Copyright 2003 News World Communications, Inc. Insight on the News
May 26, 2003, Monday
The Character of Wartime Statesmen; Eliot Cohen discusses what made Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion effective wartime leaders and analyzes how President George W. Bush stacks up.
By Stephen Goode, INSIGHT
Eliot Cohen is professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's prestigious School for Advanced International Studies, also known as SAIS. But Cohen's influence ranges far beyond the classroom. His most recent book, Supreme Command, reportedly was read by President George W. Bush during Bush's 2002 summer vacation. In the book the author takes up the theme articulated by the subtitle, Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime.
Cohen writes about four great wartime statesmen: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, French leader Georges Clemenceau and World War I, Winston Churchill as Britain's World War II prime minister and David Ben-Gurion establishing the state of Israel. Of interest to Cohen is what made these four men effective and successful wartime leaders. His answer is that each engaged in continuing and sometimes downright hostile dialogue with their military leaders dialogue in which wartime strategy was thrashed out and settled.
When that vigorous dialogue between civilian and military leaders is absent, as Cohen shows it was during the long and disastrous Vietnam War, then strategy suffers and war fighting tends to be much less effective.
Cohen's background is both scholarly and practical. A Harvard Ph.D., he also was commissioned in 1982 in the U.S. Army Reserve. He is a member of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon and, among other achievements, directed and edited the official study of air power in the 1991 Persian Gulf War with Iraq.
Insight interviewed Cohen in his office seven floors above Massachusetts Avenue near Washington's Dupont Circle on a bright spring day as the successful Gulf War II was winding down in Iraq.
Insight: You write about what you call "the normal theory of civil-military relations." What is this theory?
I use the four case studies of great wartime leaders Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion to discuss an alternative notion to the normal theory of civil-military relations. I call that alternative "the unequal dialogue," which is when you have politicians engaged in very intense and sometimes unpleasant interaction with their senior military leaders. It is in the course of that unequal dialogue, it seems to me, that you get much better strategy than you do any other way.
Q: What qualities did these four political leaders have that led them to carry on such effective dialogue with the military?
A: It is striking that all four were able to listen to and absorb fresh ideas, and that they could be self-critical in serious ways. They had a deep self-confidence about who they were that allowed them to venture safely beyond cockiness. They studied hard, they worked hard, they mastered the details. In fact Ben-Gurion said of his wartime leadership, "It's really all a matter of details."
The four were also, I think, very good at both the written and the spoken word. They understood the importance of that in wartime. If there's one thing which we tend not to have much of today it is leaders who can give rattling good speeches week after week and month after month because they have mastered language. Tony Blair, who can be tremendously eloquent, is an exception.
Another quality they had is ruthlessness. These were men perfectly capable of firing people on the spot. Even Lincoln, probably the nicest human being among them, went through generals like they were candy bars.
Also, I think these four not only were strong but wanted to have strong people around them. There's a great saying an old boss of mine used to quote: "First-rate people hire first-rate people. Second-rate people will hire third-rate people." Leadership is a factor here. Politicians who feel insecure about military matters tend to be the ones who say, "I'm going to delegate and get out of the way!"
A mediocre politician may have neither the intellectual capacity nor intellectual energy to master the things they need to learn to make sense of what they are hearing.
Q: What do you mean when you say these men were good listeners?
A: We tend to think of listening as passive. That's really wrong. It requires a certain strength of character at that high level to be able and willing to listen and then ask telling questions. And these four men could ask good questions. They always were probing, always on a hunt for information.
They knew that there always will be people afraid to deliver the bad news, whether it's because they're afraid you will bite their head off or that they will look bad or they just don't want to trouble you. Of course this is particularly true of the political world, and these four politicians knew that, so all of them felt they had to go out and actively acquire information for themselves.
Q: Why did you choose these men?
A: I wanted an American, a Frenchman, a Brit and an Israeli, leaders from the four main warlike democracies. Also I wanted a chronological progression. One of the things that struck me is that there were links. For example, Clemenceau was a tremendous admirer of Lincoln and came to the United States at the very end of the Civil War.
Winston Churchill, who was a tremendous admirer of Clemenceau, paid the great French leader the ultimate compliment of stealing some of his better lines, translating them into English and using them in speeches. BenGurion, who had been in London during the blitz, was a tremendous admirer of Churchill and thought so much of Lincoln that he had a picture of the Great Emancipator hanging in his home.
Q: Why is wartime dialogue between civilian and military leaders of such great importance in your view?
A: First, war ends up being highly political in one way or another, and it is very hard to separate out what's military and what is political. All kinds of little military actions can have large political consequences.
Let's take a current example. Someone did not give an order to send an infantry company to protect the antiquities museum in Baghdad. In retrospect, that was a very serious mistake. Somebody should have done that.
A major symbol of Iraq's character and importance was wrecked because we didn't intervene to stop this looting. So there you have a little military decision, something easily left undone in the heat of battle, with very large political consequences.
That's one thing to remember about the importance of a good civil-military dialogue. Another is that the military is a very peculiar profession.
I should be very clear: The American military is highly professional in its attitudes and outlook, in the amount of time and attention it devotes to education and training, and in its level of skills both technical and organizational. But the fact remains that the military is a very peculiar profession in that, thankfully, wars are very rare and people in the military experience them at different levels at different times in their military careers. Compare the implications to another life-and-death profession.
Say a physician is doing brain surgery at the same level of risk. He's operating on different patients, but he's still doing the same old brain surgery. A military professional, on the other hand, finds himself in the position of a brain surgeon who does brain surgery only every 10 years and with instruments that may have changed radically. So the analogy between the two professions breaks down. And it breaks down in another way. In his first operation, the military professional may have been a very junior officer with very limited responsibilities. Years later, he's a midlevel staff officer, and maybe 10 years after that he's somebody in charge. The world looks very different from those different perspectives.
