| |
A supreme commander's
choices
By Ehsan Ahrari
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.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an
Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic
analyst.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies,
or to submit a letter to the editor.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
