Rick Perlstein: Bush, Like Nixon in 1972, Needs a Way Out

Rick Perlstein, in the Village Voice (Jan. 14-20, 2004):

George Bush is selling out Iraq. Gone are his hard-liners' dreams of setting up a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic republic, a light unto the Middle Eastern nations. The decision makers in the administration now realize these goals are unreachable. So they've set a new goal: to end the occupation by July 1, whether that occupation has accomplished anything valuable and lasting or not. Just declare victory and go home. The tyranny of Saddam Hussein will be over. But a new tyranny will likely take its place: the tyranny of civil war, as rival factions rush into the void. Such is the mess this president seems willing to leave behind in order to save his campaign....

Once again, as so often in these last few months, an analogy is Vietnam. And, as so often in the last three years, the analogous president is Nixon.

The war was already very unpopular, its prospects none too promising, when Nixon became president in 1969. It had only gotten worse by 1971, when Nixon began thinking hard about re-election. As with Bush recently, his approval rating in the middle of that year was around 50 percent; without at least appearing to quell the bloodshed, he couldn't get re-elected. But failure—a North Vietnamese takeover—could only be held off by continuing to kill. And failure would render Nixon the first American president to lose a war.

The solution he hit upon was to change the definition of "failure," to move the goal line.

The word victory was banned from all White House discussion, in favor of the bland substitute "peace with honor"—repeated more and more mellifluously, with each passing month systematically emptied of actual meaning. By late 1971, the phrase signified nothing more than an absence of U.S. troops on the ground and the freeing of American prisoners of war. "Following the President's lead," Nixon's shrewdest historian, Jonathan Schell, has written, "people began to speak as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped four hundred Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them."

Secretly, and behind the back of the South Vietnamese government, Nixon's emissary, Henry Kissinger, negotiated a face-saving exit with the enemy, one that let the enemy keep troops in South Vietnam—guaranteeing South Vietnamese collapse. Publicly we proclaimed the fiction that our allies were strong enough to get along without us. Actually, Nixon and Kissinger knew they could only hold on long enough for the American people to forget about them. On October 26, 1972, Henry Kissinger announced that negotiations had succeeded, that "peace is at hand." On November 7, Richard Nixon won his 49 states against the Democrat, George McGovern. A weary nation had proved perfectly willing to acquiesce in a political swindle. Nixon had moved the goalpost to the 50-yard line, then awarded himself a touchdown....

Once again a war has gone wrong, and the denouement still must be leveraged for maximum political advantage—or at least to minimum disadvantage. A scary story must be capped off with a happy ending. And for that reason, the Bush administration must make sure certain things are forgotten: namely, the aims it said we were going to war for in the first place. George Bush must keep on moving the goal line, as he has ever since this war's beginning.