...or Get off the Pot

By Crispin Sartwell

The lessons of Vietnam.

They can be summed up in a sentence: win or go home.

Or, a bit more concretely: double, triple the force and resources in Iraq; subdue the country; essentially, annex it. Or leave, immediately. The alternative, as we found to our cost: no guts, no clarity, no leadership; slow devastation of people''s lives and the unity and spirit of the nation; a decade or more of purposeless messing about; not just defeat but grinding humiliation over many years.

The barriers to winning are immense. And it''s not clear that the American people are willing to support the effort. But assume for a moment Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld believe their own story. They are fighting against terrorism for freedom, a battle which America must and will win; they have liberated a grateful nation from a monstrous tyrant; their glorious idealistic effort is being undermined by a few crazed extremists.

Then surely the only honorable approach is to do what it takes to accomplish such noble ends and then pay the political price.

Assume that the motivations for the attack were slightly less noble or less clear than the ones described above. Then cut your losses. Let those poor saps sort it out among themselves. Maybe if the place plunges into civil war, the UN really will bail it out, as long as we don''t ask them to. Otherwise you''ll be there forever, dully taking losses and sodomizing prisoners.

I''m not sure how the Democratic party ended up nominating someone who voted to authorize Iraq, and now vows vaguely to hang around, providing target practice. The real puzzlement isn''t Kerry''s road from war hero to anti-war activist, but the counter-metamorphosis from protester to half-hearted, half-assed, half-witted war-monger.

Perhaps the lesson is this: A man can be true blue in the heat of battle and bright yellow on the Senate floor, stutteringly undermining his own real convictions. Certainly, presidential politics always bears a heavy fruit of cowards.

I personally can''t see re-electing Bush, but you have to be aware that the policies of the prospective Democratic administration toward Iraq are liable to be even less effective or worthwhile: years of endless quasi-commitment to a cause they themselves don''t believe in.

To say that the Democrats deserve Nader is an understatement. You can go ahead and vote for the Patriot Act, but then you can''t also start whining when someone with a backbone runs against you.

The miserable choice we seem to face is similar to what we got in 1968, when Hubert Humphrey vaguely refused to disassociate himself from Lyndon Johnson''s Vietnam policy, while Nixon, equally vaguely, promised some sort of change.

People who opposed the war had nowhere to go. Chicago erupted into violence. America was divided in an enduring way. And the war stretched on another seven years: seven years of unnecessary, pointless death and grinding, richly-deserved national debasement.

In 1968, the Youth International Party nominated Pigasus, a great American hog. By the time election day rolled around, Pigasus was looking pretty good. Nader is more articulate than Pigasus, and if Kerry remains penned up with the porkers, Nader''s going to get 15% of the vote.

If Kerry wants to be president - or if he''d like his presidency to mean something - he needs to change his mind: clearly, simply: now.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.