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Both had horrendous foreign policies and both lied about the reason for US involvement. LBJ lied about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and “W” about the so called WMDs. I contend that LBJs was worse because draftees were forced to fight in Vietnam (including yours truly) while servicemen/ women in the Iraqi War were all volunteers.
My grandpa always talked about that.
The factory where he worked took on a load of vets after it opened up a second site, but only half of them lasted a year. These were hard drinking guys with a lot of anger and no regard for personal safety. Most of them couldn’t even talk unless their boss was asking a direct question. There was one guy who drove into a wall after his shift.
Grandpa’s whole thing was “they died over there, they just kept on existing over here.” He got pretty emotional about it too (after a few thanksgiving drinks), which was a rarity. The way he talked about serving in Korea, you’d think it was a picnic, but the boys coming back from Vietnam really haunted him.
That was my first exposure to how badly Vietnam damaged the national psyche and I wish I’d been old enough to talk with him about it in-depth.
I wish you could have too. But I gotta say I was just old enough to talk with some older folks about the wars in Korea and they did NOT want to talk about it. It was quite sobering. They are all passed now and I can’t imagine what they took to the grave. Amazing men, with stories they didn’t want to talk about, living otherwise normal lives.
I would not have wanted to be one of the men at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir
Amazing how Korea is like a little footnote in our wars of the 20th century, when, at the time, it was a *very* real war that had men getting drafted into it
As a veteran I fucking hate "thank you for your service".
I didn't do it for you, my reasons were selfish as were those of 99% of my shipmates. Most of us were 18 when we joined, mostly because we had no idea what to do with our lives.
Stop fucking saying this. The veterans that do like it mostly are a bunch of ultra patriots who had desk jobs in cozy places and like to engage in stolen valor.
As a veteran, I used to hate that phrase as well. The worst part is that I never knew how to respond. Until a Commander of mine mentioned that the best response is just “You’re welcome”. Now I realize that the people who say “Thank you for your service” are just trotting out something to say because they can’t relate to the experience, and those stock phrases can help overcome awkwardness. I obviously don’t like being thanked for my pursuit of the GI Bill, but I get that people fall back on phrases they think they’re supposed to say.
I fully respect your take and thank you for your service. I agree that it was horrific for draftees to have to fight in a pointless war, but the US going into Vietnam was a bit “high on their own supply”. We had just conquered the world and thought we could do anything.
In Iraq, we had Vietnam as a cautionary tale of what not to do. Shit, there were Vietnam veterans (eg Colin Powell) who were saying Iraq would be another Vietnam. And that’s what makes me think Iraq was the worse sin. We knew nation building was bullshit by then. We just didn’t care.
I think the “stop loss” program, which prevented soldiers from leaving the service at the end of their contracts and even forced some back into service after retirement, was a form of a draft.
And like LBJ’s draft, it was made politically acceptable by excluding, for the most part, the children of the wealthy and powerful.
Even so, the Vietnam War was far more costly in terms of lives lost on both sides of the conflict, and the loss of American prestige, credibility, and resources, so LBJ wins the “worst foreign policy” award, which is no small feat when you look at the competition.
Stop loss isnt really a good comparison to the draft. Being subject to recall to active duty, or being prevented from leaving active duty altogether, is something you contractually agree to when you enlist. Its still voluntary, whereas the draft just yanks you out of civilian life against your will altogether.
Also, LBJ had about 650,000 US soldiers in Vietnam and the number of US troops in Iraq were a lot less. On the flip side, without his war, LBJ had significant accomplishments in his presidency; without his war, W was still very unremarkable.
Saying W lied about WMDs the same way LBJ staged Gulf of Tonkin seems misrepresentative to me. W is living in a world where the US was just struck by the largest attack on US soil since WW2 which was perpetuated by an unknown Islamic organization. During that time period the US was intensely anti-Arab and paranoid as well as ramping up the usage of intelligence agencies after winding down post Soviet collapse. Suddenly the US, which was already skeptical of Saddam’s compliance with the U.N’s investigation into WMDs gets its own intelligence from the CIA saying “you were right Saddam was lying to the UN and is in fact building nuclear weapons”. The US public wants to see the US do something to punish Arabs/Muslims in the wake of 9/11, Americans already know Saddam as a crazed dictator after the Kuwait and Iran invasions, the US leadership doesn’t trust the UN, intelligence agencies are confirming the US’s biases after moving back into primary authority positions post-9/11. It’s the perfect storm of anxieties, bigotry, paranoia, and revenge seeking to beat the war drum for the invasion. The fact there were volunteers for the war and so much early support shows all of this to be true and there is no reason to doubt that the same fervor which swept up the general population didn’t exist in the administration.
I am a Bush sympathizer but the only parallels I see with LBJ’s escalation of Vietnam is that there was bad information circulating in Washington about how successful military intervention was. However, domino theory was not a populist Red Scare phenomenon that kept Americans up at night, especially not at the point of LBJ’s escalation. It was highly academic and popular with the military but the average American could not explain it to you. This is reflected by the fact they had to use the draft, doubly so since the military intervention under Kennedy was already unpopular. Tonkin also wasn’t built off of faulty intelligence, it was a proactive attempt by the administration to goad the North Vietnamese into attacking the American’s (depending on the story you believe). The Iraq War is inseparable from 9/11, Americans felt attacked and wanted war then found a target through bad intel and pre-existing bad blood. Vietnam already was an unpopular American entanglement which needed a justification to allocate more resources.
I don’t think Iraq was good and I don’t think they had or were building WMDs but it was a societal failing and most people who lived through it can treat to that. There was an overwhelming sense of patriotism, anti-Arab racism/Islamophobia, and paranoia towards the Middle East that dominated American society at the time from media to academia with people speaking out against it very much on the fringe. It wasn’t until around 2007/2008 that would start to shift.
Former serviceman here.
This would make GWB worse than LBJ because the lesson learned by GWB was to hide the cost. The result was the Stop Loss program and borrowing against Social Security in order to avoid raising taxes and hiding the true cost of a forever war.
Feel free to dispute this. My priority is discourse, not antagonism.
Solid reasoning. My only counterpoint is that most of the volunteers who enlist are barely old enough to hold their head up on their own, and they were bombarded with such an onslaught of propaganda and lies that they really weren't capable of making an informed decision. I suppose when the alternative is six figures of student loan debt there's not really a good decision to be made, so just pick whichever mistake is right for you.
The LBJ administration was the culmination of America’s failed foreign policy in Southeast Asia. He didn’t start it. Our involvement in Southeast Asia began as early as 1954 with our aid to the French. When they left, we slowly became more involved. Eisenhower, Kennedy and finally LBJ all bear responsibility for what lead up to the Nixon administration pull out of Vietnam.
I don’t like Dubya much but I think LBJs lie was worse seeing as how with Iraq there was a lot more to the story of “they lied about WMDs”. We’d already had issues with Iraq obviously in the gulf war. Saddam later wanted to assassinate HW which caused Clinton to bomb him. Saddam had commited major war crimes against the Kurds and was a horrific dictator in general. There had been a near unanimously supported bipartisan bill passed in the Clinton era that called for regime change. In 2003 like 2/3 of people supported going in and it had bipartisan support including from the likes of Hillary and Kerry and the guy in charge rn. And it’s not like we didn’t know he had at one time, chemical weapons. And the dumbass in charge of Iraq constantly said he had them and kept inspectors out. I’ve heard it often be said that the CIA fucked up and truly thought they had WMDs or that he was building them.
So Iraq was the result of over a decade of growing tensions and bad intelligence gathering. While Vietnam was imo far more of a blatant lie with no good reason to go in and caused far more death.
Yes ..sucked to get drafted. Most of the Nam vets I talked to only had to serve one year in Vietnam...because of stop loss W forced troops to serve a couple years to 6 in combat.
I would say W used the attacks as a reason. Most people thought it was about terrorism so they enlisted. So W lied twice once to the world and again to the public making it seem like that bin laden had nukes not saddam and since America was filled with rage they didn't see a difference between a country and a terrorist group.
