Eliot Cohen: A Time for Humility

[question everything]

A Time for Humility

By ELIOT A. COHEN
January 31, 2005; Page A18

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The war has achieved important results, wrongly minimized or dismissed by the administration's critics. But this is not, alas, the whole story. For us too the Iraq elections provide an opportunity, more proper than arbitrary anniversaries, to reckon with our failures as well as our achievements. If the war has had its great successes, it has also had more than its share of bungles, evident in the chaos and suffering in Iraq, heavy loss of American life, and a battered reputation for the United States abroad. Bloody mistakes occur in all wars, as some point out -- an easy wisdom that flows most easily from those who have no loved ones in harm's way. Even such philosophers, however, should honor the 8,000 families of dead and wounded American soldiers by facing the unpleasant truths, because even if blunders characterize all wars, blunders they remain.

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Before the war reasonable people disagreed about these arguments for war; they still do. But good idea or bad, the handling of the war has made an admittedly risky strategy far more precarious and costly than it need have been. Some of those failures persist, and others could recur all too easily. They fall into two classes:

The first consists of waging war with the mentality and practices of peace. Because we choose to cut taxes in wartime, we have a ballooning deficit; because we have a ballooning deficit we cannot expand the active-duty military on a permanent basis; because we cannot expand the active-duty military we call up hundreds of thousands of reservists to fight an optional war half a world away, sending part-time soldiers -- some ready for this mission, others not -- off for a year of combating guerrillas in a limited war, a concept at odds with all previous notions of what citizen-soldiers do. Because we cannot substantially increase the defense budget we may fail to replace equipment worn down by months of active service in a harsh climate, and we have even begun to drain our military-school system of leaders. Signs of strain appear in retention rates; but it becomes most clear, if you talk to soldiers, in the disgust and anger of the Army's best mid-level leaders, and in the institutional leukemia that has begun to sap the vitality of a military educational system that was once, deservedly, the pride of our armed forces.

In past conflicts, civilian and military leaders ruthlessly pruned the ranks of generals who though competent in peace, could not adapt to the novel conditions of war. They promoted rapidly the lieutenant colonels and colonels who could. George Marshall did this in World War II, and pillars of the old Army like 62-year-old Hugh Drum gave way to hard 36-year-olds like James Gavin. A few happy but nonetheless regular promotions aside, this has not happened here. Nor is the issue military leadership alone: Ambassador Paul Bremer, an intelligent and self-sacrificing man, accepted the call to go to Iraq, with neither the time nor the authority to build a staff and a plan. Still, the Coalition Provisional Authority he ran was a disaster, a micromanaged American enterprise too often out of touch with Iraqi realities. The U.S. government that had not provided the structure needed to administer postwar Iraq would not admit his deficiencies and replace him. Instead, he, like George Tenet and Gen. Tommy Franks -- equally able and patriotic men, who also failed in key aspects of the Iraq war -- received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military philosopher, declared that statesmen and commanders must establish "the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor turning it into, something that is alien to its nature." Here came the second class of failures. For a very long time, the U.S. government would not even use the word insurgency. Until recently it insisted that we faced only 5,000 "former regime loyalists, jihadis, and released criminals." We have killed or captured more than three times as many, and yet the insurgency rages. In a war where, as one successful commander has put it, "dollars are bullets," bureaucrats spent months ponderously awarding giant contracts to multinational corporations that would hire expatriates from around the world, rather than Iraqis who could get angry young men off the street. In guerrilla war nothing matters more than raising and training indigenous forces; we passed that job off to Vinnell Corporation, and only belatedly realized that we needed our best general, supported by American soldiers and Marines, to do the job.

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Mr. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University.

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