16-month timetable would be consonant with the safety of the troops. I submit that in the real world, Obama is going to be pressed to find all kinds of "safety" reasons why troop withdrawals should proceed at a glacial pace. Remember, in Vietnam Nixon started to withdraw troops, albeit very slowly. But there were also periods of troop increase and certainly drastic expansions of the theater of war and violence through bombing.

Let us not forget all the bases we've had Halliburton/KBR et.al. build in Iraq at very great taxpayer expense, complete with American shopping, entertainment, perimeters extending for miles and every indication of being totally permanent. Then there's the embassy compound that's as big as Monaco. Finally the true goal of the Iraq invasion is almost achieved: The oil majors are on the brink of returning to lord over the Iraqi oilfields. Will President Obama have the right stuff to tell all the very special and persuasive interests that their time is up?

Obama sees the White House almost within his grasp and suddenly he's confronted with anti-war supporters who must be sidelined, gelded, made to sit down and STFU. It's only good politics -- accepted Village wisdom -- to fuck over your own Democratic supporters, dirty fucking hippies all, but "these things must be done delicately."

First Obama has to trivialize the passionately-held beliefs of the liberal Boomers and the experience we've gained from dealing with Republican ratfuckers for the last forty years. Here's Obama in his speech on patriotism:

And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often, our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments, a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.

Given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions. None of us expect that arguments about patriotism will, or should, vanish entirely. After all, when we argue about patriotism, we're arguing about who we are as a country and, more importantly, who we should be.

But surely we can agree that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism.

Note that it seems as if he's gently criticizing the hard-hats who took clubs to the DFHs in the peace marches of the '60s and '70s, but on closer reading it's clear that he's conflating the left and the right. We were all wrong, he's saying. Our arguments are old and threadbare. Now can't we all lower our voices and compromise -- on Iraq, on FISA, on universal health care, on separation of church and state?

Our concerns over the Iraq War are made to sound like part of "the old battles." We're just dinosaurs who can't stop fighting those boring old "culture wars." Obama may have been born in the Boomer cohort, but he is not one of us. He was outside the country or in the remote islands of Hawaii during the upheavals that forged the attitudes and beliefs of my generation.

Obama's arguments are gaining a certain amount of traction with Democrats desperate for victory in November, no matter what has to be thrown overboard. Cruise over to DKos to see the raging flame wars. Here's one example: "Markos, you Blockhead.... let me boil it down for you on FISA." Nice, eh?

Obama and his youthful followers, so naive and full of hope, will come to real grief if they don't learn the lessons Vietnam taught us. It has nothing to do with "culture wars" but with political integrity when it matters. It's about understanding that compromise is not always a virtue. It has to do with trusting in the Constitutional order, even when it seems inconvenient or dangerous. It's about understanding how hard it is to tell the truth about a failed war, a failed policy and a bankrupt nation and then do something about it on your watch. It's about how hard it is to lead people and persuade people that the honorable course is to end a dishonorable war, not to compound the dishonor with delusions of victory. It's about explaining that victory, in this case, is a victory over the dark side of fear -- victory over torture, rendition, the surrender of our freedoms and blind wrath against imagined enemies.

If Obama is all ready to compromise, reach across the aisle, and pretend that the bipartisan divide is somehow made of meaningless distinctions, then he is headed for disaster. He and his most ardent supporters may be bewitched by the idea of post-partisanship, but there has never been any hint or suggestion that the Repubs believe or would cooperate with any such thing. Every time they've had the opportunity to compromise, they've offered Democrats filibusters and amusing attacks on Democratic intransigence. Obama will be a weak and disappointing one-term president, ridiculed and rolled by Republicans who are not afraid of ruthlessness.

Then there is the terrible danger that Bush and Cheney will seek to cement Obama into endless war with an October surprise: the opening of an air war on Iran. It's something I've been fearing all along. All the signs are there, all the pieces have been moved into position. Will war with Iran be just another compromise for Obama, another opportunity to show he's his own man by bravely fucking over his own supporters?

Happy Birthday, America.