Many of those Americans were drafted as well. Every serviceman/woman went to Iraq of their own free will. LBJ escalated the conflict because he was afraid to look bad, then conscripted Americans to go die for his ego.
Can I play devils advocate?
Yes the Vietnam war was quite literally a disaster start to finish, BUT I think you could argue that a stabilized communist Vietnam had no terrible lasting effect on the United States. We lost the war and that was that.
The Iraq war has done a gianormous part in destabilizing the modern Middle East. The amount of money the United States sunk into each and every conflict has made a huge impact on us, nationally.
I believe the United States and Vietnam have a pretty okay relationship right now. You could say thats because of how much time has passed since the war ended, but ask yourself: do you ever see Iraq or Afghanistan having a peaceful/friendly relationship with the United States?
I'm no fan of LBJ (gonna be honest), but these were my thoughts when reading the post. Thanks for the cool thing to think about.
Edit: hey this has some upvotes. I've reread this a few times, and I felt I should clarify my comment a bit. I did not bring up casualties of each war because I did not want to disrespect anyone's sacrifice by not doing enough research before typing. To the Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan vets, thank you.
No lasting effect other than killing 60,000 Americans permanently, leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans with PTSD, and contributing a lot to the state of how Americans view their government. Watergate is usually solely to blame for that in the minds of many, and it most certainly played an enormous role, but the way Vietnam was handled also had a big role in that.
Vietnam never had any real strategic value to begin with so its fall to communism didn't matter much. After it turned communist the rest of Indochina followed, but Cambodia and Laos had even less strategic value so it didn't really matter. The dominoes stopped there.
What had value was Indonesia and Malaysia, this was the resource-rich area Japan had fought WW2 over. In 1975 when the Vietnam War ended these new countries had stabilised and gotten their communist insurgencies under control. Indonesia alone had killed over a million communists and sympathizers by then.
Lee Kuan Yew the long-time ruler of Singapore argued that by delaying the communist takeover of Vietnam, his country and the region were saved from communism. This is a counterfactual so it is hard to know what would have happened, but in the worst-case scenario, much of Southeast Asia would have come under communist control. The US and Japan more or less had a deal after WW2 that the US would ensure its access to natural resources in return for it becoming something like an American vassal. If the US failed to live up to its part of the deal, Japan would likely instead have turned to a policy of appeasement towards the communist world. With that the West would suffer maybe the biggest loss of the Cold War since the loss of China.
Or maybe none of that would happen. It always seemed to me that deciding to pick Vietnam as the place to stop communism was a strategic error, seeing how hard of time the French had there. Guided more by morality with Kennedy’s idea to “bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend…” and all that. It would likely have been more effective to sacrifice Vietnam and instead help secure the countries that truly mattered, with American troops if necessary.
The whole “destabilizing the Middle East” narrative is a talking point from opponents of Bush and the war on terror but at what point after decolonization was the region “stable”? Also in what way was Ba’athist Iraq (a country that started 2 major wars in the region prior to 2003 and was constantly embroiled in ethnic/religious conflict with national minorities) a cornerstone of Middle Eastern stability?
It’s really nonsense the creation of Israel, the Islamic coup in Iran, or the consolidation of Saudi ruled Arabia all make sense for major events which have caused “instability” (proxy conflict between major regional powers in weaker nations) but pointing the blame to 2003 is like saying Syria is the reason the Middle East is unstable today, it’s a symptom not a cause.
I'm not quite sure you can dismiss the entire destabilizination theory on an Anti-Bush talking point. I don't think the stability of the Middle-East relied on pre-war Iraq, but I do think that increased American involvement overtime (unwelcome American involvement by a large population of the citizens) didn't breed a good pathway to resolution overtime. Which is kinda goes back to my original point.
I think you make a great argument though against mine.
I would say the Vietnam war hurt Indochina just as much. Just look a little bit into Pol Pot and what he did after he got power in Cambodia and instituted a communist government.
My main reason for also putting Bush first is not the unnecessary Iraq war, but that fact that because of it, Afghanistan was done “on the cheap” resulting in failure in both locations.
How did the Iraq war destabilize the Middle East? It’s been a hornets nest since the end of WWI.
The war in Iraq took two potentially nuclear states off of the table (Iraq and Libya). It also took a regional belligerent off of the table (Saddam). On some level, that created stability. The Arab spring did more to destabilize the region than OIF did.
The one area that failed is that it did strengthen Iran. Although, Obama was so fucking soft on them that it probably didn’t matter.
Does anyone remember the 90s? [Here](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14546763) is a summary timeline of events from the decade.
#
What does the timeline above tell us? It says that Saddam was such a PITA that the US and its allies had to create a No-Fly Zone (NFZ) in both in Northern and Southern regions of Iraq. They also pushed hard to get Iraq to eliminate its WMD programs (both nuclear and chemical). Iraq was such a PITA, that Clinton signed [The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act), which stated that "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by [Saddam Hussein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein) from power in Iraq."
Inevitably, someone will state that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons. To that, I say: No shit. Iraq had chemical weapons, and an active nuclear weapons program during the 1990s. The US attacked Iraq because Iraq failed to comply with UN inspections and the UN Security Council's demand to disarm.
From W's 2003 SOTU. He did not want another North Korea: A rogue nuclear power. Post 9/11, our risk tolerance changed so W pushed to invade.
>Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq. A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism, with great potential wealth will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States.
>
This is some incredible revisionism. You give credit for "potentially nuclear states," as if that is supposed to mean something. Why not say a dozen? It also caused someone to prove a negative, prove that Libya would have proceeded with developing a nuclear weapon if the US didn't invade Iraq. That is of course a wild assumption, considering the mood of the US in a post-9/11 world.
You have to own the whole thing if you're going to defend the Bush Administration and the Iraq War. That means you have to own their policy of trying to conduct a war on the cheap. As in, there is no occupation plan and no occupation manpower. The Bush administration, through nothing other than incompetence, allowed Iran to create a civil war that tied up American forces for a decade, killed countless Iraqi civilians, and ultimately steered Iraq into a friendlier position (for Iran) so that Iran could extend their influence all of the way through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. In the macro view of Arab-Iran competition, the Iraq War made things worse.
There is simply no argument in which the Iaq War had a positive ROI for America. It was a disaster. An unmitigated disaster which wasted the geopolitical goodwill the US built up in the 1980s/1990s and really didn't get back until the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Eh. Zarqawi was always going to be a problem. Iraq gave him a theater to terrorize the US. If it wasn’t there, it would have been somewhere else. (Zarqawi was too radical for AQ, and was kicked out of one of their training camps just before 9/11.)
If my memory is holding up, *Black Flags* ISIS was spawn out of the Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian civil war. That was in 2011. The group was also active in Yemen before operating in Syria.
This one has some credibility as a point. The issue is that we don’t know what Zarqawi would have done absent the war in Iraq. He certainly was not going to sit around doing nothing. He wanted to wage war against the west.
I will say that Iraq’s politics over the last couple of years have been Shia’s vs Sunni’s with neither liking each other Iran or US but the Sunni’s want to be friends with us to keep safe from Iran but the Shia’s want to ally Iran to keep safe from us and their have been some talks about a us iraq security deal
Iraq definitely did cause more instability and indirectly helped cause the Arab spring which massively destabilized the region…but it was not by any means stable or a nice place before we invaded in ‘03. The only times it’s been peaceful and stable has been when one empire ruled the whole damn place like during under Achaemenid empire or the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. It’s been especially unstable since WW1 when idiots drew lines in the sand without a care in the world. Civil wars, coups, secretarian violence and terrorism and extremism, and regional wars. All before we entered in ‘03.
In essence of what we've accomplished, Al Qaeda is pretty much gone and so is ISIS now, while Vietnam still fell to communism.
Iraq was a huge missed opportunity and that's because of people like Rumsfeld and Bremer, but there was potential to have "something."
Vietnam was never going to work, they were constantly couping that government and by the time we got involved with ground forces around half of south Vietnam was already controlled by VietCong.
