Quote Originally Posted by Steve Blair View Post
The biggest issue I see with Congress getting involved at this stage in the way that they have (much like they did in Vietnam) is that there is no accountability for them. Popular memory (not necessarily history) remembers Watergate, not Kennedy making political hay out of the casualties at Dong Ap Bai (Hamburger Hill). It also remembers the photos of the last helicopters out of Saigon, not the lackluster political decisions made by Congress that led up to that moment.

Bush has certainly made mistakes with Iraq, and they will be remembered as his. But within the anonymity of "consensus" and "voting blocks" Congress may once again be able to evade theirs. To borrow some of Nagl's framework, this certainly does NOT make Congress a "learning institution," and perhaps teaches them a dangerous lesson: They can act (or fail to act) with near impunity because of their sheer size and lack of political accountability. Elections certainly are not accountability in this case, especially when one considers the Senate. Kennedy has never been held accountable for his poor decisions in the late 1960s, and he seems to have failed to learn from them. The same could be said for many of his colleagues.
Neither am I particularly keen on putting them in charge of running a war, and I agree that their track record doesn't bode well for them getting much right. Several hundred people as CINC? Ugh. But in cases where they have stepped in to muck things up, the action was in response to a backlash from the public, and it was, in each of the cases of Vietnam and Gulf 2, after giving the Executive Branch several years to pursue its policy. In Vietnam, the American public was pretty supportive -- until Tet put the lie to the Light at the End of the Tunnel. I would submit that the American public gave this administration's policy a fair shake -- given the various lines that were coming out of the administration -- before losing patience.

That's what any administration needs to remember about the American public -- you have to be mostly on target on the level of commitment and how long it will take, and certainly don't give them false hope, because the people get very impatient when that is dashed. FDR never promised anything about WWII -- it was "for the duration," and nobody thought the duration was just about to end at any point. Possibly that's why the collective memory of the war is so positive -- given the enormity of the conflict, for the Americans it probably ended sooner than expected.

The bottom line is that managing public perception and support is a significant piece of the strategic picture in the American case. And as tempting as it is to use optimism as a means of building the right image of the policy and maintaining positive feelings towards it, it's a very risky way to go about things, because of the problems associated with dashed expectations. And in the American system, if there is not the option to dump the administration when the public loses patience with the policy or the handling thereof, the second recourse is to the Congress. Hence my strong sense of executive responsibility in such cases -- because that second option is sub-optimal.