And, as costly as Vietnam turned out to be, the Treasury was not nearly as broke then as it is now.
Shortly after his Washington Post Outlook article, Kennan accepted an invitation from Sen. William Fulbright to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was February 1966. There were some 200,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam; two years later there would be 536,000.
Kennan minced few words:
"There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives. ...Kennan concluded his Senate testimony with a familiar quotation from John Quincy Adams. "[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," said our sixth president. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.""Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country, and particularly not in one remote from our shores, from our culture and from the experience of our people.
"This is not only not our business, but I don't think we can do it successfully. " "Vietnam is not a region of major military, industrial importance. It is difficult to believe that any decisive developments of the world situation would be determined ... by what happens on that territory. ...
"Even a situation in which South Vietnam was controlled exclusively by the Viet Cong ... would not, in my opinion, present dangers great enough to justify our military intervention."
Kennan added: "Now, gentlemen, I don't know exactly what John Quincy Adams had in mind when he spoke those words. But I think that, without knowing it, he spoke very directly and very pertinently to us here today."
And to us here today.
Death Via Invincible Ignorance
More than 55,000 of the eventual 58,220 American deaths in Vietnam came after Kennan testified. It is yet to be known how many Americans will die in Afghanistan if President Obama follows the advice of his generals -- much as President Johnson did -- and escalates.
Can we not learn from history? Kennan (and John Quincy Adams) were, of course, right on target. As for today, it is a pity that the United States lacks a statesman of Kennan's caliber who would dare set aside concern about status within the power circles and make as pointed a critique about Afghanistan as Kennan did about Vietnam. [George Kennan died on March 17, 2005.]
And it is a pity that West Point didn't teach much about the lessons of the Vietnam War when McChrystal was studying there in the 1970s. [For a flavor of the current elite "group think" on Afghanistan, see Consortiumnews.com's "Kipling Haunts Obama's Afghan War."]
Is this not the lesson to apply to deliberations on Afghanistan? When it becomes clear that current policies are not working or, worse, are self-defeating, experienced folks with those insights need to find ways to say that -- loudly.
