Failed Leaders, False Wars

Never mind all the facile talk about ground forces, as if this were the siege of Stalingrad. Were we serious about improving the lot of the hundreds of thousands of miserable people either massacred by the Serb mobile killing units or fleeing the Serbs toward Albania and Macedonia, we would have sent our superb Special Forces into Kosovo to hunt and destroy the killers.

Indeed, this is a textbook mission for the Special Forces. They are well prepared for it, and our NATO allies have excellent units as well. All these groups have trained together, they know and trust one another, and they can teach a much-needed lesson to the murderous Serbians who remind one of the dreaded Nazi Einsatzgruppen during World War II. Nothing would have more stabilized Kosovo than the defeat of those Serbian units, and nothing would have more effectively demonstrated our ability to win this conflict. Yet, at this writing there is not a single member of the Special Forces in Kosovo.

President Clinton has not sent American fighters to defeat Slobodan Milosovic, any more than he deployed our armed forces to defeat Saddam Hussein or the Somali warlords. Clinton has run from real warfare all his life. Although he has deployed more troops than any American president since the end of World War II, he has used military power to enhance his own political appeal, not to advance American interests or to decisively defeat American enemies. His overriding concern has been to avoid direct military engagement, prevent American casualties, prisoners and hostages, guarantee that no American aircraft would be shot down (thus the cruise missile as the weapon of choice) and emerge as an amiable peacemaker. In Clinton’s mind, American soldiers are not waging war, they are spreading peace, enabling him to breezily deny that the Serbs had the right to capture American soldiers, even as American bombs rained down on Belgrade.

Just as Clinton’s feeble Kosovo policy is part of a broader pattern, so he himself is an example of a classic type of failed leader, pitilessly analyzed in the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, whose beloved Florentine Republic was overrun by foreign armies in the early 16th century.

Before its defeat, Florence sank into a mire of corruption and weakness. The clearest evidence of the rot was contempt for military virtue, which both led to fatal weakness in the face of enemies, and encouraged the vices that undermine discipline and valor. The failed policies of Florence, and the corruption and self-indulgence of its leaders, sound ominously familiar to us. “If we occasionally see a king (at the head of an army, it’s) for the sake of pomp only, and not from any praiseworthy motive.” A photo op, in other words.

Like Clinton, “when these indolent princes or effeminate republics send a general with an army into the field, the wisest order they think they can give him is never to risk a battle, and above all things avoid a general action . . . . “ And like Clinton, their fecklessness on the battlefield is intimately linked to their own personal corruption and self-indulgence. As Machiavelli wrote in “The Art of War”:

“They thought . . . that it sufficed for a prince in the writing-rooms of palaces to think up a sharp reply, to write a beautiful letter, to demonstrate wit and readiness in saying and words, to know how to weave a fraud . . . to keep many lascivious women around, to conduct himself avariciously and proudly, to rot in idleness, to give military rank by favor, to be scornful if anyone might show them any praiseworthy path, to want their words to be oracular responses, nor did these no-accounts realize that they were preparing themselves to be the prey of whoever assaulted them . . . .”

No better description of Bill Clinton has ever been written, and no one, before or since, has so brilliantly exposed the connection between such leaders’ self-indulgence and their inability to craft effective strategy. As Machiavelli stresses, military virtue is the opposite of these leaders’ ambitions. Military virtue is selfless, sacrificing personal ambition, even life itself, to the common good. The Marines define their core values in three words: honor, courage, commitment. Leaders like Clinton--and while Clinton is an extreme case, he is hardly unique--are far removed from such virtuous standards of conduct.

Machiavelli’s point, which we ignore to our profound peril, is that we cannot have effective leaders unless we hold them to the highest standards of selfless virtue. Alas, we have done the opposite, and we can accordingly expect this president to continue to indulge himself, and to use our fighting forces as props for his own personal satisfaction.

Machiavelli warned that the most perilous situation for any leader is to incur the hatred and contempt of his followers. Clinton now runs that risk: gaining the hatred of those he attacks, and the contempt of those who conclude that he is not equal to the challenge.