Witness to History

I will be 83 next month, and I find myself wanting to get across a few things I've learned during these years. Most people seem not to know them; many of my contemporaries appear to have forgotten them.

Troops should be limited to one deployment.
That was the rule for most American soldiers during the Vietnam War—and that deployment was for only one year. Nothing more dramatically exposes the cruelty of three and four deployments of 15 to 18 months each that are becoming standard in Iraq and Afghanistan. It can be argued that these soldiers are volunteers—and it's true that some volunteer because they are professional warriors who relish combat. But most join out of a mixture of patriotism and a desire to escape small towns or urban ghettos, get an education, or get a job. The Army is desperate to recruit and retain mental-health professionals. The irony is that not nearly as many would be needed if it were not for the strain that repeated deployments impose on our troops.

The top income-tax rate should be 70 percent.
Since World War II, it was that or higher(at least twice what it is now). Was our economy crippled? No, and for most of those years, it thrived. In four of them, unemployment plunged below 4 percent, something it hasn't done since. The lesson: we could pay much higher taxes than we are now, enabling us to pay for the education and health-care reform we need while reducing the deficit. Higher rates can be deferred until economic recovery takes hold, but they should be enacted now to take effect then. That way we can demonstrate that we take fiscal responsibility seriously.

Obama could learn from FDR about how to put millions more to work.
Roosevelt's Civil Works Administration employed 4 million people during the winter of 1933–34. How long did it take for aide Harry Hopkins to perform this miracle? Two months. It took President Obama three months to "create or save" 150,000 jobs. To be sure, the situation was different then: most people were willing and able to do manual work. But though Obama's challenge differs, he can gain great insight from Hopkins's imagination, bureaucratic skill, and sense of urgency (if Obama does not feel that same sense soon, he could easily lose his congressional majorities next fall). Hopkins put the new hires directly on the government payroll. Obama is employing a "contracting out" approach, which typically takes six months between the congressional appropriation and the signing of a contract—and even longer for the contractor to put people to work.

American efforts to help the Karzai regime are doomed.
Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky were the leaders of South Vietnam, and U.S. attempts to help them defeat the North were sabotaged by their corruption and ineptitude. The Karzai regime in Afghanistan appears to be even more of a joke, and propping it up would be repeating history. In the July 1965 White House meetings that led to a major escalation of U.S. troops, several participants acknowledged the incompetence of the South Vietnamese government. Still, all of Johnson's military advisers—and all but one of his civilian advisers—urged him to escalate. This episode merits Obama's attention.

History shows that it's inhumane to expose our soldiers to the terrors of repeated deployments to help a foreign government that can't be helped. History also tells us that we can create millions of jobs quickly, and that higher taxes can enable us to have the government programs we need while reducing the deficit. Are our policymakers so afraid of being accused of too much taxation and too big a government that they won't consider what has worked in the past?