Abstract
The Bush team must have sent out a memo, telling bureaucrats and friends in the press which clichés are acceptable in describing how things are going in Iraq and which platitudes are not. Saying things like “we're turning the corner,” or expressing some version of the mindless determination to “stay the course” are okay. But somewhere in that memo, probably in ALL CAPS, is a warning that under no circumstances must the phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” be invoked.
The insistent repetition of those words–uttered unconvincingly by Gen. William Westmoreland, among others, to describe the struggle against the Viet Cong–helped an entire generation of Americans to lose respect for the leaders of their own government, whom they came to see as figures of deceit and deception. We wouldn't want that to happen again.
As more and more ordinary folk decided the ill-considered, costly war in Vietnam was a disaster, the Johnson administration, ditto the Nixon crowd, could never admit that falling into a land war in Southeast Asia had been the colossal mistake Eisenhower predicted it would be. Today, the “domino theory” seems quaint; most of us know the world is too complicated to be explained in such simple terms. But back then it was ideology, not reality, that led to the insistence that a pinpoint of light could be found in the vast darkness. We wouldn't want ideology to trump reality again.
As Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History, points out, the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel language was even more ironic than Lyndon Johnson or Westmoreland knew, the phrase having first been used by Gen. Henri Navarre, just before the November 1953 to May 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu, which ended with no more than one-fifth the French force still standing. That struggle in northern Vietnam convinced a shocked French nation to abandon Indochina.
The disaster in Vietnam is only one example of the cost of pursuing the unattainable, which militaries are too often asked to accept. Consider the loss of life under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, whose preparations for the Battle of Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876, might sound vaguely familiar.
Custer thought taking on his enemy would be easy. He dismissed the idea of needing the additional troops that were on their way. He separated his own force of 650 men into three distinct battalions, which he had approach the battlefield from three different directions–considerably diluting their possible effect. And he rejected his scouts' warnings about the numbers of the enemy–as many as 15,000 Amerindians from six distinct tribes had settled in by the river.
Custer's chief concern was that all these men, women, and children would somehow get away, so he chose to attack by riding directly into the middle of the Indian village. There, Custer and the 200 men who rode with him were killed, it is estimated, in less than 30 minutes.
Even as Gulf War II looks more and more like the history-repeating-itself-as-farce version of his father's war, it wouldn't be fair, would it, to come to think of George Bush as George Custer–only freed from the annoying physical risk to his own person?