A supreme commander's choices
By Ehsan Ahrari
atimes.com
At a time when the talk of war against Iraq is so casually bandied about in the United States, Eliot A Cohen's book Supreme Command is a timely must-read for both supporters and opponents of that war. Authors of an intricate topic of this nature are usually quite perceptive and sagacious when they discuss historic events and personalities, and Cohen fully fits that mold.
He studies four great statesmen - Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill and David Ben Gurion. One of his major conclusions is that they succeeded in their role because they immersed themselves in the conduct of war; they mastered their military briefs as thoroughly as they did their civilian ones; and that they demanded and expected from their military subordinates a candor as bruising as it was necessary.
While the study of those leaders is significant for the current and future generations of leaders, it is equally important to examine how President George W Bush conducts himself in the seemingly inevitable war against Iraq. He has the benefit of Cohen's sage observations, since he is reported to have read his book.
If Cohen's book establishes one thing, it is that the top civilian leadership must be highly proactive, and remain wholly involved in every step of a military operation, quizzing the military leaders about the nature and scope of actions taken. All four great statesmen of his study did just that, and did it exceedingly well. The author has consistently and persuasively rejected what he calls the "normal" theory of civil-military relations, which states that after making the decision to take military actions - a sole prerogative of civilian leadership - the latter should let the military run the campaign, which is supposedly the forte of military leaders. None of the statesmen studied in Cohen's book lived by "normal" theory of civil-military relations. "All of them drove their generals to distraction, eliciting a curious mixture of rage and affection as they did so."
In the most important chapter of his study, "Leadership Without Genius", Cohen raises an interesting point about President Lyndon B Johnson and his conduct of the Vietnam War. He notes, "Johnson and [his secretary of defense Robert] McNamara operated from a false strategic concept - a 'theory of victory' that rested on radically inadequate understanding of the opponents and, for that matter, of their own society".
The author faults the civilian and military leadership for failing to ask hard questions of military leaders about the basic direction of the war, about its related "strategic choices", and the military brass for remaining equally clueless about how to attain victory. Elaborating on the role of Johnson's military advisers, Cohen writes, "That they supported the war we know. That they favored waging it more aggressively we also know. But one searches in vain for evidence that they had any strategic concept other than more intense bombing or the dispatch of even more men to the fighting front."
Applying the preceding to the Iraqi situation Bush currently faces, the need for having a clear strategic concept - I prefer the phrase "strategic purpose" - is vital. It is anyone's guess as to what Bush has learned from Cohen's book, and what lessons he has drawn from it for his upcoming involvement in a military campaign against Iraq. However, if Cohen's observation about the significance of having a right strategic purpose is correct, then military action against Iraq should never take place.
The litmus test of a right strategic purpose is the answer to the following questions: 1) What does the US want to achieve by taking military action against Iraq? 2) Is the strategic purpose of such a campaign for the US to become the "puppeteer" of Iraq and controller of its vast oil reserves, as is generally believed in the Middle East?
Undoubtedly, no US official will answer affirmatively to the second question. Is the strategic objective of the US to disarm Iraq? If so, then the issue of a military campaign is obviated, unless Saddam Hussein categorically rejects any UN inspections. But the issue has not even reached that stage yet. However, reading the daily press coverage of the issue, and watching Bush's regular public discussions of Iraq, there is little doubt that the decision to invade that country has been made - only its timing may not yet have been decided.
Another important question is whether the civilian leadership has adequately examined the necessity of military action against Iraq - ie, what do they want to achieve after ousting Saddam? Even in terms of educating the American public on the issue, Bush has waffled from emphasizing the disarmament of Iraq one day to portraying an urgency of toppling Saddam the next. About the only time he really spoke to the American people at length on the subject was in his speech of October 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.
Even if one were to reject the preceding discussion of the "correct" strategic purpose, we are still left with an unambiguous need for having one. One frequently mentioned suggestion is that Iraq will be a good candidate for becoming a test case of a new US strategic concept - mentioned in Bush's National Security Strategy of September 2002 - that the Muslim world should be introduced to democracy, and only the US is qualified to do that. In an essay on the "grand strategy" of the US under Bush, Johns Lewis Gaddis speculates about the current administration's "grand" purpose as follows, "What appears at first glance to be a lack of clarity about who's deterrable and who's not turns out, upon closer examination, to be a plan for transforming the entire Muslim Middle East: for bringing it, once and for all, into the modern world."
