Lessons From History on How to End the Iraq War

Nov. 10, 2006 — -- When it comes to changing the guard at the Pentagon, is history repeating itself? I hope so but I'm not at all sure.

In 1967, the announcement came that Robert McNamara was stepping down as secretary of defense.

He had been a chief architect of the U.S. escalation in Vietnam, an early advocate of the use of force there, and, like Donald Rumsfeld 40 years later, a man sure of his own superiority who brooked no interference

By late 1967, McNamara had grown disenchanted with the policy he had helped forge and had come to the conclusion that the "game was not worth the candle."

He proposed to Lyndon Johnson a troop freeze, a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, and a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Johnson fired him.

Johnson chose Clark Clifford to replace McNamara. Clifford had come to prominence as a young man by helping plan the strategy that won the 1948 election for Harry Truman.

He rose rapidly as a top strategist and sage within the Democratic Party, and later as a high-powered lawyer in private practice, became the man to see if you wanted something done in Washington.

As the new secretary of defense, Clifford gathered together a group of similarly impressive individuals and pushed the president toward accepting the very recommendations that McNamara had made.

It was Clifford more than any one individual who turned Johnson around on the war. Johnson agreed to a bombing pause and agreed to open negotiations in Paris with the North Vietnamese.

So now, Rumsfeld has been fired.

There is a difference, of course. Unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld was not fired because he had turned against this war but because he didn't prosecute it properly and beside, given this week's elections, someone had to be served up to an angry public.

But Rumsfeld is not the important comparison here.

The important question is whether Robert Gates will prove to be another Clark Clifford and help turn this president away from a disastrous policy. The augurs are mixed.

On the one hand, Gates is clearly an intelligent person with a record of accomplishment that brought him to the directorship of the CIA in the administration of this president's father.

He knows how to navigate in Washington, and he knows something about the Middle East and the peoples and religion of the region.

On the other hand, when Gates was in the CIA, he was a "hard liner" who aligned himself with then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

Cheney was resisting efforts to take a moderate view toward Mikhail Gorbachev and accept that Gorbachev might be part of the solution to the Cold War, rather than a continuation of the problem.

Moreover, according to several of his colleagues, Gates manipulated the intelligence to give hard-line policy makers the ammunition they needed to press their agenda -- does that sound familiar -- and Gates was widely believed to have had guilty knowledge of the illegal diversion of money to the Contra "freedom fighters" in Central America.

Yes, the augurs are decidedly mixed.

Let us hope that when the old television-show moderator says, "Will the real Robert Gates please stand up" that the ghost of Clark Clifford will rise and Gates will prove to be someone who helps move the president into a world of realism and out of his world of fantasy.

Let us hope that history is, indeed, repeating itself. But pardon me if I keep my fingers crossed.