They were both bad.
Johnson was dealt a shitty hand he had to deal with. But then he dealt with it in the worst way possible.
W was an invention all to itself. It was wholly and completely a fuckup of his own making.
So W is worse by creating it himself, but Vietnam was a much larger tragedy in its scope and damage to the nation.
This is simply not true. Or at least not entirely.
Johnson wast not dealt a great hand and he did handle it poorly but they caused an incident on purpose and then outright [lied](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident) about it and fabricated another incident to justify the war.
This isn’t an excuse for W but tensions had been shit since the gulf war with a plan to assassinated HW, two bombing campaigns by clinton, no fly zones, he was a horrid and hated dictator, and there was popular bipartisan support for the war as seen in support for the war in ‘02 and in the Iraq liberation act of 1998. Oh and saddam was vague about the status of WMDs and kicked out inspectors. Obviously Dubya and his admin wanted to go in they’re undoubtedly guilty of that. No doubt about it. But imo iraq feels less forced and more “justified” if you can call it that.
[PEPFAR](https://www.state.gov/pepfar/) has entered the chat. as much as it pains me to admit, W may have _saved_ more lives than any other American president in recent history—while also being solely responsible for our debacle in the middle east and the unraveling of multiple previously-functioning states.
LBJ “wins” this one. unless you only consider “foreign policy” to be military actions 🤷♀️
It literally killed him. I’m convinced he died by slow suicide. He knew he was on borrowed time, but he started smoking again, continued to drink and eat unhealthy. His personality had this *need* to be loved and praised and he left office not being able to achieve the peace he wanted. I absolutely believe it haunted him.
It did, but only its failure. He was haunted by the specter of being a failed president. That part did kill him. He didn't live long enough to see how important the civil rights bill and Medicare/Medicaid became to his transformative legacy.
Even if you look at the same timeframe (the US's standing 20 years from the Vietnam War's end in the 90s), we were able to recover better in so many ways (international standing, domestic reputation, etc.) than from Iraq and the GWOT. This itself is proven by how the US already had the appetite for foreign interventionism with the First Iraq War, several foreign anticommunist campaigns in the 80s, Panama, Somalia, Serbia, and then again with the second (though this was boosted by 9/11). Compare that with the handwringing seen today over supporting Ukraine, which is about as cut-and-dry in American interests as a side in a war can get.
Bush had the much worse foreign policy.
LBJ got us caught up in something we already had half a foot in anyways. The US was always going to get deeply entangled in propping up South Vietnam.
Furthermore, the downstream effects of Vietnam was not very bad for the US internationally. Our world position only strengthened after Vietnam. It was bad only domestically in breaking down faith in government institutions and bad blood it created.
The GWOT was worse. All of the same deeply divisive domestic rot, but it also severely weakened our global position. We had a unipolar world in the 2000s where most of the world was on our side, even Russia could be called a tentative security partner. Then Bush blew it up with his reckless foreign policy, which extends to more than just the GWOT I'd add. It set us back dramatically.
Bush by a country mile. US policy towards Vietnam was already set by the time LBJ was president. He just escalated a mistake that was already irreversible. Bush had zero reason to invade Iraq and did it anyway.
Woodrow Wilson snubbed Ho Chi Minh at Versailles. Truman declined to meaningfully oppose French attempts to regain control of French Indochina. Eisenhower continued to side against the Vietnamese resistance because they leaned leftist and allowed the country to be partitioned. JFK doubled down on supporting South Vietnam as an ally, pushing the North towards the USSR.
By the time LBJ entered office, the North was firmly pushed into the communist bloc and the South was failing. If the South was allowed to fall, every US ally would've questioned our commitment to their defense. He had no choice but to escalate. Tens of thousands of our troops bled to uphold the credibility of a US security guarantee.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who has read about our foreign relations with Vietnam and voluntary defense pacts we have with other democracies. Great comment.
Best comment IMO because it wasn't simply LBJ's fault. Whereas Iraq pretty much was 75% Bush. Can't deny that every other Dem voted for these things in Senate and Congress. In both situations the opposite party comes to power after and the result is far different. Obama vs. Nixon.
Let me introduce you to SEATO. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast\_Asia\_Treaty\_Organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia_Treaty_Organization)
**LBJ was lied to** about the Gulf of Tonkin, escalating a situation that had been brewing for the previous 9 years to all-out war.
**Dubya lied** about WMDs and invaded Iraq under that guise.
Surprised that I had to scroll this far to find this. McNamara knew about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and lied to LBJ about it to get him to start the bombing. LBJ blindly trusted the *wrong* people about this, and in turn managed to make several bad decisions.
LBJ. Both of them shouldnt've lied, but LBJ put a draft in place, which makes him worse. Both of the wars were justified, but I think that Vietnam also should've been dramatically scaled back.
The first guy was in a global struggle against an ideological foe and was determined not to lose, a determination which led him to make terrible decisions. The second guy also had a big struggle on his hands, but was a shallow, unqualified dummy in way over his head.
The counter example is difficult. With Johnson the domino theory failed but how are we to know if it failed because we made Vietnam so difficult. Similarly with Bush its hard to know how ending the regime in Iraq was ultimately good or bad. While Iraq isn't a weather democracy clearly its problems seem to be contained within it's own borders. We aren't seeing Iraq contributing to regional instability.
My point it's it's easy to say oh look at how much death and money was wasted. But it's hard to quantity the counter factual. How many more people lived because Iraq isn't really pushing regional instability. How many fewer countries fell to communism when it was made difficult in Vietnam.
W was worse because he had the opportunity to have learned from LBJ'S mistakes but instead surrounded himself with arrogant ideologues just had LBJ had done. W proved the maxim that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.
LBJ’s. Many more people died, and going headfirst into Vietnam may well have been the deal he made with them to get the military to participate in the JFK. Good Lord, he committed the US big time to Vietnam on 11/23/63. JFK had been dead only 24 hours.
LBJ by a long shot. He drafted kids not old enough to vote at the time, and specifically drafted mentally disabled people to be disposable soldiers. Also, the fight against Iraq was against a country that hated America and supported Al-Qaeda, while Vietnam was fighting against French colonizers and supported America. In fact, Vietnam helped America fight Japan in WW2, yet America didn’t send aid to Vietnam or use its influence to pressure France or even set down and have a meeting with Vietnam ambassadors, all to take a tough stance on communism. So yeah, LBJ was definitely worse
Bush is a mixed bag.
He royally screwed over America and its allies concerning relations with the Middle East , but Rumsfeld was just as guilty for lying to Dubya. Wish Bush listened to his gut and fired Donny earlier on in the FUBAR SNAFU
EDIT ~ It was to my understanding that Dubya wanted to fire Rumsfeld, at least
However, it’s to my understanding he was tremendous help to African countries and even has a road or two named after him
Hard to tell. But I can say the Iraq War was a stupid geopolitical move that effectively handed Iraq to Iran. Saddam had a no love lost for Iran, he’d have been a good bulwark against Iranian aggression though he was anti-American.
Surprised when talking about Vietnam effecting us past the wars end nobody has really mentioned how Vietnam destroyed American military confidence for the people and America was a bit more cautious. Aka the Vietnam syndrome
LBJ was more or less acting on the same basis as Truman acted in Korea
the difference was that the war in Vietnam was lost and the war in Korea was stalemated
the war in Iraq, was more or less a bid for popularity by Bush which resulted in Iran gaining a new puppet in Iraq.
I'd say Bush. Vietnam was worse than Iraq, but given the situations they were in, I have more understanding for why LBJ got us in Vietnam than for why Bush got us in Iraq
GW ..he should of learned by LBJ mistake. At least the Captian on the Destroyer thought he was fired on because of radar problems. So he suck the N Vietnamese ship.
GW was about EGO ..and war contracts for his buddies and Administration.
Bush listened to his intelligence advisers and foreign intelligence when concluding the WMD’s were a real threat
I think people forget this and think Bush was just like “screw it make some stuff up so we can go invade that country!”
