Will wonders never cease! In a fourth article in the WP today, Elliot Cohen weighs in on a term, and attitude, that is dear to the heart of some of our posters.
washingtonpost.com
Hunting 'Chicken Hawks'
By Eliot A. Cohen
Thursday, September 5, 2002; Page A31
Chicken hawk.
Like most slurs, it works because it is both ugly and faintly amusing. Some of those using it against people arguing for a military operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein have no record of military service themselves, which would seem to undermine a premise of their case. But recently prominent Vietnam veterans have begun to hurl the epithet (or circumlocutions for it), and they are serious people.
To the extent "chicken hawk" is an argument, it consists of four related but distinct propositions.
The first variant is that the generals are all against war, and if they are, they must be right -- particularly if their opponents are civilians who have not served. Does the same work in reverse? If the generals and admirals favored a preemptive attack on Cuba in 1962 -- as many did -- were they right then because they were flag officers? Of course not. The expertise of generals lies chiefly in the operational, not the strategic, sphere{ndash}how to wage war, not whether it should be fought.
There is no evidence that generals as a class make wiser national security policymakers than civilians. George C. Marshall, our greatest soldier statesman after George Washington, opposed shipping arms to Britain in 1940. His boss, Franklin D. Roosevelt, with nary a day in uniform, thought otherwise. Whose judgment looks better? A few soldiers become great diplomats or great politicians; others are abject failures. Most avoid the field altogether. Military careers spent in hierarchical, rule-bound, tightly controlled organizations are not necessarily the best preparation for accurately judging the fluid world of politics at home and abroad.
Nor is it the case that a few of the most vocal generals can speak for all the rest (where is the authoritative poll of retired flag officers on Iraq?). Or consider the unseemly spectacle of the freshly retired four-stars who rushed to line up behind the opposing Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in the last three elections. If nothing else, it tells us that this admittedly small group of generals had very different views on the central issue of American politics.
The second variant of "chicken hawk" is that veterans per se are uniquely qualified to make judgments on matters of war and peace. How does that work, though? Does a former airborne ranger get twice as loud a voice as an ICBM crew chief? Does the stateside finance corps lieutenant count more than the civilian who came under fire running an aid mission in Mogadishu? According to this view, to fill a senior policy position during a war one would of course prefer a West Point graduate who had led a regiment in combat, as opposed to a corporate lawyer turned politician with a few weeks' experience in a militia unit that did not fight. The former profile fits Jefferson Davis and the latter Abraham Lincoln. Not only did Davis turn against the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, he was a poor commander in chief, while Lincoln was the greatest of our war presidents. Being a veteran is no guarantee of strategic wisdom.
The third argument is that those who have been shot at have an intuitive understanding that war is a terrible thing, which civilians do not. That they have an exceptionally acute sense of this fact is, of course, true. But is it fair to imply that non-veterans are by nature too obtuse to understand it, or too irresponsible to care about it? By this logic, should the weight of authority go not to veterans but to the parents of today's soldiers, no matter what their prior service record?
Finally, there are those who seem to believe that veterans' sheer moral authority should give them an authoritative voice on matters of war and peace. Do they also think that those without children are inferior schoolteachers, or that those who do not have relatives on ventilators should not speak about medical ethics? There is but a short path from this set of beliefs to the militaristic fantasy of Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers," in which only veterans have the vote.
A young person embarking on a career in the national security field should seek out military service for many reasons -- patriotism, experience and peace of mind among them -- but failure to do so does not disqualify him or her from playing a leading role.
A terrible curse lies on the Vietnam generation. Its young men fought in a war that may have been unwinnable, that was surely botched by the civilians (many of them veterans) responsible for it and by not a few of the generals to whom they turned to wage it. The conscription system of the time made it easy for young men and their communities to behave badly and evade their duty as citizens. The leaders of that generation -- civilian and soldier alike -- deserve the obloquy they have received, and more. Responsibility for that calamity, however, rests with the men, now aged or dead, who held office then, and not with those who, more than a generation later, are debating the issue of war with the regime of Saddam Hussein.
What we hear now from the veterans shouting "chicken hawk" is, in truth, not a case but an expression of the understandable -- and, in some respects, justified -- resentment of those who went when others, often more privileged, failed to go. There is a large moral difference between those who served and those who deliberately evaded the draft -- but that does not translate into a difference in strategic insight. The veterans of Vietnam -- of any and all wars -- deserve not only the pensions and care that a rich nation can provide, but also the honor that belongs to those who have fought for their country. That debt of esteem and gratitude is one that non-veterans can never fully repay. But in matters of war and peace veterans should receive no special consideration for their views.
The writer is a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and the author of "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime." During the 1980s he served as an officer in the Army Reserve. |
