The Wall Street Journal-20080122-American Honor
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080122
American Honor
By an apt coincidence, the revival of John McCain's political fortunes takes place close to the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, when some 100,000 North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong irregulars launched a coordinated attack on the South that took the U.S. by surprise and permanently altered the political landscape of the war. That event, far more so than Sept. 11, is what Mr. McCain's candidacy is all about. In many ways it's what this year's election is all about, too.
There are two narratives about Tet, which began on the night of Jan. 30, 1968. In the liberal version, the sheer scale of the North's offensive exposed America's politicians and generals as dupes or liars when they claimed that progress in the war was being made and that victory was within reach. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," said CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite in his broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968, adding that "we are mired in a stalemate" that could only be ended by negotiation, not victory. The comments reportedly prompted Lyndon Johnson to remark that "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
Conservatives tell a different story. While the U.S. might have been caught off guard by the offensive, the result was nonetheless a rout for the North, which lost every significant tactical engagement and suffered tens of thousands of casualties. Contrary to Johnson's grim political assessment, public support for the war effort actually rose in the wake of Tet: A Gallup poll showed that the percentage of Americans who considered themselves "hawks" on the war went to 61% from 56% following the offensive, while the number of self-declared "doves" dropped to 23% from 27%.
In fact, what Johnson had lost was the support of the media elite, who (conservatives say) used their privileged positions to skew perceptions of what was actually happening in the war. "In all honesty, we didn't achieve our main objective [in the offensive]," admitted North Vietnamese general Tran Do, who in later life became a pro-democracy dissident. "As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention -- but it turned out to be a fortunate result."
It is this second narrative that largely explains why Mr. McCain is succeeding among Republicans in 2008 in a way he did not eight years ago. Last time, he ran and lost as an anti-establishment, "moderate" Republican. This time, although he continues to depend heavily on the votes of independents, his fundamental appeal is to American honor, which is also the trait he uniquely embodies among the GOP contenders. He seeks to turn his personal code of honor -- the "No Surrender" slogan -- into a national code. He rails against a news media that only begrudgingly recognizes American military gains, repeatedly citing as Exhibit A Time magazine's refusal to name Gen. David Petraeus as its Person of the Year for 2007. Above all, he not only warns against the policy consequences of a failure in Iraq, but also stands against a philosophy, or psychology, that seeks to make a virtue of failure.
This is another Vietnam legacy. Beyond the purely pragmatic argument that the war in Southeast Asia was unwinnable, there was also a sense among opponents of the war that defeat would, in some deep way, be balm for America's soul. "For all the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted?" asked antiwar writer James Carroll in 2006, explicitly making the connection between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. On the subject of honor, Mr. Carroll added that "the goal of 'peace with honor' assumes the nation's honor has not already been squandered."
Mr. Carroll penned those lines when American fortunes in Iraq were approaching their nadir. Since then, the military balance has shifted dramatically in America's favor, just as it did following Tet with the appointment of a new commander (Creighton Abrams) and the implementation of a new strategy (focused on providing security at the local level). In Vietnam neither of those changes proved sufficient for victory, partly because the moral and strategic case for involvement had become so muddled, partly because the consequences of withdrawal were dimly perceived, and partly because the constellation of political circumstances -- Watergate above all -- conspired against sustaining the gains that had been achieved.
Yet there is no cosmic rule that says that all that will again come to pass with Iraq, and the essence of Mr. McCain's message is that it must not. His case is easier to make because this time Americans do have the benefit of hindsight about the consequences of defeat, and they are not the redemptive ones imagined by Mr. Carroll. Among them: the mass murder of the people who stood with us; the enslavement of entire nations by fanatical and confident ideologues; the blow to U.S. interests and the stain on American prestige.
These are some of the practical and ethical arguments for seeing the Iraq war through to a decent conclusion. But honor is a different, deeper matter. For the Democratic candidates in this race, it has only a conditional and tenuous relation to the word "victory" in its usual sense. If it means anything at all to them, it seems to be mainly in the sense of the good opinion of America's traditional friends, many of whom opposed the Iraq venture from the start. This kind of honor, also known as ingratiation, is gained by improving America's poll numbers in global opinion surveys.
There is another kind of honor, however, which is uniquely bestowed by one's adversaries and enemies. It is the honor one acquires by defying temptations of popularity, by the acceptance of long odds, by suffering, by what is called the nobility of the last-ditch defense. It is the honor many Americans feel they lost in Vietnam, and which, through Mr. McCain's not-so-improbable resurgence, they now seek to regain and make their own.
