Ike Would Offer This Advice: If You Use Force, Never Lose

In all the babble over NATO and Kosovo, I keep hearing, in NATO’s 50th anniversary year, the voice of its first supreme commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. It’s a voice I’ve heard time and again saying how to deal with the kind of mess we’re in in the Balkans.

Eisenhower was not, like his old friend George Patton, a man who loved war. During his eight years in the White House, if I heard one word repeated by him, at times almost ad nauseam, it was “peace”: “We seek peace.” “Reelect Jack Javits and send him back to Washington to do a blazing job for peace.”

But as a five-star general, Eisenhower knew war at times became a last necessary resort. And at these times he had a simple axiom: “When you appeal to force, there’s just one thing you must never do: lose.” If I heard him say this once, I heard him say it a hundred times. No tit for tat. No creeping bombing escalations as in Vietnam. On that axiom Eisenhower and Patton saw eye to eye.

Another thing: When you use force, use it overwhelmingly. When Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas defied a federal court order to integrate the state’s public schools, Eisenhower might have tried to enforce that court order by sending in a little band of U.S. marshals. He might have just federalized the Arkansas National Guard, pitting brother against brother. He might have sent in a bunch of FBI agents. Instead, he sent in paratroopers--a thousand of them from the 101st Airborne Division in Ft. Campbell, Ky., to dispel the mob and bring law and order to, for God’s sake, Little Rock’s Central High School. The little group of black students entered the schoolhouse building. The rowdy jeering street mob melted away.

Ten months later, when the government of Lebanon requested U.S. help to prevent its overthrow, Ike, under a specific congressional resolution, once again used overwhelming--indeed almost ludicrously overwhelming--force. He sent nearly 2,000 Marines splashing ashore among the bathers on Lebanon’s beaches. He followed them up with Army troops (the total U.S. troop strength would eventually peak at 15,000). He then immediately went to the United Nations to ask it to take over. And within weeks, mission accomplished, he pulled our troops out. Lebanon remained free.

Those aiming at one objective above all--preventing U.S. casualties--might remember this: In neither Little Rock nor Lebanon did anybody get hurt. Overwhelming force is the way to win. It can also be the way to minimize bloodshed.