If there is, indeed, a US grand strategy to democratize the Muslim world, there is little doubt that the timing of it is horrible, and the methodology of materializing it appears highly disastrous. It takes little knowledge of current affairs of the Muslim world at large, and not very much imagination, to conclude that anti-Americanism in those countries is at an all-time high. No Arab state at the present time wishes to identify itself being perceived as friendly to any US aspirations regarding Iraq. In fact, the Bush administration's handling of the PLO-Israeli seemingly unending circle of violence has created enormous amount of hostility toward Washington.
Even after the tragic explosion in Bali, the government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri has not introduced the type of crackdown on Islamists that satisfies the US. There have been instances of attacks on US Marines in Kuwait, whose current independent status is the outcome of the American-led Gulf War of 1991. A US diplomat was murdered in Jordan on October 28, 2002. The government of Egypt, probably one of the closest Arab allies of the US, seems to be pandering to already anti-Israeli sentiments, by showing a 41-part film, Horseman Without a Horse, across the Arab world. It is doing that, despite American and Israeli requests that it be banned as anti-Semitic.
Under these circumstances, military invasion of Iraq does not appear to be a rational choice by using any measure of rationality. There are also suggestions in some quarters that the best the US can hope to accomplish after conquering Iraq is to occupy it and utilize the Japanese and German occupation models of transforming it into a democracy. Those who point to these models fail to recall that both those nations were parties to a world war. Iraq, on the contrary, is not party to a conflict of that magnitude against the US. It has neither attacked the US, nor does it aspire to.
More to the point, Iraq is not a Buddhist Japan or a Christian Germany with a socio-religious milieu that is not hostile to the US. Occupation of a Muslim country by the US during an era when the contentious rhetoric of Osama bin Ladin is constantly depicting it as an "infidel" power is only an invitation for daily disasters as long the American troops continue to occupy Iraq.
An accurate reading of Cohen's book underscores the importance of having a correct strategy before the US invades Iraq. But if my reading of the public debate on this issue is correct, that strategy is evolving on a daily basis. There is no empirical evidence available indicating that a regular and, more important, rigorous examination of that strategy is being done. Only Bush is well placed to ask the right type of questions of his subordinates; only he ought to be asking: Why should we invade Iraq? Why now? Is there any other way of dealing with the situation? Is invasion likely to promote our strategic objectives? How will it affect the our ongoing war on terrorism? Watching the official debate from a distance, he seems to be very much a part of the hawkish rhetoric that is so pervasive within Washington official and semi-official circles. One only hopes that away from public scrutiny, he is asking his subordinates the aforementioned questions on a daily basis.
The military leadership is off the hook in the contemporary era when the US military dominance is awesome and unquestionable. The military operations against Iraq will be successful, as they were against the Taliban-al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. But the success of a strategic campaign is an entirely different story. The jury is still out on whether the US has, indeed, won the overall war in Afghanistan. By the same token, it will be a long while after the conclusion of the military campaign before one may be able to state with certainty that the US has, indeed, won in Iraq.
When it comes to Saddam, the feeling of hatred of him is so pervasive and intense that rational analysis of the issue of toppling him may not be possible. Hawks and doves in the US may be of one mind on the issue. However, considering what is at stake, one hopes that their hatred of the dictator of Iraq will not tilt them on the side of a wrong decision. The supreme commander of the US armed forces will be ill served then.
As long as one is thinking of Bush's role as a statesman in the context of the seemingly impending war in Iraq, a number of observations must be made. First, unlike the four great statesmen's awesome ordeals that are the topics of Cohen's analysis, the military portion of US's war against Iraq is going to be very minor. Second, the statesmen of Cohen's study could not avoid the wars of their era. War against Iraq, on the contrary, belongs to an entirely different category. It is highly avoidable, and, indeed, unnecessary. Thus, the military nature of challenges emanating from it is of entirely different scope and nature. Third, the modalities of the performance of Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben Gurion in their respective wars - ie, the fact that they kept their sights focused on their strategic objectives, and that they immersed themselves in the operational details while ensuring that their commanders continued to serve their overall purpose - made them great.
The main challenge of Bush's statesmanship will depend on how manages the nation-building phase of the military invasion of Iraq. On this issue, his record in Afghanistan leaves little room for optimism, especially when one considers what a significant challenge Washington will face on that issue in Iraq. |
