[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 95 (Tuesday, June 23, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H7116-H7117]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2000
                         TO DIE FOR A MYSTIQUE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. JONES. Madam Speaker, thank you very much. Tonight, I want to 
take my time and refer to an article written by Andrew Bacevich. This 
was in the American Conservative of May 18, 2009. The title is ``To Die 
for a Mystique,'' subtitled ``The lessons our leaders didn't learn from 
the Vietnam War. I'm going to read two or three paragraphs and then 
close from this article.
  ``In one of the most thoughtful Vietnam-era accounts written by a 
senior military officer, General Bruce Palmer once observed, `With 
respect to Vietnam, our leaders should have known that the American 
people would not stand still for a protracted war of an indeterminate 
nature with no foreseeable end to the United States' commitment.''
  He further stated in the article, ``General Palmer thereby distilled 
into a single sentence the central lesson of Vietnam: to embark upon an 
open-ended war lacking clearly defined and achievable objectives was to 
forfeit public support, thereby courting disaster. The implications 
were clear: never again.''
  I further read from the article, ``The dirty little secret to which 
few in Washington will own up is that the United States now faces the 
prospect of perpetual conflict. We find ourselves in the midst of what 
the Pentagon calls the `Long War,' a conflict global in scope (if 
largely concentrated in the Greater Middle East) and expected to 
outlast even General Palmer's `Twenty-Five Year War.' The present 
generation of senior civilians and officers have either forgotten or 
inverted the lessons of Vietnam, embracing open-ended war as an 
inescapable reality.''
  Madam Speaker, I submit this entire article for the Record.

             [From The American Conservative, May 18, 2009]

                         To Die for a Mystique

                        (By Andrew J. Bacevich)

