Funny thing is, W's operatives were as willing to attack the US uniformed military leadership for expressing doubts about W's resolute march to war as anybody else, though they were a little more subtle about it than with obvious war opponents on the wrong side of the political fence. Way back when this review came out, I got in a minor argument here with the former resident real foreign policy expert, who thought the reviewer was being unfair to credentialed expert Eliot Cohen: query.nytimes.com
Although the defense analyst Eliot A. Cohen's ''Supreme Command'' seems to be devoted to a very different topic, it shares a remarkably similar polemical stance with ''The Savage Wars of Peace.'' Both Cohen and Boot direct their strongest attacks against contemporary military leaders' embrace of the ''Powell doctrine.'' That doctrine, an outgrowth of the military's bitter experience during the Vietnam war, holds that America should intervene in foreign conflicts only when its vital national interests are at stake; that such interventions must have the unqualified support of Congress and the public; and that the military force the United States then uses must be massive and decisive.
To Cohen such preconditions are ''extreme'' and severely limit the use of armed force as an instrument of statecraft. He devotes most of his book to five historical case studies -- of Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, Ben-Gurion and the ''leadership without genius'' during the Vietnam War. The lesson of these, to simplify, is that civilian officials should not defer to military opinion regarding grand strategy and the use of force. Both authors are scornful of what Boot regards as the military leadership's distaste for small wars and what Cohen characterizes as its ''reckless'' emphasis on ''force protection'' in such conflicts as the NATO war against Serbia. And both authors correctly identify the military leadership as the primary institutional barrier in the national security establishment to the interventionist policies they wish to see pursued.
But Boot and Cohen disguise their policy advocacy as objective history. It is simply wrong, for instance, to declare, as Cohen does, that it was Gen. William Westmoreland's ''finicky'' concern that the United States not act as a colonial power in Vietnam that led to the American refusal to take direct control of Saigon's military. American military and civilian leaders were equally unhappy with the corruption and ineptitude of the South Vietnamese military, but both held firmly to the conviction that Saigon could never prove its legitimacy -- the central issue in the war -- if the United States were to assume command of the South's armed forces. Cohen's entire interpretation of American policy in Vietnam is flawed: although he ascribes the United States' failure to the muddled thinking of the military and to the Johnson administration's unwillingness to ask tough questions, military, intelligence and administration officials were in fact grimly realistic about the unlikely prospect of ''victory'' in Vietnam. But given cold war imperatives and constraints, the vital goal was to avoid losing the Vietnam War, not to win it. A costly and indefinite stalemate was the inevitable result of what was actually a carefully considered and cleareyed policy.
And, while Boot's criticism of Colin Powell's opposition to American intervention in Bosnia is forceful, his assertion that ''it took remarkably few sorties by NATO, principally U.S. warplanes -- combined with a Croation ground offensive -- for the Serbs to agree to a peace treaty'' is misleading. It neglects the atrocities -- ethnic cleansing, summary executions, indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations -- that the Croation Army committed against the Krajina Serbs, with the tacit blessing of Washington.
Cohen resurrects the old saw that war is too important to be left to the generals. But it's equally true that history is too important to leave to policy advocates.
I thought it was pretty obvious where Cohen was coming from. The other book reviewed in that article was by Max Boot, and there's sort of a scary example of people not learning history there too:
But, as Boot sees it, because the American public and its leaders are haunted by the specter of the disastrous ''small war'' in Vietnam, the United States has recently failed to take up what he strongly suggests is its imperial burden. He therefore devotes the last section of his book to arguing that America has learned the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War.
Here he rehashes the arguments made by most perceptive military and civilian officials during the conflict (and by a host of analysts and historians since). To wit, that the United States and South Vietnamese armies should have waged the war using pacification and counterinsurgency techniques; they should have emphasized population security to win the allegiance of the South Vietnamese people, rather than using search-and-destroy operations against the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army.
But the question of whether the Vietnam War could have been ''won'' involves issues far too complex to serve Boot's purposes. Suffice it to say that American military and civilian leaders always recognized the vital importance of pacification -- which a 1966 study by none other than the United States Army asserted ''must be designated unequivocally as the major U.S. effort.'' The frustration lay in what Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called the inability to find ''the formula, the catalyst for training and inspiring'' the South Vietnamese government and military to pursue that strategy.
More important, by 1970, as Boot acknowledges, South Vietnam had been effectively ''pacified'' -- thanks to the profligate use of United States firepower, the failure of the Tet offensive and the success of the United States-run Phoenix program, designed to uproot the guerrillas' leadership, all of which destroyed the Vietcong's infrastructure. But that success was meaningless because, although more of the population was insulated from the Vietcong's political control, Saigon failed to provide political control of its own -- owing to low morale, poor leadership, cowardice, corruption and incompetence. Simply put, South Vietnam was not a nation that could be ''built'' by United States efforts.
Oh dear. I imagine Boot, as a WSJ editorial page type, would be about as willing to admit to incorrect thought there as Rummy or W. I think the Times' staff reviewer Frank Bruni did a little better job pining down where Cohen was coming from and what was wrong with his argument, though. From query.nytimes.com
Beyond his accounts of how these commanders in chief worked, Mr. Cohen postulates that the problem with Vietnam was not excessive civilian intrusion but rather a civilian involvement that was qualitatively flawed: President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara were not demanding the right kind of information and accountability from military officers, who were in a muddle that needed to be noticed and addressed.
And while the Persian Gulf War is often cited as a paradigm of the appropriate relationship between civilian leaders and military officers -- in that the first President Bush delegated responsibilities for waging the war and then got largely out of the way -- Mr. Cohen maintains that the brief conflict came to a kind of incomplete and fettered conclusion partly for that reason.
His elucidation of his theory is organized tightly and rendered crisply, although not always vividly. The tone and diction of ''Supreme Command'' are as much those of an academic treatise as a piece of popular nonfiction; it will probably appeal more to enthusiasts and policy wonks than to general readers. But it nonetheless addresses a vital question that deserves widespread consideration: to what extent should the person who holds the reins of government immerse himself or herself in the tactical details of combat?
In suggesting that the immersion be deep, Mr. Cohen may be extrapolating too far from the examples and accomplishments of the four men he profiles and giving too much anticipatory credit to the intellects, good sense and imagination of other heads of state. The leaders at the heart of ''Supreme Command'' are not exactly typical; the success of the second President Bush's military campaigns will be determined less by the mere extent of his engagement in the details than by whatever personal talents and attributes he brings to the task.
Well, yes, there was certainly a lot of anticipatory credit floating around before the war. Now, my understanding is that it's all somebody else's fault. Tommy Franks, Democrats who voted for the war resolution, or anybody else who doubts will do when it comes to making sure the buck stays a safe distance from the people who had to have this war. |
