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By George C. Wilson, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007

In January 2009, for the third time since World War II, a newly inaugurated president will be handed a shooting war that Congress did not declare. Even before taking the oath of office, the new commander-in-chief will walk into the political crossfire generated by the hottest question in the land: "Whither Iraq?"

If the opposing party controls Congress, the new president can count on taking extra-heavy fire. Not since 1953, when U.S. forces were bogged down in Korea, have lawmakers and the White House achieved a measure of bipartisanship in deciding how to get out of an unpopular war.

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower not only got himself elected president but also pulled enough fellow Republicans into the House and Senate to give the GOP control of Congress. And, having been commander of the Allied forces in World War II, Eisenhower enjoyed a level of deference on military matters that the next president will not get from lawmakers.

Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's 1952 running mate, did not have Ike's long coattails in the 1968 election, when what to do about the Vietnam War was the big question. Nixon barely defeated Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Although the Republicans gained five Senate seats, bringing their total to 42, the Democrats still had a big enough edge in both chambers to challenge Nixon as he tried to back out of Vietnam with guns blazing and hand the fight over to the South Vietnamese.

Like the presidential contenders in 1952 and 1968, every 2008 candidate has felt compelled to say what he or she would do, as president, about the current war. Their stands range from Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich's get out right now to Republican Sen. John McCain's hang in until the United States can leave honorably. Yet, no matter what today's would-be presidents say during the campaign about extricating the United States from Iraq, the winner is bound to be sobered by the long list of other national security questions waiting to be answered. They include Iraq but go far beyond it.

Global Strategy
Soon after the inauguration, the president will have to spell out a plan for pursuing peace in a world where the threat of terrorism hangs over everybody like the sword of Damocles.

President Bush loosed an avalanche of criticism by announcing that he was not averse to waging pre-emptive warfare. He underscored his shoot-first philosophy by invading Iraq. Rather than try to get the United Nations to bless his military action, as President Truman did in 1950 when he sent American troops to stop the North Korean attack on South Korea, Bush went into Iraq pretty much on his own, with only the British committing significant additional forces.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Democrats and some Republicans have assailed Bush's go-it-alone strategy. His pre-emptive strike stood in stark contrast to this declaration in the Democratic Party's 1952 platform: "Korea has proved, once and for all, that the United Nations will resist aggression.... We reject the ridiculous notions of those who would have the United States face the aggressors alone. That would be the most expensive, and the most dangerous, method of seeking security. This nation needs strong allies around the world making their maximum contribution to the common defense."

In its 1968 platform, the Republican Party had likewise cautioned against answering every fire bell. "The entire nation has been profoundly concerned by hastily extemporized, undeclared land wars which embroil massive U.S. armed forces thousands of miles from our shores," it declared, lambasting President Johnson's Vietnam policies. "It is time to realize that not every international conflict is susceptible of solution by American ground forces."

Ironically, today's Democratic candidates could denounce Bush with the same words that the GOP platform of 1968 used to denounce Johnson: "Politically, the administration has failed to recognize the entirely novel aspects of this war. The overemphasis on its old-style, conventional aspects has blinded the administration to the fact that the issue is not control of territory but the security and loyalty of the population. The enemy's primary emphasis has been to disrupt orderly government. The administration has paid inadequate attention to the political framework on which a successful outcome ultimately depends."

Politics aside, the reality is that World War II was the last time that a president dealt with clear-cut situations when it came to deploying U.S. military power. Americans of all stripes saw fighting Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan as taking on the black hats, and they could follow the war with easy-to-understand arrows on the maps and memorable slogans like "Berlin by Christmas." But the Cold War that came after the shooting war became a struggle to contain rather than conquer communism, and American presidents came to realize, belatedly, that the contest was, essentially, a struggle for minds.

So it was that Truman and then Eisenhower settled for restoring the old boundaries in Korea rather than trying to unify the whole peninsula. Their decision did not sit well with commanding Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who had fought under the World War II demand of unconditional surrender. MacArthur went so far as to vent his frustration in a letter to House Minority Leader Joseph Martin, who read it on the House floor on April 5, 1951, causing an uproar in Washington. In the letter, MacArthur said that there was no substitute for victory, an obvious swipe at Truman's strategy of containing rather than conquering communism by liberating North Korea as well as South Korea. Truman fired MacArthur less than a week later.

Presidents Truman through Nixon could explain what they were doing, and why, starting with the debatable but little-debated premise that communism was monolithic. They could portray their wars as freedom standing against communism. But in the 21st century, a president who resorts to war is less likely to have a clear casus belli. Terrorists are often stateless, with no fixed address.

Iraq
How many American troops should remain on the ground in Iraq, and what should they do?

The new president's starting point for doing the math is the 130,000 troops who were there before this year's "surge" brought the number to 160,000. In the unlikely event that the commander-in-chief wanted to go back up to 160,000, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would almost certainly warn that the resurgence would break the Army and Marine Corps as effective forces because tours of duty would have to be extended yet again. Activating more National Guard units would not be a suitable alternative, the Joint Chiefs would likely tell the president, because governors are already at battle stations to fight additional deployment of their guard members.

Assume that the new commander-in-chief inherits from Bush a force of 100,000 troops on the ground. How should they be deployed? Should they withdraw from the cities and hunker down in a ring of bases that would operate like fire stations answering emergency calls for help from Iraqi army units? Or should the Americans remain salted within the Iraqi population as peacekeepers in a continuation of Gen. David Petraeus's strategy? Should the new president build bases in Iraq that American forces could use as launching pads during other Middle East crises, or would doing so fuel Arab claims that this was what the Big Satan had in mind all along?

What if insurgents are about to overwhelm the newly minted Iraqi army and too few American troops are in the country to save the day? Should the president dispatch more U.S. forces? If past is prologue, he or she -- whether a Democrat or a Republican -- would refuse. During Vietnam, it became a given that once American troops were extricated from the quagmire, it was politically impossible to return them to it.

Although the new president might try to get the United Nations, NATO, or the European Defense Union to send troops into Iraq to keep the lid on the sectarian violence, the odds are long that such pleas would succeed. The Iraq war is even more unpopular abroad than were the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Those earlier wars were portrayed as stands against communism. But the Cold War is over. And the new president will have no such unifying battle cry to shout.

Afghanistan
Persuading other countries to send forces into Afghanistan will not be as tough as persuading them to go to Iraq, especially if the Taliban launches its long-feared offensive. Still, how many U.S. troops can the new president afford to send into Afghanistan without breaking the force and leaving other global trouble spots uncovered?

Pacific Basin
What should the next president do about China? The Chinese are building a "blue water" navy of warships. Conservatives will press the president to combat the threat by building more attack submarines (even though the new Virginia-class subs cost $3 billion each) in case the Chinese navy attacks Taiwan or blocks oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf. Liberals will argue that China is merely arming itself in case it has to protect the oil shipments it needs to fuel its booming economy. Should Japan be encouraged to accelerate its defense buildup as a counterweight to China's? Or would that just alarm Japan's old enemies in the Pacific while failing to inhibit China? The two Koreas are caught between China and Japan, making it difficult for the next president to withdraw more American troops from South Korea without setting off alarm bells in Seoul.

Iran
The challenge here for the next president is to persuade the Tehran government to forgo nuclear arms without sending the American military in to do the persuading. The new secretary of State could play a critical role. Military leaders know that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities could either prove futile or end up poisoning the air of the planet for hundreds of years. And they certainly don't want another Iraq.