Iraq, Vietnam and the isolation of the President

George Packer on the Iraq/Vietnam analogy:

The shift in war policy at the end of the Johnson Presidency turned out to be too little too late, and Americans would fight in Vietnam for five more years. But what’s striking about the moment when L.B.J. finally began to break is the nature of the forces that had led him to it: not just Clifford’s establishment friends and the bipartisan gray eminences of American foreign policy but also newspaper editors in the provinces and the power centers, party bosses like Mayor Richard Daley, of Chicago, moderate Republicans, and, above all, Johnson’s former colleagues in the Senate—his mentor Richard Russell, of Georgia; the majority leader, Mike Mansfield, of Montana; and even Eugene McCarthy, of Minnesota, who, though he was running an insurgent antiwar campaign against Johnson, maintained a back channel to his old friend in the White House. These were not just individuals but institutions that represented a broad center, able to appeal to politicians of both parties and, in a moment of crisis, speak to a truly national interest. “There were structures through which people could influence L.B.J.,” Michael Janeway, the author of “The Fall of the House of Roosevelt,” whose father was a close Johnson adviser during L.B.J.'s Senate years, told me. “In our time, nothing like that exists.”

In the middle of a crisis even more dangerous than Vietnam, President George W. Bush sits isolated in the White House, surrounded by a dwindling band of advisers, and continues to talk about winning in Iraq. His supporters in Congress and the media seize every short-term success, in Washington or Iraq, to flog their opponents as defeatists and lay the groundwork for a stab-in-the-back narrative. His critics in Congress and the media clamor for him to admit defeat and begin an immediate withdrawal. Over the course of 2007, the two sides haven’t begun to negotiate the possibility of a compromise; instead, they are driving each other to increasingly bitter resistance. The national tragedy in Iraq is taking place against a political culture personified by the departed Karl Rove: tactically brilliant, strategically blind, polarized into highly partisan bases and orthodoxies endlessly repeated through the mass media. You don't often hear it mentioned, but this might be one of the most important differences between Vietnam and Iraq.