"We're trying to be prudent"

As often happens on Saturday, I'm asking anyone who has not seen it yet to watch this week's Bill Moyers' Journal online. As President Obama decides (after the holiday now) whether to send as many as another 40,000 Americans into an open-ended faraway military action, Moyers shares tapes of LBJ deliberating a similar commitment in Vietnam. One excerpt from one of Johnson's conversations with Robert McNamara:

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: It gets down to a question of numbers then. [...]

ROBERT MCNAMARA: That's right [...] Westmoreland recommended ten additional battalions over and above the 13 you've already authorized, which would have a strength of something on the order of 45,000 men. I would recommend five battalions with the strength of about 25,000 men. So, we're talking about [...] the difference of 20,000 people. But they're all combat people. And it's quite a difference in risk in my opinion. Really this is the difference and this is a hard one to argue out with the Chiefs, because in the back of my mind, I have a very definite limitation on commitment in mind. And I don't think the Chiefs do. In fact, I know they don't.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Do you think that this is just the next step with them up the ladder?

ROBERT MCNAMARA: Yes. Well, they hope they don't have to go any further. But Westmoreland outlines in his cable the step beyond it. And he doesn't say that's the last.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Well, I don't guess anybody knows.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: I don't think anybody knows, that's right. But I'm inclined to think that unless we're really willing to go to a full potential land war, we've got to slow down here and try to halt, at some point, the ground troop commitment [...]

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Do you know how far we're going to go?

ROBERT MCNAMARA: No.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Or do the Joint Chiefs know? What human being knows? [...] Now, we don't say that putting these people in is going to win, but we say if you don't put them in, you're going to lose substantially what you have. Now we don't want to promise, you do, but this is more of a holding action in the hope that through the monsoon they'll change their mind and time will play. Instead of being rash, we're trying to be prudent. Now isn't that really what we're trying to do? No, not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 are going to end that war. And we're not getting out. But we're trying to hold what we got.

Just to be clear. The two men are considering sending something between 20,000 and 50,000 troops into a situation they know is bad and is going to be bad (roughly the same sort of thing Obama is considering now) in the name of "trying to be prudent".

Listening to these conversations, one sees how a slow-building disastrous tragedy like the U.S. war in Vietnam is allowed to happen through a process of dithering and political calculating and muddling through even as the horrifying ramifications are openly visible to everyone and repeatedly referred back to. None of the people making these decisions, despite their obvious grasp of the situation, had the moral courage necessary to push back and say no, we're not doing this horrible thing.

It isn't difficult to imagine something very like these conversations taking place in the Obama White House right now. Will the President have the courage to do the right thing, or just the prudent thing?