Behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, there were testy exchanges between Secretary Rumsfeld and his interrogators on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Rumsfeld dismissed the insurrection as a "flare-up." Sen. John McCain was still simmering when he later spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter: "For Rumsfeld to say 'there are good days and bad days' when they are taking control of cities... well, it's a little more than a flare-up, a lot more than a bad day." McCain said that Bush needs to make a nationwide speech laying out the difficulties involved and the sacrifices required—more troops, more time, more will.
Will the president rise to the challenge? Out in Crawford, as he prayed with his mother and father, wife and daughters over Easter weekend, Bush was undoubtedly seeking to renew his resolve. He is in the same difficult spot faced by earlier presidents who have sent troops into harm's way and could not find a way to bring them back. In America's long and violent history, its people have been ready to fight—small wars, big wars, "police actions," world wars, even, a century and a half ago, a gargantuan Civil War. But when the fighting is done, Americans like to come home and try to forget about it. It is not really in the American character to be effective imperialists. With few exceptions, Americans have been too decent and freedom-loving, as well as too nativist, impatient and inward-looking, to want to colonize or "pacify" any country for long.
Persuading Americans to commit abroad has been a challenge for any president. After World War II, as the cold war loomed, most Americans just "wanted to go to the movies and drink Coke," the statesman Averell Harriman said. President Harry Truman had to persuade them to spend billions to rebuild Europe and send their sons to far-off places to guard against communism. Truman achieved this in part by hyping the communist threat (or as his Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, "by making things clearer than the truth").
Bush has declared an ambitious foreign policy, vowing that he will not hesitate to "pre-empt" terrorist threats. He has demonstrated a willingness to promote liberty, even by going to war. But he has been less than forthright about explaining the cost and sacrifice required by such undertakings (not unlike LBJ, who tried to have both "guns and butter" during Vietnam). Bush's opponent this November, John Kerry, has been no more willing to step up. He talks about the need for honesty and more troops, but then seems to suggest that the United Nations can bear the burden, a somewhat wishful suggestion and, in any case, too late.
Pacifying Iraq—as well as stopping further terrorist attacks on the United States—will require an enormous act of national will and the abandonment, or at least diminution, of some taken-for-granted freedoms. The Vietnam-era draft is gone, but as anyone in the Reserve or National Guard can attest, protecting America from the wrath of Islamic extremism requires sacrifice and stoicism. Are other Americans willing to shoulder their share?
In Vietnam, Johnson had most of the country with him for most of his presidency. Inspired by JFK's "bear any burden" rhetoric, Americans were willing to lose tens of thousands of their sons before they finally listened to Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman and national father figure who turned against the war in the winter of 1968, at the height of Tet.
Bush is a long way from such a moment. He has the virtue of taking better care of himself than LBJ, who soaked his miseries in Cutty Sark, and he has the beginnings of an argument that could sustain Americans through some bad "flare-ups" ahead. That is the need for national resolve to face a threat far greater than insurrection in Iraq—the threat of more "spectacular" terror attacks against the United States.
The failure, or lack, of national resolve is the real story behind the 9/11 commission hearings that have captivated many TV viewers over the past two weeks. In her long-awaited public testimony, national-security adviser Rice stirred up the talk-show hosts by admitting that on Aug. 6, 2001, a month before the terrorist attacks, the top-secret PDB—Presidential Daily Briefing, his morning menu of hot intelligence tips—was titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." Her inquisitors pounced: here was the smoking gun! Bush had been warned yet failed to act. (On Saturday, the White House declassified the PDB, which showed intelligence that Al Qaeda planned attacks on Washington and New York.)
The problem with this analysis is that it was probably too late to stop 9/11. Even if Bush had jumped on his desk and shouted "Do something!" it's unlikely much would have been done. As Rice pointed out, the PDB made no mention of when and where the strike might come. The bureaucracy was too sclerotic and risk-averse to really go after shadowy terrorists. Rice observed, correctly, that until there were thousands of dead Americans after 9/11, the country lacked the will to stop terrorist attacks. Neither the narrowly elected Bush nor his scandal-plagued predecessor, Bill Clinton, had the clout to rally the county and force the bureaucracy to do what needed to be done: assassinate Osama bin Laden and his associates and unleash the intelligence services to spy inside the United States.
So far, there is only one group of Americans who have had to bear the true burden: the servicemen and -women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families. There is, to be sure, some restlessness in the ranks. Military Families Speak Out reported receiving so many calls and e-mails from people wishing to join their antiwar cause that they lost count. And yet there are families like the Rippetoes of Gaithersburg, Md. Capt. Russell Rippetoe, 27, was an Army Ranger killed a year ago when a bomb-laden car exploded at a checkpoint he was guarding in northwest Iraq. A pregnant woman had run from the car just moments before, asking for help. Rippetoe had moved toward her. Both he and the woman were killed; Rippetoe was the first Iraq com-bat casualty buried at Arlington cemetery.
Rippetoe's father, Joe, had been an Army Ranger who served two tours in Vietnam. "If my son were here today, and I wasn't disabled, we'd both put our uniforms on and say, 'Where to?' " said Rippetoe, 67. His wife, Rita, said of her son's death, "If I look at it through the eye of a mother, I am devastated." But, she added, the United States must stay the course in Iraq. "I don't think you can go into a place and start something so significant and just walk out... As family members of soldiers serving in wartime, we have to have faith. It's not blind faith, but it's a deep faith."
It is such faith that sustains Americans and drives them forward. We do best when we defend freedom without trampling it, defeat tyranny without becoming tyrannical, and understand what is worth the blood of our children and what is not. That is the true lesson of Vietnam.
