326presidents often have a keen sense of history. In wartime, they are
attuned to the real or perceived mistakes of their predecessors. Wilson
thought Lincoln had interfered too much in how his generals fought;
from Wilson’s League of Nations debacle, Roosevelt recognized the
need to put in place the framework of a postwar collective security
system before World War II ended; Bush thought Johnson had meddled
excessively in military decisions in Vietnam. When Barack Obama
weighed what course to follow in Afghanistan, he feared a reprise of the
incremental drift into war that had characterized Johnson’s approach to
Vietnam in 1964–1965. He thought that Johnson had failed to ask hard
questions about the recommendations he was given from the military
and that Bush had made the same error in planning the Iraq invasion.
In thinking about Vietnam, Obama may have had the right war in
mind, but his situation more closely resembled that faced by Richard
Nixon in 1969 than Johnson four years earlier. Nixon, too, had inher-
ited a war that had become a stalemate for his predecessor. Nixon’s
challenge had been fi nding a way out that did not look like defeat, as
he played a weakening military hand during the gradual withdrawal of
American forces. Obama actually came into offi ce with two wars on his
hands, one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq. Fortunately, the
6
Inheriting a Bad Hand
Barack Obama