‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED'. Who can forget this infamous banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln as President George W. Bush declared premature victory in the Iraq War on May 1, 2003? What was the mission? What was accomplished? When will it end? America's bungled war in Iraq is the subject of dozens of popular and scholarly studies. One of the latest – and best - books in this growing library is Lloyd C. Gardner's “The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present” (The New Press, 2010). Lloyd C. Gardner is Research Professor of History at Rutgers University. He is the author and/or editor of many notable books, such as “Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam” (1997), “Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam” (2008), and “The Case That Never Dies: The Lindbergh Kidnapping” (2004). His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Fulbright Professorships (England and Finland). “The Long Road to Baghdad” takes a look back at American foreign policy beginning in the Vietnam era. “Vietnam,” Gardner writes, “was a traumatic intellectual and political experience. It was something no one wanted to repeat.” America's defeat in Vietnam was followed by further humiliations during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. President George H. W. Bush proclaimed an end to the “Vietnam Syndrome” with America's swift victory in the Persian Gulf War (1990-91). Gardner maintains that this war marked the end for “Cold War realism,” and sparked the development of “a new form of liberationist theory suitable for a reigning superpower, one supposedly able to remake the world in its image.” This liberationist theory was applied militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq after the tragic events of 9/11. Vice President Dick Cheney boasted on May 31, 2005 that “just in this administration, we've liberated 50 million people from the Taliban and from Saddam Hussein in Iraq – two terribly oppressive regimes that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their own people.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld congratulated American troops in 2005 for showing that “America is, in fact, a land of liberators, not a land of occupiers.” Gardner sorts out the conflicting motives and the shifting foundation for the war in Iraq. “The war,” he writes, “had been sold on the issue of Saddam's threat to the world, but shock and awe had always had a political objective.” Of course, Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or collaborate with Al-Qaeda on 9/11, as the Bush administration had claimed. But they gambled, Gardner says, that if the war ended quickly, “no one would really care all that much, because a tyrant had been removed, and now there was a real opening for a new era in Middle Eastern politics.” Gardner's book sharpens our focus on real war and surreal consequences. We will live with both for a long time to come. We are still living with the ghost of Vietnam as Gardner maintains: “The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had its origins in the Vietnam defeat and the perceived need to reassert American primacy over the Soviet Union in contests in the third world, but this drive was also connected root and branch to a need to reassure the nation that what had been lost in Vietnam was confidence in the metaphor of progress.” We are indebted to Professor Gardner for his clear dissection of the disease of war in our time. “The Long Road to Baghdad” is required reading for understanding a tragic chapter in world history. - SG Joseph Richard Preville is an American writer living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.A conversation with Lloyd C. GardnerBy Joseph Richard Preville What inspired you to become a historian? I had always loved history from the time my mother read me a somewhat expurgated version of King Arthur and the Roundtable, but it was a college professor after an exam where I did fairly well who told me there were plenty of good lawyers around, and not enough good historians. It was the first I had thought of it as a career. I had always loved historical research and writing term papers, so it all came together. Do you agree with President Obama that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity,” but Iraq was “a war of choice”? The problem is obvious in the very way you phrase the question. Iraq was not a war of choice against a country, but against a regime; Afghanistan was a war against the Taliban regime in hopes of bringing Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda to justice, or, preferably, simply destroying Al-Qaeda. The real question is the kind of war he has decided to fight. What we are doing now will not end the threat, and it inflames the entire country, also including border areas of Pakistan. Deny it as the president may, the situation does resemble Vietnam, because we cannot maintain 100 to 150 thousand men there indefinitely, and Karzai is as bad as Thieu was. Meanwhile, it is like pouring gasoline on a fire. I think that is why there is such a debate inside the administration over possible negotiations with the Taliban. Is President Obama fulfilling the promises he made to Muslims in his famous speech in Cairo in June 2009? I'm not sure what those “promises” actually were, except to show that he did not have a general bias against the Muslim world? He discussed many things that appeal to American liberals, such as the need for women to be brought into the mainstream of economic and political life. I think he genuinely wishes to try to deal with the Arab-Israeli issue, and I think he wanted to re-set the button on Iranian-American relations. But whether he, or any American president, any longer has the leverage to make things happen the way he wants them to is doubtful. On the Middle East there are powerful forces in Congress that shape options (or prevent options), although that influence has now encountered some opposition from the Pentagon. George W. Bush once described his Presidency as “a joyous experience.” How do you think future historians will rank his tenure in the White House? We expect more and more from our presidents, while at the same time there are more and more constraints on the president except in the area of military policy. Bush could not “get rid of” Social Security, but he could wage war with ease after 9/11. Obama barely got through a health bill that fell short of dealing with many serious issues, while he can send 100,000 troops to Afghanistan with barely a murmur. It is also the case that Americans traditionally distrust diplomacy. Historians are going to have to deal not with individual presidencies, but with larger spans of time and clusters of issues. It was, after all, Sandy Berger in the Clinton Administration, as I wrote in “Long Road,” who denigrated the idea of inspections for WMD. But having said these things, I think that George W. Bush's reliance on Cheney and Rumsfeld strengthened the Pentagon's supremacy in international affairs. The general verdict on that point alone will not change, no matter the individual historian's point of view.