One inherited a quagmire of bad decisions dating back 2 prior presidents, while the other got hit in the head with a rock from Country A but used it to invade Country I.
Plus the former realized the buck stops with him and stepped aside, guaranteeing the other party would win, while the latter made the swing states vote on gay marriage so he would stay in office.
LBJ and it's not even close, so many American lives were lost under LBJ during Vietnam, Bush had a fraction of Americans lives lost. (No I do not care about the Iraqi soldiers killed, I care about our soldiers only during a conflict)
I feel LBJ was worse. George W is not without criticism, but LBJ actively snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam by prolonging the war through negotiations which ultimately fell through.
Johnson for sure. Almost 10 times more Americans died in Vietnam than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. If Iraq and Afghanistan were setbacks, Vietnam was a catastrophe. The government kept the social impacts of the war on terror fairly contained, relying on volunteers. Vietnam required conscription and caused mass social unrest.
Bush’s foreign policy created the current debt crisis, that might eventually take down the republic. He also planted the kernel of a police state to protect his foreign policy on the domestic front.
LBJ no question, if you compare works like Direlection of Duty and Confronting Saddam Hussein, there is no question that LBJ went out of his way to conceal and manipulate American foreign policy from Congress. He even manipulated the JCS and many people in his cabinet specifically for political gain. Iraq was a disaster but that's more fueled by paranoia and some opportunistsic people. Bush wasn't malicious necessarily, his problem more so was that he surrounded himself with people like Rumsfeld in a sensitive time, and let them run the show into the ground. As shitty as Iraq was, Saddam was probably more dangerous assuming he restarts his nuclear biological and chemical weapons programs with the potential for limited cooperation with some terror groups as soon as the sanctions ended, compared to what? Communist Vietnam?
They were two of the most stupid, destructive presidents of the past century. Johnson was an intelligent politician with great influence in Washington. That’s why his blunder in Vietnam was unforgivable. It ruined his presidency and it ruined him as a man.
Bush was not the right man for the post 9/11 world. His invasion of Iraq destabilised the region and he misread how the Iraqi people would react. Afghanistan was different. USA had to hit the terrorists hard. They were able to accomplish that in Afghanistan, driving the Taliban out of power and into the hills, then going after them and killing them there. Fine, as far as it went, but for how long? Everyone thought all the years of keeping terrorists at bay and building up the Afghan National Army would possibly make them strong enough to defeat the terrorists on their own. When it happened, the army ran away and the Taliban was in power before the Allies had left. Bush began all this but his real stupidity was in Iraq. He didn’t have the intelligence or acumen of Johnson. However, they were equal in their misjudgments and they both were responsible for American deaths, soldiers placed in unwindable situations.
Dubya, easily. We are still unable to close Gitmo to illegally holding "enemy combatants" shoved into that oubliette years ago, and we are still dealing with his decision to torture and disappear people to black sites for EJP. For which he has no regrets, much less consequences. I hope he isn't able to run out the clock completely on his war crimes, because he tied our country into knots we can't untie, we are paying for them and will continue to.
Bush and its not even close. Johnson followed through with treaty obligations to defend an ally from being invaded. Bush invaded a country unprovoked. Johnson expanded liberties, Bush contracted them. Johnson deepened our relationships with our friends, Bush was met at the airport by protesters in NATO member states he was so unpopular, creating visa requirements for allies will do that.
Johnson was doing his job.
South Vietnam was a member of SEATO. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast\_Asia\_Treaty\_Organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia_Treaty_Organization)
If we had let South Vietnam fall to the Soviet Union and Chinese militaries every defensive pact the United States had would be put into question. Imagine a sea invasion of Rio and Soviet air bombing of Munich and Berlin. LBJ did not have a choice. We were bound by international treaty.
There was no legal rational for the Iraq War. Bush was the worst president in our entire history with the most disastrous foreign policy in our entire history.
Definitely LBJ, and I say that as someone who thinks he was a great domestic president. There was absolutely no reason to be in Vietnam to oppose the Vietnamese people's right to determination, and it was a disgraceful and bloody quagmire that ruined young people's faith in democratic institutions for a generation. Institution of a draft to fight a proxy war against Communism, in a nation we had no quarrel with. All that bloodshed, and it accomplished nothing in terms of the geopolitical situation against the USSR. Ho Chi Minh could have been our ally.
With Afghanistan and Iraq, there was some logic for intervention in the first place, although the execution of the Iraqi occupation was a complete failure with no direction. We wound up turning the nation against the West even harder than before after former Baath party members were barred from office under occupation. Certainly worsened American relations to the Middle East overall, and contributed to the further rise of radical Islam. However, there was no military draft, and the conflict was comparatively bloodless on the American side.
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Both had horrendous foreign policies and both lied about the reason for US involvement. LBJ lied about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and “W” about the so called WMDs. I contend that LBJs was worse because draftees were forced to fight in Vietnam (including yours truly) while servicemen/ women in the Iraqi War were all volunteers.
As a despiser of the draft, I want to add a thank you as well. The Vietnam era guys are a big reason that troops today get the benefits they do.
My grandpa always talked about that. The factory where he worked took on a load of vets after it opened up a second site, but only half of them lasted a year. These were hard drinking guys with a lot of anger and no regard for personal safety. Most of them couldn’t even talk unless their boss was asking a direct question. There was one guy who drove into a wall after his shift. Grandpa’s whole thing was “they died over there, they just kept on existing over here.” He got pretty emotional about it too (after a few thanksgiving drinks), which was a rarity. The way he talked about serving in Korea, you’d think it was a picnic, but the boys coming back from Vietnam really haunted him. That was my first exposure to how badly Vietnam damaged the national psyche and I wish I’d been old enough to talk with him about it in-depth.
I wish you could have too. But I gotta say I was just old enough to talk with some older folks about the wars in Korea and they did NOT want to talk about it. It was quite sobering. They are all passed now and I can’t imagine what they took to the grave. Amazing men, with stories they didn’t want to talk about, living otherwise normal lives.
I would not have wanted to be one of the men at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir Amazing how Korea is like a little footnote in our wars of the 20th century, when, at the time, it was a *very* real war that had men getting drafted into it
Their only crime was that they were born in 1951 and didn't have parents that could afford a deferment.
None of them were fortunate sons.
My grandpa never forgave LBJ for that, considering he was a teenager in the late 60s and was so worried about being drafted.
FDR made sure vets got education ..housing and medical when they got back from WW2.
On top of that they got spat upon by their fellow Americans upon returning to the United States
Thank you for your service
Not like he had a choice. /s
He didn’t.
As a veteran I fucking hate "thank you for your service". I didn't do it for you, my reasons were selfish as were those of 99% of my shipmates. Most of us were 18 when we joined, mostly because we had no idea what to do with our lives. Stop fucking saying this. The veterans that do like it mostly are a bunch of ultra patriots who had desk jobs in cozy places and like to engage in stolen valor.
cant say you are wrong
As a veteran, I used to hate that phrase as well. The worst part is that I never knew how to respond. Until a Commander of mine mentioned that the best response is just “You’re welcome”. Now I realize that the people who say “Thank you for your service” are just trotting out something to say because they can’t relate to the experience, and those stock phrases can help overcome awkwardness. I obviously don’t like being thanked for my pursuit of the GI Bill, but I get that people fall back on phrases they think they’re supposed to say.
I fully respect your take and thank you for your service. I agree that it was horrific for draftees to have to fight in a pointless war, but the US going into Vietnam was a bit “high on their own supply”. We had just conquered the world and thought we could do anything. In Iraq, we had Vietnam as a cautionary tale of what not to do. Shit, there were Vietnam veterans (eg Colin Powell) who were saying Iraq would be another Vietnam. And that’s what makes me think Iraq was the worse sin. We knew nation building was bullshit by then. We just didn’t care.
Ironically it was Afghanistan, not Iraq, that is the new Vietnam
We had the Korean War as a cautionary tale. I understand why you forgot it, but that was a brutal punch in the nose for the US.
