Statesmen and the art of war

George W. Bush, his aides tell us, has been reading Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command.” He would be well advised to read Jeffrey Record’s “Making War, Thinking History” as well before he takes the country into war with Iraq.

Cohen’s and Record’s books are two superb studies of past civilian-military relationships in time of war and of the lessons that might be drawn. Cohen uses Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion to illustrate how statesmen should perform in time of war. Record is concerned specifically with how recent American leaders have shaped their approach to war based on appeasement (Munich) and entrenchment (Vietnam). He focuses on presidents from Harry S. Truman to Bush and finds them lacking sophistication, both tactically and diplomatically. He is especially harsh on those who, beginning with the Reagan administration, determined policy on the basis of what he perceives as flawed conclusions drawn from the war in Vietnam.

One comes away from these books troubled by the prospect of our current president, as someone who prides himself in being disengaged from the details of policy, presiding over America’s next war. Can the country risk another war when led by a president who seems ignorant of the incompetence of the men to whom he has turned over direction of his “war on terrorism,” and who is unable to fire any of those who have failed him? Moreover, in Dick Cheney and Colin L. Powell, he relies on two of the men responsible for the decisions that precluded consummation of victory in his father’s war against Saddam Hussein.

In “Supreme Command,” Cohen immediately confesses that he’s guilty of hero worship. He proclaims Winston Churchill to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century. As a professor who served in the office of the secretary of Defense and is currently a member of Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board, Cohen is eager to distinguish himself from those “donnish” academics who have been critical of Churchill and from those authors who, writing in the comfort of their studies, cannot imagine the pressure under which a wartime leader functions. The basis of his admiration of Churchill and of the other wartime leaders is their willingness to challenge the generals, to participate actively and abrasively in the conduct of the war.

Cohen is persuasive in his argument that his central subjects played essential roles in the conduct of the wars they led. Lincoln goaded his generals, fired those who failed to fight as he deemed necessary and spied on Ulysses S. Grant, his most successful general. It is not a recipe for leadership that will sit well with military leaders anywhere, but Lincoln’s direction of the war saved the Union. Similarly, Clemenceau’s management of his generals kept the French army in place until the blundering Americans were in France in sufficient numbers to win the war for the European nations, and Ben-Gurion built an army out of competing guerrilla and terrorist groups and veterans to save his infant country from destruction by its invading Arab neighbors.

But what happens when mere mortals lead the nation? Sensibly, Cohen follows his sketches of great statesmen with a chapter on “Leadership Without Genius” in which he examines the efforts of men like Lyndon B. Johnson, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. These pages provide little comfort, for today’s leaders will never be ranked with Lincoln and Churchill. Cohen can tell us what mistakes were made by lesser men, but he cannot tell us how to win a war after we’ve elected them.

Cohen dismisses the military’s contention that the war in Vietnam was lost because of restraints imposed on the generals by civilian leaders. He rejects the argument that Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara micromanaged the war, and he can find no evidence that military leaders had any better ideas as to how to fight it. On the contrary, he is sharply critical of the military’s efforts to limit the choices available to its civilian leadership. He suggests that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chose irrelevance rather than accept necessary political restraints. Cohen concludes that the fault in Vietnam was a combination of inept strategy and weak civilian control. In addition, there was no Clemenceau, no Ben-Gurion to redirect the Joint Chiefs.

Similarly, he is appalled by the elder George Bush’s abdication of responsibility to his generals during the Gulf War. Bush wanted to terminate the rule of Saddam Hussein and to destroy Iraq’s programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. Powell allowed Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf to decide when to halt the advance of his forces and how to arrange the armistice -- and Schwarzkopf erred in both decisions, enabling Hussein to survive to torment us another day.

Record, who served as assistant province advisor in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War and now teaches strategy at the Air Force’s Air War College, stresses the fact that presidents use the “lessons” of the past, historical analogies, when deciding to use force. He is merciless in his contempt for Vietnam revisionists, for those who argue that the war could have been won had its direction been turned over to the military. He savages Caspar W. Weinberger’s rules for going to war and the Powell Doctrine that restated them, policies that allowed for troops to be sent into combat only when a vital interest was threatened, only when overwhelming force -- unrestrained by politics -- could be used and only when an exit strategy was clearly in place. Perhaps most surprisingly, after condemning the Truman administration for sending troops across the 38th parallel in Korea, the “mission creep” of 1950, he too criticizes the elder Bush for terminating the Gulf War too soon. He contends that Desert Storm, by merely driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait, dealt with the symptom of Iraqi aggression but did not eliminate the source.

Neither author has a kind word for the Clinton administration. The president, despite graduating from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, showed little interest in foreign policy. Having avoided military service during the Vietnam War, he was reluctant to send troops into battle. Once bruised in his battle with military leaders over his policy toward gays in the military, he was reluctant to take them on again. His resistance to risking the lives of American servicemen in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in those territories. Record notes the persistent fear of another Vietnam -- and obviously of another Somalia -- hindering the responses of American leaders to evidence of genocide.

Record is troubled by what he perceives to be the professional military’s increased influence on the use of force. Most provocative is his charge that contemporary American leaders are searching for “riskless wars.” He sees Weinberger’s rules and Powell’s doctrine leading to “force protection fetishism,” wherein the military’s mission is subordinated to the goal of avoiding casualties. The result, he demonstrates, has led to military timidity. A case in point would be the recent battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan, where the unwillingness to risk American casualties squandered an opportunity to capture Al Qaeda principals, perhaps even Osama bin Laden. Certainly, we want our fighting men and women to take no unnecessary risks, but unlike video games, real war is about death, about killing and being killed.

Record makes four points that would serve well as a prescription for our current leaders. All are consistent with the arguments put forth by Cohen. First, read about and understand the past, but don’t expect it to repeat itself. Second, forget the teachings of Weinberger and Powell, except for their insistence on clarity of purpose. Third, be willing to use force, including ground troops, to accomplish the nation’s mission. Be prepared to accept casualties (polls suggest the American people understand the need). And finally, never forget the law of unintended consequences. Watch carefully as the battle proceeds, question everyone and everything, and be forever ready to change course.

Statesmen, Cohen insists, must play a role in deciding how war will be fought. They must not defer to military professionals.

Together, Cohen and Record raise important questions about the current state of military-civilian relations in the United States and about the deep and pernicious shadow of Vietnam. Cohen addresses indirectly issues of coalition management in his chapters on Clemenceau and Churchill, but neither of these brilliant students of military history and strategy offer any insight into how a nation can justify a preemptive war without evidence of what Oliver Wendell Holmes would have called a “clear and present danger.” Perhaps the current administration’s road to war with Iraq is simply too unimaginable to them.