And, on top of the infrequency of wars and the varied wartime experiences of those sent to fight them, you have the fact that military professionals can disagree with one another profoundly, something I think is a lot less true in the case of medicine, where there tend to be normative protocols for treatment.
For all these reasons, the dialogue between civilians and the military is essential to war fighting.
Q: Essential, indeed. You argue that the civil-military dialogue never really developed during the Vietnam War and that this is one of the reasons the war ended badly for the United States. How was it that the dialogue failed to take place?
A: My feeling is that there are many ways in which [President Lyndon] Johnson and [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara evaded their responsibilities as wartime leaders. McNamara admits in his memoir that, Yes, as a matter of fact, I didn't ask a lot of the hard questions that should have been asked about why we were doing what we were doing in Vietnam.
A lot of it had to do with the character of Johnson. He was focused on his domestic agenda. Johnson's main concern was, How do I prevent this [war] from screwing up the Great Society? How do I make sure I don't turn Gen. William Westmoreland [the American commander in South Vietnam] into a Douglas MacArthur?
You certainly do not have the unequal dialogue going on here. They had William Westmoreland in command for about four-and-one-half years. Most historians will say that Westmoreland was not the guy to run that war, yet he's in for four-and-one-half years. And it was not until well into the war that [the Johnson administration] has the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff participating in the Tuesday luncheons at which the president and his team talk about Vietnam! There is something just breathtaking about that!
Also there was an underlying tension between McNamara and the chiefs which was dysfunctional. One very important fact about the civil-military relationship is that it can be a tense and very difficult relationship, but it has to be one of mutual respect. If you have this you can put up with tantrums and fits and harsh disagreement, but it will work. If there is not mutual respect, then you've got real trouble.
Q: How did the George W. Bush administration fare during the war with Iraq when it came to the civilian and military dialogue?
A: As a historian, I'm here to tell you that I have a healthy respect for all we don't yet know what we don't know abut the origins of the plan, what we don't know about Donald Rumsfeld, who I think is the key figure, and what we don't know about the president and the vice president, Dick Cheney, and the roles they played in the development of the plan.
What did Rumsfeld really think of Gen. Tommy Franks? Where did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff fit into the planning and execution? We may not know for years, if ever. But that said, if I can believe what I see in the media and I take it all with a grain of salt it appears that Rumsfeld is a very active secretary of defense, rather along the lines essential for a good civil-miliary dialogue: pushing, probing, querying. But not, I think, dictating in detail what the military should do.
The Bush administration was engaged in what was a very intensive dialogue with senior military leadership, and I think that was right. You certainly get the strong sense that some key decisions were political and that Bush made them the decision, for example, to begin the war with that aerial attack on Saddam's bunker.
Q: You referred to "World War IV" in a November 2001 Wall Street Journal column. World Wars I and II we know about. World War III was the Cold War. What is World War IV?
A: I did that tongue-in-cheek as a way of getting people to think about the current conflict as something bigger than the Afghanistan war. It's something that could last a long time.
I think Iraq is part of that overall conflict in several ways. First, it's part of the post-9/11 sensibility. The one thing neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to admit is that the war in which we just engaged represents the logical continuation of Clinton administration policy. By 1998 the Clinton administration was saying Saddam Hussein was out to get weapons of mass destruction, that this would be a disaster and that we had to get rid of him.
After the attacks of 9/11 changed national sensibilities, the Bush administration went out and did it. Although the war was primarily about the menace of the regime there is hope that this victory will help change some of the underlying circumstances that gave rise to the events of Sept. 11.
Q: What are some of the underlying circumstances that may be changed as a result of the war?
A: It may be that this war will allow us to get out of Saudi Arabia, for example. We're there because of Saddam Hussein. If we go back to Osama bin Laden's February 1998 platform, what's the first thing that's bothering him? That U.S. forces are on the holy ground of Saudi Arabia. We should take that stuff seriously.
And I think there are likely to be long-term consequences of the war. If we can help create in Iraq a responsible government, a continuing better place from the point of civil liberties and just government, that would be a huge step forward and a great example. The victory already is beginning to create a certain kind of conversation that may yield something positive.
Q: Does George W. Bush rank up there with Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion as a wartime leader?
A: He is an authentically modest man, and I don't think he would claim to be in that league. But I give him pretty high marks, first and foremost for sheer determination. That's a very important characteristic, and all four of them had it. All four had some very, very dark moments. Each of these men was, in some measure, melancholic. All of them persevered.
Bush has been tested since 9/11 and has persevered despite internal opposition. All of these men faced internal opposition. All of them persisted, too, in the face of a difficult international diplomatic environment. Bush has done that as well.
I think President Bush's most authentic and important characteristic is his faith, and I think that has had a profound impact.
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Personal Bio
Currently: Professor and director of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies [SAIS] of the Johns Hopkins University; author, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime.
Positions held: 1982-85, assistant professor of government and assistant dean, Harvard College; 1985, member of Strategy Department, U.S. Naval War College; February 1990, joined policy-planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Books: Commandos and Politicians [1978]; Citizens and Soldiers [1985]; coauthor, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War [1990]; and other books.
Other achievements: Founding director, Center for Strategic Education, a curriculum-development and university teacher-training program at SAIS; 1993 recipient of the U.S. Air Force's highest civilian decoration.
Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight magazine.
by Editor on May 30, 2003 at 3:34 PM