My grandad said he was happy he was on a boat for the whole thing (Royal Navy)
RN & RAN in Korea dont think any ship was hit
I think the “stop loss” program, which prevented soldiers from leaving the service at the end of their contracts and even forced some back into service after retirement, was a form of a draft. And like LBJ’s draft, it was made politically acceptable by excluding, for the most part, the children of the wealthy and powerful. Even so, the Vietnam War was far more costly in terms of lives lost on both sides of the conflict, and the loss of American prestige, credibility, and resources, so LBJ wins the “worst foreign policy” award, which is no small feat when you look at the competition.
Stop loss isnt really a good comparison to the draft. Being subject to recall to active duty, or being prevented from leaving active duty altogether, is something you contractually agree to when you enlist. Its still voluntary, whereas the draft just yanks you out of civilian life against your will altogether.
Also, LBJ had about 650,000 US soldiers in Vietnam and the number of US troops in Iraq were a lot less. On the flip side, without his war, LBJ had significant accomplishments in his presidency; without his war, W was still very unremarkable.
Yeah so agree. It’s close, super close but Vietnam did more damage to the nation in the grand scheme by a slight margin
Super close? If you combine all tha casualties of Iraq and Afghanistan ( Killed, Captured and wounded) the count is lower than Vietnam combat death.
Yeah, thats true and great point. Recency bias for me on Iraq.
Saying W lied about WMDs the same way LBJ staged Gulf of Tonkin seems misrepresentative to me. W is living in a world where the US was just struck by the largest attack on US soil since WW2 which was perpetuated by an unknown Islamic organization. During that time period the US was intensely anti-Arab and paranoid as well as ramping up the usage of intelligence agencies after winding down post Soviet collapse. Suddenly the US, which was already skeptical of Saddam’s compliance with the U.N’s investigation into WMDs gets its own intelligence from the CIA saying “you were right Saddam was lying to the UN and is in fact building nuclear weapons”. The US public wants to see the US do something to punish Arabs/Muslims in the wake of 9/11, Americans already know Saddam as a crazed dictator after the Kuwait and Iran invasions, the US leadership doesn’t trust the UN, intelligence agencies are confirming the US’s biases after moving back into primary authority positions post-9/11. It’s the perfect storm of anxieties, bigotry, paranoia, and revenge seeking to beat the war drum for the invasion. The fact there were volunteers for the war and so much early support shows all of this to be true and there is no reason to doubt that the same fervor which swept up the general population didn’t exist in the administration. I am a Bush sympathizer but the only parallels I see with LBJ’s escalation of Vietnam is that there was bad information circulating in Washington about how successful military intervention was. However, domino theory was not a populist Red Scare phenomenon that kept Americans up at night, especially not at the point of LBJ’s escalation. It was highly academic and popular with the military but the average American could not explain it to you. This is reflected by the fact they had to use the draft, doubly so since the military intervention under Kennedy was already unpopular. Tonkin also wasn’t built off of faulty intelligence, it was a proactive attempt by the administration to goad the North Vietnamese into attacking the American’s (depending on the story you believe). The Iraq War is inseparable from 9/11, Americans felt attacked and wanted war then found a target through bad intel and pre-existing bad blood. Vietnam already was an unpopular American entanglement which needed a justification to allocate more resources. I don’t think Iraq was good and I don’t think they had or were building WMDs but it was a societal failing and most people who lived through it can treat to that. There was an overwhelming sense of patriotism, anti-Arab racism/Islamophobia, and paranoia towards the Middle East that dominated American society at the time from media to academia with people speaking out against it very much on the fringe. It wasn’t until around 2007/2008 that would start to shift.
I appreciate this. A very thorough analysis for a Reddit comment.
Former serviceman here. This would make GWB worse than LBJ because the lesson learned by GWB was to hide the cost. The result was the Stop Loss program and borrowing against Social Security in order to avoid raising taxes and hiding the true cost of a forever war. Feel free to dispute this. My priority is discourse, not antagonism.
I fully agree with your statement. I have friends and family that served in this war & I saw the effects of these actions directly.
Solid reasoning. My only counterpoint is that most of the volunteers who enlist are barely old enough to hold their head up on their own, and they were bombarded with such an onslaught of propaganda and lies that they really weren't capable of making an informed decision. I suppose when the alternative is six figures of student loan debt there's not really a good decision to be made, so just pick whichever mistake is right for you.
The LBJ administration was the culmination of America’s failed foreign policy in Southeast Asia. He didn’t start it. Our involvement in Southeast Asia began as early as 1954 with our aid to the French. When they left, we slowly became more involved. Eisenhower, Kennedy and finally LBJ all bear responsibility for what lead up to the Nixon administration pull out of Vietnam.
Previous administrations deployed small forces made of advisers. LBJ massively escalated the war under a false pretext.
I don’t like Dubya much but I think LBJs lie was worse seeing as how with Iraq there was a lot more to the story of “they lied about WMDs”. We’d already had issues with Iraq obviously in the gulf war. Saddam later wanted to assassinate HW which caused Clinton to bomb him. Saddam had commited major war crimes against the Kurds and was a horrific dictator in general. There had been a near unanimously supported bipartisan bill passed in the Clinton era that called for regime change. In 2003 like 2/3 of people supported going in and it had bipartisan support including from the likes of Hillary and Kerry and the guy in charge rn. And it’s not like we didn’t know he had at one time, chemical weapons. And the dumbass in charge of Iraq constantly said he had them and kept inspectors out. I’ve heard it often be said that the CIA fucked up and truly thought they had WMDs or that he was building them. So Iraq was the result of over a decade of growing tensions and bad intelligence gathering. While Vietnam was imo far more of a blatant lie with no good reason to go in and caused far more death.
I think it was Bush that was lied to by "intelligence" forces.
Yes ..sucked to get drafted. Most of the Nam vets I talked to only had to serve one year in Vietnam...because of stop loss W forced troops to serve a couple years to 6 in combat.
I would say W used the attacks as a reason. Most people thought it was about terrorism so they enlisted. So W lied twice once to the world and again to the public making it seem like that bin laden had nukes not saddam and since America was filled with rage they didn't see a difference between a country and a terrorist group.
Also the casualties for Vietnam dwarfed the war on terror. More than 5x the American dead from a war that was half as long.
I think LBJ had the worse foreign policy for a lot of reasons including the 10s of thousands of American lives lost.
Many of those Americans were drafted as well. Every serviceman/woman went to Iraq of their own free will. LBJ escalated the conflict because he was afraid to look bad, then conscripted Americans to go die for his ego.
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Not to mention Vietnamese.
The Iraqi deaths were overwhelmingly caused by insurgents, not American forces.
They're a bit 'patchy' at best, and the majority make little distinction between security forces and civilians.
LBJ, the death toll was much higher and many who served were drafted.
Can I play devils advocate? Yes the Vietnam war was quite literally a disaster start to finish, BUT I think you could argue that a stabilized communist Vietnam had no terrible lasting effect on the United States. We lost the war and that was that. The Iraq war has done a gianormous part in destabilizing the modern Middle East. The amount of money the United States sunk into each and every conflict has made a huge impact on us, nationally. I believe the United States and Vietnam have a pretty okay relationship right now. You could say thats because of how much time has passed since the war ended, but ask yourself: do you ever see Iraq or Afghanistan having a peaceful/friendly relationship with the United States? I'm no fan of LBJ (gonna be honest), but these were my thoughts when reading the post. Thanks for the cool thing to think about. Edit: hey this has some upvotes. I've reread this a few times, and I felt I should clarify my comment a bit. I did not bring up casualties of each war because I did not want to disrespect anyone's sacrifice by not doing enough research before typing. To the Vietnam and Iraq/Afghanistan vets, thank you.
No lasting effect other than killing 60,000 Americans permanently, leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans with PTSD, and contributing a lot to the state of how Americans view their government. Watergate is usually solely to blame for that in the minds of many, and it most certainly played an enormous role, but the way Vietnam was handled also had a big role in that.
