In Search of a Moral Militarist

There have been a handful of American presidents with the moral cowardice to start wars. And there have been a handful of American presidents with the moral cowardice to inherit and continue unwinnable wars. But there has been only one American president with the moral courage to end an unwinnable war as soon as he possibly could.

Dwight David Eisenhower, our last General President, our borderline Caesar, who behaved more like Cincinnatus or George Washington, is the only commander in chief we've ever had who actually commanded the chiefs to stop a war.

There are 4 points in postwar (aka imperial) American history when presidents could have ended unwinnable wars. 3 of 4 times they escalated.

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in to the presidency in his own right. To be sure, if Kennedy were not a corpse, Johnson would never have been president, but John Kennedy was not nearly as hawkish on Vietnam as was LBJ; the Vietnam war was still not inevitable when JFK was killed.

In any case, Johnson ran in '64 on the premise and the promise that he would not "send American boys to die in Vietnam". That promise, among other things, gave him the biggest landslide victory to that point in our history. A mandate, to say the least, to not make Vietnam an American war.

Three months after the inauguration, Johnson sent in the Marines.

In 1968, Johnson abdicated the presidency, a de facto resignation, in the face of rage over his war. Richard Nixon ran on the premise and the promise that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. He was elected to end the war.

Instead, he invaded Cambodia, carried out the heaviest bombing raids in human history on North Vietnam over Christmas, and presided over more than half of the American and Vietnamese deaths in the war before he resigned.

In 2008, Barack Obama ran on the premise and the promise that our response to 9/11 was catastrophically conceived and executed.

He categorically rejected the invasion and occupation of Iraq and vowed to end it.

He categorically rejected the concept and reality of Guantanamo, and all the sordid acts that fall under that now nearly pornographic word.

He acknowledged the logic of action in Afghanistan, and vowed to rehaul the effort.

But now, he deigns to nearly double our presence there, which will double our casualties, which will make it doubly hard to withdraw.

The only president who has done the right thing in similar circumstances was Ike. 25% of our presidents until JFK were Generals. Ike was the last.

When Eisenhower ran in '52, his only promise and premise was the maddeningly innocuous "I shall go to Korea". But that was enough to win. And after he won, Ike went to Korea and ended the war. We didn't "win", but we stopped dying, killing, and spending on a wormhole of an endeavor.

When Ike came in, he stopped a pointless war, without worrying that nobody would trust us anymore, that nobody would think we loved freedom anymore, that nobody would think we had a small collective penis. Ike didn't need to act tough. Because he knew what tough was.

As Ike left office, he delivered one of the masterpieces of American oratory.

"We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration.

To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle--with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment."

"Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage."

Sounds like Barack. But it was Ike. And I never thought I'd say this, but I wish Barack had a little more Ike in him.