       In one of the most thoughtful Vietnam-era accounts written 
     by a senior military officer, Gen. Bruce Palmer once 
     observed, ``With respect to Vietnam, our leaders should have 
     known that the American people would not stand still for a 
     protracted war of an indeterminate nature with no foreseeable 
     end to the U.S. commitment.''
       General Palmer thereby distilled into a single sentence the 
     central lesson of Vietnam: to embark upon an open-ended war 
     lacking clearly defined and achievable objectives was to 
     forfeit public support, thereby courting disaster. The 
     implications were clear: never again.
       Palmer's book, which he titled ``The Twenty-Five Year 
     War'', appeared in 1984. Today, exactly 25 years later, we 
     once again find ourselves mired in a ``protracted war of an 
     indeterminate nature with no foreseeable end to the U.S. 
     commitment.'' It's deja vu all over again. How to explain 
     this astonishing turn of events?
       In the wake of Vietnam, the officer corps set out to 
     preclude any recurrence of protracted, indeterminate 
     conflict. The Armed Forces developed a new American way of 
     war, emphasizing advanced technology and superior skills. The 
     generals were by no means keen to put these new methods to 
     the test: their preference was for wars to be fought 
     infrequently and then only in pursuit of genuinely vital 
     interests. Yet when war did come, they intended to dispatch 
     any adversary promptly and economically, thereby protecting 
     the military from the possibility of public abandonment. 
     Finish the job quickly and go home: this defined the new 
     paradigm to which the lessons of Vietnam had given rise.
       In 1991, Operation Desert Storm seemingly validated that 
     paradigm. Yet events since 9/11, in both Iraq and 
     Afghanistan, have now demolished it. Once again, as in 
     Vietnam, the enemy calls the tune, obliging American soldiers 
     to fight on his terms. Decision has become elusive. Costs 
     skyrocket and are ignored. The fighting drags on. As it does 
     so, the overall purpose of the undertaking--other than of 
     avoiding the humiliation of abject failure--becomes 
     increasingly difficult to discern.
       The dirty little secret to which few in Washington will own 
     up is that the United States now faces the prospect of 
     perpetual conflict. We find ourselves in the midst of what 
     the Pentagon calls the ``Long War,'' a conflict global in 
     scope (if largely concentrated in the Greater Middle East) 
     and expected to outlast even General Palmer's ``Twenty-Five 
     Year War.'' The present generation of senior civilians and 
     officers have either forgotten or inverted the lessons of 
     Vietnam, embracing open-ended war as an inescapable reality.
       To apply to the Long War the plaintive query that Gen. 
     David Petraeus once posed with regard to Iraq--``Tell me how 
     this ends''--the answer is clear: no one has the foggiest 
     idea. War has become like the changing phases of the moon. 
     It's part of everyday existence. For American soldiers there 
     is no end in sight.
       Yet there is one notable difference between today and the 
     last time the United States found itself mired in a seemingly 
     endless war. During the Vietnam era, even as some young 
     Americans headed off to Indochina to fight in the jungles and 
     rice paddies, many other young Americans back on the home 
     front fought against the war itself. More than any other 
     event of the 1960s, the war created a climate of intense 
     political engagement. Today, in contrast, the civilian 
     contemporaries of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have 
     largely tuned out the Long War. The predominant mood of the 
     country is not one of anger or anxiety but of dull 
     acceptance. Vietnam divided Americans; the Long War has 
     rendered them inert.
       To cite General Palmer's formulation, the citizens of this 
     country at present do appear willing to ``stand still'' when 
     considering the prospect of war that goes on and on. While 
     there are many explanations for why Americans have disengaged 
     from the Long War, the most important, in my view, is that so 
     few of us have any immediate personal stake in that conflict.
       When the citizen-soldier tradition collapsed under the 
     weight of Vietnam, the military rebuilt itself as a 
     professional force. The creation of this all-volunteer 
     military was widely hailed as a great success--well-trained 
     and highly motivated soldiers made the new American way of 
     war work. Only now are we beginning to glimpse the 
     shortcomings of this arrangement, chief among them the 
     fact that today's ``standing army'' exists at considerable 
     remove from the society it purports to defend. Americans 
     today profess to ``support the troops'' but that support 
     is a mile wide and an inch deep. It rarely translates into 
     serious or sustained public concern about whether those 
     same troops are being used wisely and well.
       The upshot is that with the eighth anniversary of the Long 
     War upon us, fundamental questions about this enterprise 
     remain unasked. The contrast with Vietnam is striking: back 
     then the core questions may not have gotten straight answers, 
     but at least they got posed.
       When testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations 
     Committee in April 1971, the young John Kerry famously--or 
     infamously, in the eyes of some--asked, ``How do you ask a 
     man to be the last man to die for a mistake?''
       What exactly was that mistake? Well, there were many. Yet 
     the most fundamental lay in President Johnson's erroneous 
     conviction that the Republic of Vietnam constituted a vital 
     American security interest and that ensuring that country's 
     survival required direct and massive U.S. military 
     intervention.
       Johnson erred in his estimation of South Vietnam's 
     importance. He compounded that error with a tragic failure of 
     imagination, persuading himself that once in, there was no 
     way out. The United States needed to stay the course in 
     Vietnam, regardless of the cost or consequences.
       Now we are, in our own day and in our own way, repeating 
     LBJ's errors. In his 1971 Senate testimony, reflecting the 
     views of other Vietnam veterans who had turned against the 
     war in which they had fought, Kerry derisively remarked, ``we 
     are probably angriest

[[Page H7117]]