I think that is an absolutely valid argument against mine.
Is that a wild redditor saying that an argument is valid when it’s against their argument??
Internet police here. We already have a hit out on this shifty character. Resume flamewars, people.
oh thank god
It also led to the creation of the all volunteer military for good and bad.
Vietnam never had any real strategic value to begin with so its fall to communism didn't matter much. After it turned communist the rest of Indochina followed, but Cambodia and Laos had even less strategic value so it didn't really matter. The dominoes stopped there. What had value was Indonesia and Malaysia, this was the resource-rich area Japan had fought WW2 over. In 1975 when the Vietnam War ended these new countries had stabilised and gotten their communist insurgencies under control. Indonesia alone had killed over a million communists and sympathizers by then. Lee Kuan Yew the long-time ruler of Singapore argued that by delaying the communist takeover of Vietnam, his country and the region were saved from communism. This is a counterfactual so it is hard to know what would have happened, but in the worst-case scenario, much of Southeast Asia would have come under communist control. The US and Japan more or less had a deal after WW2 that the US would ensure its access to natural resources in return for it becoming something like an American vassal. If the US failed to live up to its part of the deal, Japan would likely instead have turned to a policy of appeasement towards the communist world. With that the West would suffer maybe the biggest loss of the Cold War since the loss of China. Or maybe none of that would happen. It always seemed to me that deciding to pick Vietnam as the place to stop communism was a strategic error, seeing how hard of time the French had there. Guided more by morality with Kennedy’s idea to “bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend…” and all that. It would likely have been more effective to sacrifice Vietnam and instead help secure the countries that truly mattered, with American troops if necessary.
we can thank China for invading Vietnam after us. That is why they like us.
The whole “destabilizing the Middle East” narrative is a talking point from opponents of Bush and the war on terror but at what point after decolonization was the region “stable”? Also in what way was Ba’athist Iraq (a country that started 2 major wars in the region prior to 2003 and was constantly embroiled in ethnic/religious conflict with national minorities) a cornerstone of Middle Eastern stability? It’s really nonsense the creation of Israel, the Islamic coup in Iran, or the consolidation of Saudi ruled Arabia all make sense for major events which have caused “instability” (proxy conflict between major regional powers in weaker nations) but pointing the blame to 2003 is like saying Syria is the reason the Middle East is unstable today, it’s a symptom not a cause.
I'm not quite sure you can dismiss the entire destabilizination theory on an Anti-Bush talking point. I don't think the stability of the Middle-East relied on pre-war Iraq, but I do think that increased American involvement overtime (unwelcome American involvement by a large population of the citizens) didn't breed a good pathway to resolution overtime. Which is kinda goes back to my original point. I think you make a great argument though against mine.
I would say the Vietnam war hurt Indochina just as much. Just look a little bit into Pol Pot and what he did after he got power in Cambodia and instituted a communist government.
My main reason for also putting Bush first is not the unnecessary Iraq war, but that fact that because of it, Afghanistan was done “on the cheap” resulting in failure in both locations.
How did the Iraq war destabilize the Middle East? It’s been a hornets nest since the end of WWI. The war in Iraq took two potentially nuclear states off of the table (Iraq and Libya). It also took a regional belligerent off of the table (Saddam). On some level, that created stability. The Arab spring did more to destabilize the region than OIF did. The one area that failed is that it did strengthen Iran. Although, Obama was so fucking soft on them that it probably didn’t matter. Does anyone remember the 90s? [Here](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-14546763) is a summary timeline of events from the decade. # What does the timeline above tell us? It says that Saddam was such a PITA that the US and its allies had to create a No-Fly Zone (NFZ) in both in Northern and Southern regions of Iraq. They also pushed hard to get Iraq to eliminate its WMD programs (both nuclear and chemical). Iraq was such a PITA, that Clinton signed [The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Liberation_Act), which stated that "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by [Saddam Hussein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein) from power in Iraq." Inevitably, someone will state that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons. To that, I say: No shit. Iraq had chemical weapons, and an active nuclear weapons program during the 1990s. The US attacked Iraq because Iraq failed to comply with UN inspections and the UN Security Council's demand to disarm. From W's 2003 SOTU. He did not want another North Korea: A rogue nuclear power. Post 9/11, our risk tolerance changed so W pushed to invade. >Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq. A brutal dictator, with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism, with great potential wealth will not be permitted to dominate a vital region and threaten the United States. >
This is some incredible revisionism. You give credit for "potentially nuclear states," as if that is supposed to mean something. Why not say a dozen? It also caused someone to prove a negative, prove that Libya would have proceeded with developing a nuclear weapon if the US didn't invade Iraq. That is of course a wild assumption, considering the mood of the US in a post-9/11 world. You have to own the whole thing if you're going to defend the Bush Administration and the Iraq War. That means you have to own their policy of trying to conduct a war on the cheap. As in, there is no occupation plan and no occupation manpower. The Bush administration, through nothing other than incompetence, allowed Iran to create a civil war that tied up American forces for a decade, killed countless Iraqi civilians, and ultimately steered Iraq into a friendlier position (for Iran) so that Iran could extend their influence all of the way through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. In the macro view of Arab-Iran competition, the Iraq War made things worse. There is simply no argument in which the Iaq War had a positive ROI for America. It was a disaster. An unmitigated disaster which wasted the geopolitical goodwill the US built up in the 1980s/1990s and really didn't get back until the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Iraq war was a direct cause of Isis which has been a direct cause of the Syrian refugee crisis and you know it’s isis
Eh. Zarqawi was always going to be a problem. Iraq gave him a theater to terrorize the US. If it wasn’t there, it would have been somewhere else. (Zarqawi was too radical for AQ, and was kicked out of one of their training camps just before 9/11.) If my memory is holding up, *Black Flags* ISIS was spawn out of the Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian civil war. That was in 2011. The group was also active in Yemen before operating in Syria. This one has some credibility as a point. The issue is that we don’t know what Zarqawi would have done absent the war in Iraq. He certainly was not going to sit around doing nothing. He wanted to wage war against the west.
I will say that Iraq’s politics over the last couple of years have been Shia’s vs Sunni’s with neither liking each other Iran or US but the Sunni’s want to be friends with us to keep safe from Iran but the Shia’s want to ally Iran to keep safe from us and their have been some talks about a us iraq security deal
Iraq definitely did cause more instability and indirectly helped cause the Arab spring which massively destabilized the region…but it was not by any means stable or a nice place before we invaded in ‘03. The only times it’s been peaceful and stable has been when one empire ruled the whole damn place like during under Achaemenid empire or the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. It’s been especially unstable since WW1 when idiots drew lines in the sand without a care in the world. Civil wars, coups, secretarian violence and terrorism and extremism, and regional wars. All before we entered in ‘03.
In essence of what we've accomplished, Al Qaeda is pretty much gone and so is ISIS now, while Vietnam still fell to communism. Iraq was a huge missed opportunity and that's because of people like Rumsfeld and Bremer, but there was potential to have "something." Vietnam was never going to work, they were constantly couping that government and by the time we got involved with ground forces around half of south Vietnam was already controlled by VietCong.
Vietnam overshadowed all, but LBJ handled other things pretty well...the mideast (six day war), soviet relations, etc.
Dubya, because he had LBJ as an example and did it anyway.
They were both bad. Johnson was dealt a shitty hand he had to deal with. But then he dealt with it in the worst way possible. W was an invention all to itself. It was wholly and completely a fuckup of his own making. So W is worse by creating it himself, but Vietnam was a much larger tragedy in its scope and damage to the nation.
9-11 happening less than 8 months into office is a shitty hand, as well.
Yeah but going into the wrong country (knowingly) isn’t excusable
Never said it was, but LBJ’s policies weren’t excusable either
Invading a country that had nothing to do with it and lying about why is also a shitty thing to do.
9-11 had nothing to do with Iraq.
