This brings us to the last and worst consequence of Nixon’s Dolchstoßlegende. Americans are defenseless to stop another president from doing what Nixon did. Actions taken by both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama raise the question of whether they merely postponed, rather than prevented, defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bush’s 2007 surge in Iraq would have required a miracle to succeed. The premise was that temporarily increasing the American troop presence and employing “clear and hold” tactics to secure the population would provide diplomats an opportunity to work out a settlement among Iraqi parties who were then shooting out their differences. The miracle required was to turn blood enemies into peaceful, democratic partners. It did not occur, of course, nor did anyone come up with a workable way to make it occur. The surge did, however, solve the most dire political problem facing Bush and the Republican Party. Instead of withdrawing American troops and acknowledging failure, the surge enabled them to claim “progress” of the kind Nixon made in Vietnam. The increased American troops did increase the security of the Iraqi population—temporarily. But the surge troops started coming home before the Bush administration ended. As the number of American troops gradually decreased during the next three years, violence among the Iraqis increased once more.1 Geopolitically, the surge produced temporary, tactical benefits, but it failed to achieve its strategic goal. Politically, however, it provided the Republican president with an excuse to continue the war long enough to hand it off to his successor. President Bush never did find a way to win the war, but he did find a way to shirk responsibility for losing it.
Nevertheless, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, reached back into the McGovern playbook to accuse the president of “an open-ended commitment to a war without end.”2 Once again, a Democratic leader was casting a Republican president as someone who would never retreat, never surrender. On the other hand, Chairman Joe Biden, D-Conn., of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, did accuse the president of merely delaying disaster so his successor would “be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.” Like Ted Kennedy in 1971, Biden in 2007 lacked documents (or tapes) to back up his claim. “I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost,” said the future vice president. “Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy—literally, not figuratively.”3
Bush also handed his Democratic successor a particularly Nixonian withdrawal deadline: December 31, 2011, Reelection Year Eve for the next president. Recall that Nixon rejected a Reelection Year Eve withdrawal deadline of December 31, 1971, because it would have allowed Saigon to unravel before Election Day and voters to hold him accountable. The December 31, 2011, deadline accomplished two ends helpful to Republicans: It kept the war going long enough for it to become a Democratic president’s responsibility, and it provided almost a year of unraveling in Iraq before Election Day 2012.
“A Romney for President White Paper” from October 7, 2011, laid the groundwork for a new Dolchstoßlegende:
The 2007 “surge” of troops successfully provided security to the population and granted space and time for the Iraqis, our diplomatic corps, and our coalition partners to establish institutions of governance. Today, after struggle and sacrifice, the goal of a democratic Iraq allied with the United States is within our reach. The Obama administration, however, is threatening to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We are nearing the December 31, 2011 deadline for reaching a new Status of Force Agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in Iraq to continue their training mission.4
Far from creating a democratic ally of the United States, the invasion of Iraq and subsequent efforts at nation building replaced the minority Sunni-dominated government of Saddam Hussein with a majority Shiite-dominated government friendly to Iran. At the time of Romney’s white paper, the debate was over how many American troops to keep in Iraq past the deadline. Romney accused Obama of planning to keep too few there.5 The Iraqi government resolved the debate by refusing to allow any American troops to remain in the country past the December 31, 2011, deadline.
Voters familiar with the true story of Nixon and Vietnam would have had other questions on their minds than how many troops to keep in Iraq: Was the president’s proposal to keep American troops in Iraq past the December 31, 2011, deadline an attempt to keep the country from unraveling before Election Day 2012? Would keeping American troops in Iraq another five years achieve the goal that the previous five years had not? Was the opposition party accusing the president of doing too little too late because that’s a time-tested way for the party out of power to become the party in power? Were any of the proposals to keep America militarily involved in Iraq, from the surge through the deadline-extension debate, part of a workable strategy to transform the country into a democratic ally of the United States? Or did they amount to little more than useful ways for politicians to delay, and shift the blame for, defeat?
President Obama adopted a distinctly Nixonian withdrawal date for the 33,000 surge troops he sent to Afghanistan: September 2012, two months before the election. He kept them in long enough to avoid unraveling before Election Day and brought them home in time to take credit for meeting his goals before voters went to the polls. Obama also set, years in advance, a timetable for withdrawing most American troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. That was enough to get him through the last congressional midterm election of his administration without losing the war.
More than half of the American casualties of the war in Afghanistan have occurred during the Obama administration.6 No one can say that these sacrifices have led to victory in what is now America’s longest war.
None of this proves that Bush or Obama made military decisions for political reasons. The point is that voters don’t even know that there are questions that must be raised whenever a president proposes to prolong a war without a workable strategy to win. If the Nixon tapes are, in Bob Woodward’s witty phrase, the gift that keeps on giving, then Nixon’s Dolchstoßlegende is the gift that keeps on taking. The myth disguises political cowardice as political courage, opportunism as patriotism, and defeat as victory. It keeps us from the knowledge of our national past that we need to make wise decisions for the future. For as long as the true story of how Nixon prolonged a war and faked peace for political gain remains unknown, other presidents will be able to play fatal politics with American lives.