     about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the 
     mystical war against communism.''
       The larger struggle against communism commonly referred to 
     as the Cold War was both just and necessary. Yet the furies 
     evoked by irresponsible (or cowardly) politicians more 
     interested in partisan advantage than in advancing the common 
     good transformed the Cold War from an enterprise governed by 
     reason into one driven by fear. Beginning with McCarthyism 
     and the post-1945 Red Scare and continuing on through 
     phantasms such as the domino theory, bomber gap, missile gap, 
     and the putative threat to our survival posed by a two-bit 
     Cuban revolutionary, panic induced policies that were 
     reckless, wrong-headed, and unnecessary, with Vietnam being 
     just one particularly egregious example.
       The mystical war against communism finds its counterpart in 
     the mystical war on terrorism. As in the 1960s, so too today: 
     mystification breeds misunderstanding and misjudgment. It 
     prevents us from seeing things as they are.
       As a direct result, it leads us to exaggerate the 
     importance of places like Afghanistan and indeed to 
     exaggerate the jihadist threat, which falls well short of 
     being existential. It induces flights of fancy so that 
     otherwise sensible people conjure up visions of providing 
     clean water, functioning schools, and good governance to 
     Afghanistan's 40,000 villages, with expectations of thereby 
     winning Afghan hearts and minds. It causes people to ignore 
     considerations of cost. With the Long War already this 
     nation's second most expensive conflict, trailing only World 
     War II, and with the federal government projecting trillion-
     dollar deficits for years to come, how much can we afford and 
     where is the money coming from?
       For political reasons the Obama administration may have 
     banished the phrase ``global war on terror,'' yet the 
     conviction persists that the United States is called upon to 
     dominate or liberate or transform the Greater Middle East. 
     Methods may be shifting, with the emphasis on pacification 
     giving way to militarized nation-building. Priorities may be 
     changing, Af-Pak now supplanting Iraq as the main effort. But 
     by whatever name, the larger enterprise continues. The 
     president who vows to ``change the way Washington works'' has 
     not yet exhibited the imagination needed to conceive of an 
     alternative to the project that his predecessor began.
       The urgent need is to de-mystify that project, which was 
     from the outset a misguided one. Just as in the 1960s we 
     possessed neither the wisdom nor the means needed to 
     determine the fate of Southeast Asia, so today we possess 
     neither the wisdom nor the means necessary to determine the 
     fate of the Greater Middle East. To persist in efforts to do 
     so--as the Obama administration appears intent on doing in 
     Afghanistan--will simply replicate on an even greater scale 
     mistakes like those that Bruce Palmer and John Kerry once 
     rightly decried.

  I further read and want to close and then make a few comments with 
this. This is the last paragraph. Let me say about Andrew Bacevich, he, 
himself, was a Vietnam veteran. He, himself, was a veteran of Desert 
Storm. He, himself, taught at West Point. He lost a son in 2007, a 
young lieutenant who was killed in Iraq. So I think he brings great 
credibility to this article that he has written.
  This is the last paragraph in the article. ``The urgent need is to 
demystify that project, which was from the outset a misguided one. Just 
as in the 1960s we possessed neither the wisdom nor the means needed to 
determine the fate of Southeast Asia, so today we possess neither the 
wisdom nor the means necessary to determine the fate of the Greater 
Middle East.
  ``To persist in efforts to do so--as the Obama administration appears 
intent on doing in Afghanistan--will simply replicate on an even 
greater scale mistakes like those that Bruce Palmer and John Kerry once 
rightly decried.''
  Madam Speaker, I bring this forward because my friend from 
Massachusetts, Jim McGovern, has put a bill in that would say simply to 
the Secretary of Defense: You need to come to the Congress and tell the 
Congress what the exit strategy is for Afghanistan. Some people would 
say end point.
  Let me briefly explain, having an exit strategy and saying that to 
the Congress, you don't have to say in 2009, 2010, or 2015 or 2020, but 
tell the American people where we are going when we send our young men 
and boys and girls to die in Afghanistan without a plan, without 
benchmarks.
  So, Madam Speaker, I don't know if Mr. McGovern's amendment has been 
approved for debate tomorrow on the Armed Services bill, but I want to 
thank Mr. McGovern for bringing this to the attention of the American 
people and the Congress, because we need to have benchmarks. We need to 
have an end point to the strategy in Afghanistan.
  The military, I know, from marines down in my district, will tell you 
that our military is tired. They're worn out. They'll keep going back 
and forth, back and forth because they love this Nation and they love 
defending America. But we've got to be realistic about breaking the 
military, because we have got North Korea over here threatening. We've 
got the Chinese. We don't know what they might do. Yet we need to have 
a plan for victory in Afghanistan. We cannot do what the Bush 
administration did in Iraq and keep going on and on.
  Madam Speaker, as I close, as I do every night on this floor, I have 
signed over 8,000 letters to families and extended families who have 
lost loved ones in Afghanistan and Iraq. I ask God to please bless our 
men and women in uniform. I ask God to please bless the families of our 
men and women in uniform, and I ask God in his loving arms to hold the 
families who have given a child dying for freedom in Afghanistan and 
Iraq.
  Madam Speaker, I ask three times; God, please, God please, God, 
please continue to bless America.

                          ____________________