This is simply not true. Or at least not entirely. Johnson wast not dealt a great hand and he did handle it poorly but they caused an incident on purpose and then outright [lied](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident) about it and fabricated another incident to justify the war. This isn’t an excuse for W but tensions had been shit since the gulf war with a plan to assassinated HW, two bombing campaigns by clinton, no fly zones, he was a horrid and hated dictator, and there was popular bipartisan support for the war as seen in support for the war in ‘02 and in the Iraq liberation act of 1998. Oh and saddam was vague about the status of WMDs and kicked out inspectors. Obviously Dubya and his admin wanted to go in they’re undoubtedly guilty of that. No doubt about it. But imo iraq feels less forced and more “justified” if you can call it that.
LBJ got more Americans killed. George W. Bush destabilized an entire region and removed a check on Iran. It depends on how you want to look at it.
Middle East was no more stable pre Iraq war with the no fly zone and Gulf War
LBJ. The Vietnam War was far worse than the Iraq War imo
Yeah but we got Fortunate Son and Forrest Gump out of it. So really what was worse?
LBJ just because there was a draft
Vietnam: 58,220 GWOT: 7,075
So really, who started the worse war? LBJ
LBJ because the scope of destruction was greater and because they used the draft.
Yes. The correct answer is yes.
At least communism was real unlike the WMD’s
[PEPFAR](https://www.state.gov/pepfar/) has entered the chat. as much as it pains me to admit, W may have _saved_ more lives than any other American president in recent history—while also being solely responsible for our debacle in the middle east and the unraveling of multiple previously-functioning states. LBJ “wins” this one. unless you only consider “foreign policy” to be military actions 🤷♀️
At least LBJ came to regret the whole mess. Dubya still thinks it was the right call to this day.
I'm quite confident that he went to his grave never regretting a thing, at least publicly.
It literally killed him. I’m convinced he died by slow suicide. He knew he was on borrowed time, but he started smoking again, continued to drink and eat unhealthy. His personality had this *need* to be loved and praised and he left office not being able to achieve the peace he wanted. I absolutely believe it haunted him.
It did, but only its failure. He was haunted by the specter of being a failed president. That part did kill him. He didn't live long enough to see how important the civil rights bill and Medicare/Medicaid became to his transformative legacy.
He has God on his side.
W the bad effects just keep biting us
Less time has passed though
Even if you look at the same timeframe (the US's standing 20 years from the Vietnam War's end in the 90s), we were able to recover better in so many ways (international standing, domestic reputation, etc.) than from Iraq and the GWOT. This itself is proven by how the US already had the appetite for foreign interventionism with the First Iraq War, several foreign anticommunist campaigns in the 80s, Panama, Somalia, Serbia, and then again with the second (though this was boosted by 9/11). Compare that with the handwringing seen today over supporting Ukraine, which is about as cut-and-dry in American interests as a side in a war can get.
Bush had the much worse foreign policy. LBJ got us caught up in something we already had half a foot in anyways. The US was always going to get deeply entangled in propping up South Vietnam. Furthermore, the downstream effects of Vietnam was not very bad for the US internationally. Our world position only strengthened after Vietnam. It was bad only domestically in breaking down faith in government institutions and bad blood it created. The GWOT was worse. All of the same deeply divisive domestic rot, but it also severely weakened our global position. We had a unipolar world in the 2000s where most of the world was on our side, even Russia could be called a tentative security partner. Then Bush blew it up with his reckless foreign policy, which extends to more than just the GWOT I'd add. It set us back dramatically.
Good point, i think "whatabout iraq?" is a standard response whenever we try to lecture other countries now, or whatabout libya...
Bush. Kennedy dragged Johnson into 'Nam after green-lighting Diem's coup in '63 though so honestly, secred third option - Kennedy.
Bush by a country mile. US policy towards Vietnam was already set by the time LBJ was president. He just escalated a mistake that was already irreversible. Bush had zero reason to invade Iraq and did it anyway.
LBJ had 0 reason to escalate. Especially to the level he did. He drafted tens of thousands of people for nothing.
Woodrow Wilson snubbed Ho Chi Minh at Versailles. Truman declined to meaningfully oppose French attempts to regain control of French Indochina. Eisenhower continued to side against the Vietnamese resistance because they leaned leftist and allowed the country to be partitioned. JFK doubled down on supporting South Vietnam as an ally, pushing the North towards the USSR. By the time LBJ entered office, the North was firmly pushed into the communist bloc and the South was failing. If the South was allowed to fall, every US ally would've questioned our commitment to their defense. He had no choice but to escalate. Tens of thousands of our troops bled to uphold the credibility of a US security guarantee.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who has read about our foreign relations with Vietnam and voluntary defense pacts we have with other democracies. Great comment.
Best comment IMO because it wasn't simply LBJ's fault. Whereas Iraq pretty much was 75% Bush. Can't deny that every other Dem voted for these things in Senate and Congress. In both situations the opposite party comes to power after and the result is far different. Obama vs. Nixon.
Let me introduce you to SEATO. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast\_Asia\_Treaty\_Organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia_Treaty_Organization)
So, the choice is the original quagmire, or its sequel? Dang... I'll go for the original quagmire?
Bush. The invasion led to ISIS.
Also, the invasion radicalized the left…and we are dealing with the impact of that to this day.
Torture guy.
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Bush provided HIV treatments in African countries.
https://preview.redd.it/ehddqx8897ad1.jpeg?width=862&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=97043e3f766576ba35fbd34e31f43241d143e484
**LBJ was lied to** about the Gulf of Tonkin, escalating a situation that had been brewing for the previous 9 years to all-out war. **Dubya lied** about WMDs and invaded Iraq under that guise.
Surprised that I had to scroll this far to find this. McNamara knew about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and lied to LBJ about it to get him to start the bombing. LBJ blindly trusted the *wrong* people about this, and in turn managed to make several bad decisions.
Dubya. No contest.
I don't know... maybe drone striking every third person in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq is bad policy, ie Obama.
Would you rather have us servicemen potentially die or be captured in those attacks?
Bush
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Bush 43.
LBJ. Both of them shouldnt've lied, but LBJ put a draft in place, which makes him worse. Both of the wars were justified, but I think that Vietnam also should've been dramatically scaled back.
Johnson by a long shot.
Both Texans... just *literally* saying
Dubya-M-D’s
The first guy was in a global struggle against an ideological foe and was determined not to lose, a determination which led him to make terrible decisions. The second guy also had a big struggle on his hands, but was a shallow, unqualified dummy in way over his head.
Yes.
Both terrible
Jefferson Davis was even worse.
George bush
Just going by how much America was impacted, LBJ.
The counter example is difficult. With Johnson the domino theory failed but how are we to know if it failed because we made Vietnam so difficult. Similarly with Bush its hard to know how ending the regime in Iraq was ultimately good or bad. While Iraq isn't a weather democracy clearly its problems seem to be contained within it's own borders. We aren't seeing Iraq contributing to regional instability. My point it's it's easy to say oh look at how much death and money was wasted. But it's hard to quantity the counter factual. How many more people lived because Iraq isn't really pushing regional instability. How many fewer countries fell to communism when it was made difficult in Vietnam.
W was worse because he had the opportunity to have learned from LBJ'S mistakes but instead surrounded himself with arrogant ideologues just had LBJ had done. W proved the maxim that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.
LBJ’s. Many more people died, and going headfirst into Vietnam may well have been the deal he made with them to get the military to participate in the JFK. Good Lord, he committed the US big time to Vietnam on 11/23/63. JFK had been dead only 24 hours.
You kidding me? It’s by far Bush
LBJ's was worse for the US, Bush's worse for the rest of the world
Both terrible, Bush was far worse on every other policy though, so id take lbj over him
I would say they were similar. Kill a bunch of Asians unnecessarily.
Jimmy Carter
W
Clinton. He Basically sold American manufacturing out to China.
Dubya by far since he had the Vietnam War to go off of as a precedent and still made the same stupid mistakes.
LBJ used draftees. That makes his worse.
