Of course yanking the leash of a popular general in the middle of a conflict can be political suicide for any Commander and Chief. When Truman fired General MacArthur all hell broke loose for the man the right dubbed, "that little pipsqueak traitor."
Headlines blared, "Ouster Viewed by Republicans as 1952 Issue." In a matter of hours after the firing Republicans in Congress were talking impeachment. And Truman's poll numbers plumbed historic depths. And when the fired MacArthur returned home he was greeted with parades and treated like a Roman general returning from wars of conquest.
Of course, Truman was in his second term and did not have to worry about reelection when he fired Big Mac. Obama does not have that luxury. He's going to have to take the full heat if he decides to yank Chrystal's chain. But, as time passed and cooler heads examined Truman's decision to relieve MacArthur of his command, it all came down to this: civilian control over the military. It's what's made the US different from other countries since its founding. When push comes to shove, it's the civilians in power who have the right and obligation to tell the generals how it's gonna be.
That concept, that constitutional imperative, was reinforced when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concluded that MacArthur's dismissal was entirely justified. He'd crossed the nation's civilian leaders one time too many. Even the man who succeeded Truman, Republican Dwight Eisenhower, had been stung by MacArthur one time too many and was more than happy he did not have to fire him himself.
One final observation here. The Vietnam war left America with plenty to think about, much of which we are still digesting. Still we wrestle with those two terms; "winning" and "losing."
On one side are those who claim that we should have just let the general do what they wanted to do in Vietnam and we would have "won." That it was meddling civilians and politicians in Washington who "lost" that war.
Others say those generals got everything they requested, year after year; more troops, more air strikes, more Agent Orange, military strikes inside neighboring Laos and Cambodia. And that it was only after escalation requests escalated with no end in sight that the political machinery finally reeled the generals in bringing that unfortunate "war" to an end.
That argument, the Vietnam War, dragged on and on and on. We didn't "win" and we didn't "lose." And all we have to show for it all is a black granite wall with 60,000 names of my generation on it. I wonder how many names will be on the Afghanistan wall, the Pakistan wall, the Iraq wall once we stop trying to "win" or avoid "losing" those wars.
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