After Victory, the Boot

Americans have a funny attitude toward their wartime leaders. Generally, it has been out the door once the war is over, even when victory was overwhelming. It’s a potential pitfall for President Bush.

The United States’ first triumph on the world stage was World War I. U.S. troops entered the war in the spring of 1917 and received much of the credit for the Allied victory in November 1918. President Woodrow Wilson traveled to Europe in early December for the Paris Peace Conference in January the most powerful and most beloved man in the world. Like Bush, he held strong moral views on how the world should be organized and on the role America should play in it, but fighting among the European powers quickly dashed his peace plans.

The unsuccessful peacemaker returned home, and Americans soon turned against him and his war. In 1920, voters thrashed Wilson’s Democratic Party in favor of the GOP’s Warren Harding, who ran on returning to “normalcy.” Among other things, normalcy meant rejecting a large U.S. role in world affairs, as Wilson had envisioned it, in favor of isolationism.

Fast-forward to 1946. Again, the U.S. had led the victors, this time in World War II, and had emerged as the world’s greatest power. But in the first postwar elections, President Harry S. Truman’s Democrats were defeated because of the economic dislocation and labor unrest that followed the war. All the Republicans had to say was, “Had enough? Vote Republican,” and voters gave the GOP one of the party’s greatest landslides of the 20th century. The fact that the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman had led the nation to victory did it no good in the midterm elections.

What happens if victory is elusive? Truman was run out of office in 1952 by the stalemate in Korea. Failure to deliver a triumph in the Korean War, which started in 1950, led to accusations that Truman’s Democrats had betrayed the country and allowed Communists to infiltrate the government.

The Vietnam quagmire destroyed three presidencies: Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1968, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1974 and Gerald R. Ford’s short presidency in 1976. Nixon was elected in 1968 to get us out of Vietnam, but his failure to do so over the next four years poisoned his presidency, directly leading to the Watergate scandal that forced him out of office. Ford couldn’t overcome his 1974 pardon of Nixon.

The third type of wartime experience is the most recent: a politically inconclusive war followed by disillusionment. That’s what happened to the first President Bush in 1992, a year and a half after his great Persian Gulf War triumph. Saddam Hussein’s survival in power, coupled with a mild recession at home, trumped the Bush victory in Kuwait and his successful management of the end of the Cold War. Bush lost to Bill Clinton, a little-known governor of a small state.

That may be a warning for the current President Bush. Wars in the Middle East have a habit of never ending. Israel’s conquest of southern Lebanon wasn’t the last word, and its problems on the West Bank and Gaza, the legacy of the Six-Day War in 1967, continue. Shiite demands for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, and possible terrorist acts against American soldiers, could resurrect latent isolationism in U.S. voters as victory fades into “Was it worth it?” second-guessing.

The risk of postwar disillusionment is high for Bush because his support, although broad, is brittle. His ideological approach to many issues has solidified the Democratic Party’s base against him, according to recent polls. Bush’s adversaries can block his judicial nominations and dilute his economic programs at no apparent political cost because the president has limited support among Democratic voters, and the economy remains weak. The week that Baghdad fell, every Democrat in the Senate but one voted against the Bush tax cut. The day a 30-foot cast-iron statue of Hussein was toppled in Firdos Square in central Baghdad, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 100 points. Neither the economy nor the political climate has yet produced a postwar dividend for Bush.

That may be because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the Iraq war. The administration, in large part, tied its justification to use force against Hussein to 9/11. The only modern event of similar trauma was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. World War II was the only major war in which Americans were fully united and whose goal, because of Pearl Harbor, was clear.

But the war in Afghanistan, not the one in Iraq, more closely resembled World War II in terms of clarity of connection between attack and perpetrator. And Afghanistan has been a popular and successful war, denying Al Qaeda the sanctuary it once enjoyed. It is not clear, however, that the nexus between 9/11 and the Iraq war is as strong in the public mind.

The afterglow of the Persian Gulf War faded quickly when it became evident that Hussein would remain in power, and the first President Bush felt the political sting. Nothing better exemplified how Bush’s victory had turned to dust than the 1992 bumper sticker, “Saddam Hussein still has his job, do you have yours?”

Only once has a war worked well politically for the administration that conducted it. President William McKinley was overwhelmingly reelected in 1900, two years after the Spanish American War. His running mate, Col. Teddy Roosevelt of Rough Rider fame, was a hero in the war.