Forward Observer: Vietnam Veto Redux

The uphill fight House Democratic leaders waged last week and the one their Senate counterparts will wage this week to begin the withdrawal of U. S. troops from Iraq is a replay of Congress vs. the president during the Vietnam War.

The lesson from both unpopular wars is that the president's veto power gives him the upper hand unless and until there is some dramatic development on the battlefield or a diplomatic breakthrough.

I was stunned as a combat correspondent in Vietnam at how bad the battlefield news could get, how critical our military leaders in the field could become without compelling at least two-thirds of the Congress to force either Democratic President Lyndon Johnson or his successor, Republican President Richard Nixon, to change course on the war.

It seems like only yesterday when an infuriated Lt. Col. John Keeley, a battalion commander in the 9th Division, said this into my spinning tape recorder after another hot day of chasing Vietcong guerrillas around the soft paddies of the Delta:

"All I'm doing down here is buying time with my kids' lives for the politicians to settle this thing. Don't those guys in Washington realize that using military force to achieve diplomatic objectives is like using an ax to do brain surgery?"

The year was 1968. The place where we talked into the night was his canvas-covered hooch inside a barbwire doughnut off a blacktop road linking South Vietnam's rice bowl to the capital of Saigon.

The Vietcong blew up the road night after night, preventing farmers from getting their produce to the capital and thus fueling inflation.

I'm sure there is a new generation of Col. Keeleys in Iraq, furious about spending their troops' lives to buy time for American and Iraqi politicians to find a way out of the quagmire President Bush has created.

But the record of lawmakers yelling and speechifying and resolutionizing during the Vietnam War is indeed instructive for assessing how successful anti-war pols are likely to be now in trying to tell Bush how to run the Iraq war.

The record suggests that Bush, barring that battlefield disaster or diplomatic breakthrough, will be able to countermand any battle order Congress gives him by vetoing it.

From now until the election of 2008, more than one-third of the House and Senate almost certainly will refuse to vote to override Bush's veto for fear of looking weak on defense to the voters.

Exhibit A from the Vietnam era was Congress' effort in 1973 -- when peace truly was at hand because negotiations were under way with the North Vietnamese in Paris -- to order Nixon to stop the bombing of Cambodia by a date certain.

True, a majority of the House and Senate voted for the ban, but Democratic leaders could not round up enough votes to override Nixon's veto of June 27, 1973.

Think "surge" as "this great accomplishment" and substitute "Iraqis" for "Asians" as you read this sentence from Nixon's veto message: "It would be nothing short of tragic if this great accomplishment, bought with the blood of so many Asians and Americans, were to be undone now by congressional action."

After Nixon's veto prevailed, Nixon and Congress did agree on setting the date certain of Aug. 15, 1973, for cutting off funds for combat activities in IndoChina, including the bombing of Cambodia.

What the current Democratic majorities in Congress could do to make political points without looking weak on defense would be to hold a series of "lessons learned" hearings on Iraq.

The hearings should feature commanders past and present who really know -- who have been down in the sand with the bull instead of writing airy academic treatises in think tanks.

The focus should be on wrong assumptions about invading Iraq, their consequences and how we can avoid making the same mistakes again.

Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of Central Command who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but had drafted a detailed plan for it anyway -- which was ignored -- could be enlightening on many issues, including how to train our officer corps to deal with the new realities of warfare.

Retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who quit to write a book rather than see through the war he launched as Zinni's successor, should be asked if it is indeed true he ordered his officers to take as many risks to get out of Iraq in a hurry as they did to get in.

Retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner has some shocking things he could say about how he was rolled while serving as Bush's first envoy to Iraq.

He planned, with Bush's advance approval, to keep most of the Iraqi army intact to keep the country from fracturing into warring factions.

Garner's successor, Jerry Bremer, reversed that decision. How and why could this happen despite Bush's approval? And it's high time to hear in depth from the current Central Commander, Adm. William Fallon, on how he hopes to contain the violence in this volatile region.

Instead of all this political heat coming out of Congress, let's have some daylight on how to survive in this new world where our likeliest enemies have no fixed address.