The Cow Is Over The Fence Again

by digby

If you missed Bill Moyers’ Journal last night, I urge you to find the time to watch it or at least read the transcript:

With an eye on President Obama’s deliberations on whether to deploy more U.S. troops in addition to the 68,000 already in Afghanistan, Moyers presented a montage of recorded conversations and his personal memories of President Lyndon Johnson’s decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam. He said:

“Our country wonders this weekend what is on President Obama’s mind. He is apparently about to bring months of deliberation to a close and answer General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan. When he finally announces how many, why, and at what cost, he will most likely have defined his presidency, for the consequences will be far-reaching and unpredictable. As I read and listen and wait with all of you for answers, I have been thinking about the mind of another President – Lyndon B. Johnson. I was 30 years old, a White House assistant, working on politics and domestic policy. I watched and listened as LBJ made his fateful decisions about Vietnam… Barack Obama is not Lyndon Johnson, Afghanistan is not Vietnam and this is now, not then. The situation is different. But listen – and you will hear echoes and refrains that resonate today.”

Refrains like this:

US Senator John McCain predicted an allied win in Afghanistan in one year to 18 months if sufficient troops are sent, as the White House mulls sending tens of thousands of reinforcements.

But he said that timeline is threatened by US President Barack Obama’s delay in rolling out a new Afghanistan strategy.

“I am absolutely convinced and totally confident that with sufficient resources we can turn the situation around,” McCain told reporters at an international defense summit in easternmost Canada.

“I even am bold enough to predict that in a year to 18 months you will see success if the effort is sufficiently resourced and there is a commitment to get the job done before setting a date to leave the region,” he said.

They always say that, knowing that it’s so much more complicated, but also knowing they can make political points. From the Moyers broadcast:

ROBERT MCNAMARA: … If we’re going to stay in there, if we’re going to go strictly up the escalating chain, we’re going to have to educate the people, Mr. President. We haven’t done so yet. I’m not sure now is exactly the right time.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: No, and I think if you start doing it, they’re going to be hollering, “You’re a warmonger.”

ROBERT MCNAMARA: That’s right. I completely agree with you. So this is the-

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: I think that’s the horns that the Republicans would like to get us on. Now if we could do something in the way of social work, in the way of our hospitals, in the way of our province program […] and in the way of remaking that area out there, and giving them some hope and something to fight for, and put some of our own people into their units and do a little better job of fighting without material escalation for the next few months, that’s what we ought to do.

BILL MOYERS: The President’s hopes for a kind of ‘New Deal’ for South Vietnam are stymied by the corruption and incompetence of the government there, which is again on the verge of collapse, even as the enemy – the Vietcong – are consolidating more and more control in the countryside. The walls are closing in, and the President turns once again to his old mentor in the Senate, Dick Russell.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: I’m confronted with-I don’t believe the American people ever want me to run. If I lose it, I think that they’ll say I’ve lost, I’ve pulled in. At the same time, I don’t want to commit us to a war. And I’m in a hell of a shape. I can’t do-I just don’t know.

RICHARD RUSSELL: We’re just like the damn cow over a fence out there in Vietnam.

The whole thing is so reminiscent of what’s currently going on — the clear knowledge that it’s useless, the right wing using it as a political weapon, the wishful thinking about nation building, the sense of inevitability. And you can’t help but be struck by the fact that everyone knows the right always uses war as a weapon and that the liberal political establishment always believes it must cower from the threat.

Update: Bill Moyers is retiring. I don’t know what we’ll do without him.

.