In the fall of 2009, a new book captured the attention of President Obama’s national security staff.
Lessons in Disaster, an account of Lyndon Johnson’s decision-making during the Vietnam War as seen through the experiences of McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser, became the “must-read book for Obama’s war team,” wrote George Stephanopoulos. Obama’s aides were enmeshed in a debate about how to fulfill their boss’ campaign pledge of winning the “good war” in Afghanistan, and they found Lessons—authored by scholar Gordon Goldstein—particularly instructive.
Goldstein’s key insight was that Johnson’s military advisers had led him astray. Gen. William Westmoreland, U.S. commander in Vietnam, urged Johnson to bolster the U.S. presence to crush North Vietnam, a strategy that resulted in a protracted and costly war of attrition.
Already suspicious of the military, the Obama team seized on a narrative that suited its interests. The president proceeded to overrule his generals and defense advisers by sending a smaller surge force of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and pledging to withdraw them in eighteen months—just before the president’s 2012 reelection campaign. Critics argued that the Taliban and al Qaeda would simply wait out the eventual exit of U.S. forces. Robert Gates, defense secretary at the time and a senior official for eight presidents, wrote in his memoir that “this major national security debate had been driven more by the White House staff and by domestic politics than any other in my entire experience.”
Goldstein’s history, giddily consumed by White House staff and applied to contemporary debates, was in fact “highly deficient,” writes Mark Moyar, a historian of the Vietnam War and consultant to the U.S. military, in Strategic Failure:
Johnson’s generals had recommended intensified bombing of North Vietnam and insertion of U.S. ground forces into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in order to avoid protracted bloodletting, but civilian leaders had rejected those options based on doubts about their strategic risks and returns. Postwar disclosures from North Vietnamese sources would prove those doubts to have been unwarranted; North Vietnamese leaders believed that the actions recommended by the U.S. military would indeed have crippled North Vietnam. […]The lesson the White House should have drawn from this historical episode was that civilian leaders would do well to listen closely to military experts before making decisions.
The significance of the Goldstein book for the ensuing Afghanistan debate encapsulates Moyar’s critique of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Obama and his team misunderstood U.S. military history, harbored an ideological distrust toward leaders of the armed forces—and, in addition, dramatically reduced the defense budget. The administration also favored the “subordination of policy to politics” in national security decision-making and relied on “light footprint” and “smart power” strategies that harmed U.S. interests overseas, he writes. He principally focuses on decisions in Obama’s first term that helped produce a regional maelstrom in the Middle East.
Moyar gives careful attention to Iraq, where Obama said the Bush administration had waged a “dumb war.” After a largely successful surge of American troops that Obama had opposed, U.S. forces had remained in Iraq to provide stability and prevent a fragile democracy from splintering along sectarian lines. U.S. military pressure convinced Nouri al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, to refrain from jailing Sunni political opponents and engaging in battles against the Kurds. But the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that permitted the U.S. troop presence was set to expire in 2011. The Obama administration decided to back Maliki in the 2010 parliamentary election—despite his factional tendencies and close ties with neighboring Iran—against a more secular and nationalist candidate, in the hope that he would continue a close partnership. “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend the SOFA,” Joe Biden said at the time.
