Kissinger advising Bush

Journalist Bob Woodward is about to publish a new book on the administration called “State of Denial.” And in a recent interview with ABC, he revealed, among other things, that Henry Kissinger is advising the White House on Iraq.

“The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon saying, ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better.’”

He said Kissinger, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, has been telling Bush and Cheney that “in Iraq, he declared very simply, ‘Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.’”

“This is so fascinating. Kissinger’s fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will.”

While I’d be the last person to call Iraq a quagmire, the lessons of the Vietnam War are real. Consider just a few foreign policy consequences of just the appearance of defeat or losing ground, either at home or on the ground:

• if the public loses the will to fight the war, the militants achieve a morale boost, will find it easier to recruit and win local sympathy;
• if the public loses faith in the administration, it restricts their international negotiations because they lack public support;
• if the US is perceived as being bogged down in a war, it reduces our strength to act elsewhere around the globe;
• if the US withdraws, it suffers credibility and good faith with allies, and shows the world that the US can’t take a real fight when the going gets tough;
  … and much more.