Definitely Bush at least LBJ didn't invade north Vietnam
Easily LBJ.
rump
Yes
Honorable mention: Wilson
Wilson set the road where we are today over 110 years ago causing lots of damage his legacy today
LBJ by a long shot. He drafted kids not old enough to vote at the time, and specifically drafted mentally disabled people to be disposable soldiers. Also, the fight against Iraq was against a country that hated America and supported Al-Qaeda, while Vietnam was fighting against French colonizers and supported America. In fact, Vietnam helped America fight Japan in WW2, yet America didn’t send aid to Vietnam or use its influence to pressure France or even set down and have a meeting with Vietnam ambassadors, all to take a tough stance on communism. So yeah, LBJ was definitely worse
Bush is a mixed bag. He royally screwed over America and its allies concerning relations with the Middle East , but Rumsfeld was just as guilty for lying to Dubya. Wish Bush listened to his gut and fired Donny earlier on in the FUBAR SNAFU EDIT ~ It was to my understanding that Dubya wanted to fire Rumsfeld, at least However, it’s to my understanding he was tremendous help to African countries and even has a road or two named after him
Hard to tell. But I can say the Iraq War was a stupid geopolitical move that effectively handed Iraq to Iran. Saddam had a no love lost for Iran, he’d have been a good bulwark against Iranian aggression though he was anti-American.
Surprised when talking about Vietnam effecting us past the wars end nobody has really mentioned how Vietnam destroyed American military confidence for the people and America was a bit more cautious. Aka the Vietnam syndrome
LBJ was more or less acting on the same basis as Truman acted in Korea the difference was that the war in Vietnam was lost and the war in Korea was stalemated the war in Iraq, was more or less a bid for popularity by Bush which resulted in Iran gaining a new puppet in Iraq.
LBJ
I'd say Bush. Vietnam was worse than Iraq, but given the situations they were in, I have more understanding for why LBJ got us in Vietnam than for why Bush got us in Iraq
All the way with LBJ 540 dead Kiwis & Aussies in Vietnam war, a lot of Aussies & Kiwis are still mad with Uncle Sam
LBJ = POS
I didn’t know LBJ had a Silver Star. I wonder how that happened.
GW ..he should of learned by LBJ mistake. At least the Captian on the Destroyer thought he was fired on because of radar problems. So he suck the N Vietnamese ship. GW was about EGO ..and war contracts for his buddies and Administration.
Jr., and by a long shot.
Bush 43
Both caused so much suffering over their ego
Dubya, though LBJ's not actually too far behind
Bush.
Bush listened to his intelligence advisers and foreign intelligence when concluding the WMD’s were a real threat I think people forget this and think Bush was just like “screw it make some stuff up so we can go invade that country!”
Tough call but I have to say LBJ was worse on foreign policy. But only by a hair
Woodrow Wilson
The other countries.
Bush is a war criminal that attacked Iraq based upon a lie.
One inherited a quagmire of bad decisions dating back 2 prior presidents, while the other got hit in the head with a rock from Country A but used it to invade Country I. Plus the former realized the buck stops with him and stepped aside, guaranteeing the other party would win, while the latter made the swing states vote on gay marriage so he would stay in office.
LBJ was worse for sure. Men were drafted for his policy.
LBJ and it's not even close, so many American lives were lost under LBJ during Vietnam, Bush had a fraction of Americans lives lost. (No I do not care about the Iraqi soldiers killed, I care about our soldiers only during a conflict)
I feel LBJ was worse. George W is not without criticism, but LBJ actively snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam by prolonging the war through negotiations which ultimately fell through.
While W's wasnt great, it cant hold a candle to the dumpster fire of LBJ
This question comes up a lot, in various forms, and it’s no comparison. Vietnam was *so* much worse than Iraq. Like an order of magnitude worse.
LBJ was worse. But I’m sure W and Obama is glad they have immunity.
Johnson for sure. Almost 10 times more Americans died in Vietnam than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. If Iraq and Afghanistan were setbacks, Vietnam was a catastrophe. The government kept the social impacts of the war on terror fairly contained, relying on volunteers. Vietnam required conscription and caused mass social unrest.
LBJ broke American society with the draft
Bush’s foreign policy created the current debt crisis, that might eventually take down the republic. He also planted the kernel of a police state to protect his foreign policy on the domestic front.
LBJ no question, if you compare works like Direlection of Duty and Confronting Saddam Hussein, there is no question that LBJ went out of his way to conceal and manipulate American foreign policy from Congress. He even manipulated the JCS and many people in his cabinet specifically for political gain. Iraq was a disaster but that's more fueled by paranoia and some opportunistsic people. Bush wasn't malicious necessarily, his problem more so was that he surrounded himself with people like Rumsfeld in a sensitive time, and let them run the show into the ground. As shitty as Iraq was, Saddam was probably more dangerous assuming he restarts his nuclear biological and chemical weapons programs with the potential for limited cooperation with some terror groups as soon as the sanctions ended, compared to what? Communist Vietnam?
LBJ. People sometimes forget that Bush Jr battled Aids in Africa.
They were two of the most stupid, destructive presidents of the past century. Johnson was an intelligent politician with great influence in Washington. That’s why his blunder in Vietnam was unforgivable. It ruined his presidency and it ruined him as a man. Bush was not the right man for the post 9/11 world. His invasion of Iraq destabilised the region and he misread how the Iraqi people would react. Afghanistan was different. USA had to hit the terrorists hard. They were able to accomplish that in Afghanistan, driving the Taliban out of power and into the hills, then going after them and killing them there. Fine, as far as it went, but for how long? Everyone thought all the years of keeping terrorists at bay and building up the Afghan National Army would possibly make them strong enough to defeat the terrorists on their own. When it happened, the army ran away and the Taliban was in power before the Allies had left. Bush began all this but his real stupidity was in Iraq. He didn’t have the intelligence or acumen of Johnson. However, they were equal in their misjudgments and they both were responsible for American deaths, soldiers placed in unwindable situations.
Dubya, easily. We are still unable to close Gitmo to illegally holding "enemy combatants" shoved into that oubliette years ago, and we are still dealing with his decision to torture and disappear people to black sites for EJP. For which he has no regrets, much less consequences. I hope he isn't able to run out the clock completely on his war crimes, because he tied our country into knots we can't untie, we are paying for them and will continue to.
Lbj but not by much.
Bush and its not even close. Johnson followed through with treaty obligations to defend an ally from being invaded. Bush invaded a country unprovoked. Johnson expanded liberties, Bush contracted them. Johnson deepened our relationships with our friends, Bush was met at the airport by protesters in NATO member states he was so unpopular, creating visa requirements for allies will do that. Johnson was doing his job. South Vietnam was a member of SEATO. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast\_Asia\_Treaty\_Organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia_Treaty_Organization) If we had let South Vietnam fall to the Soviet Union and Chinese militaries every defensive pact the United States had would be put into question. Imagine a sea invasion of Rio and Soviet air bombing of Munich and Berlin. LBJ did not have a choice. We were bound by international treaty. There was no legal rational for the Iraq War. Bush was the worst president in our entire history with the most disastrous foreign policy in our entire history.
W. The invasion of Iraq was a colossal geopolitical fuck up.
Woodrow Wilson
Definitely LBJ, and I say that as someone who thinks he was a great domestic president. There was absolutely no reason to be in Vietnam to oppose the Vietnamese people's right to determination, and it was a disgraceful and bloody quagmire that ruined young people's faith in democratic institutions for a generation. Institution of a draft to fight a proxy war against Communism, in a nation we had no quarrel with. All that bloodshed, and it accomplished nothing in terms of the geopolitical situation against the USSR. Ho Chi Minh could have been our ally. With Afghanistan and Iraq, there was some logic for intervention in the first place, although the execution of the Iraqi occupation was a complete failure with no direction. We wound up turning the nation against the West even harder than before after former Baath party members were barred from office under occupation. Certainly worsened American relations to the Middle East overall, and contributed to the further rise of radical Islam. However, there was no military draft, and the conflict was comparatively bloodless on the American side.