This essay is the tenth in a series being published in
successive issues of The American Spectator under the
general title, “The Pursuit of Liberty: Can the Ideals That Made
America Great Provide a Model for the World?”
(Also in The American Spectator’s Pursuit of
Liberty series: Daniel Johnson’s “The Storks Are Landing,” Fouad Ajami’s “Liberty for Strangers,” Natan Sharansky and Rod
Dermer’s “The Case for Freedom,” and Michael Novak’s “The Ebb and Flow of Global Liberty.” To read the first
five essays in the series, please click here.)
Has a grand tradition of “military liberalism” come
to a dead end in Iraq?
I. Distrusting the Military
THE COMPLEX AND SOMEWHAT ill-defined relationship between the
military establishment and constitutional government is a subject
that has made many Americans uncomfortable, especially in the
modern era when the United States has assumed a leadership role in
world affairs. American Cold War era culture, after all, cautioned
us about the intrinsic anti-democratic nature of top-ranking
military officers, whether in cinematic portrayals like Seven
Days in May or Doctor Strangelove or the very real
inflammatory politicking of retired generals like Douglas
MacArthur, Curtis LeMay, or Edwin Walker.
In reaction to these Cold War and Vietnam-era fears, scholars
such as Samuel P. Huntington (The Soldier and the State)
and, more recently, Eliot Cohen (Supreme Command) have
written insightfully about the proper relationship between civilian
and military authorities in a constitutional democracy like ours.
These scholars generally agree that the delicate balance was
sometimes upset in our past wars when politicians did not have much
knowledge about military affairs. Sometimes, out of insecurity,
they blustered and bullied officers, or at other times, in
recognition of their own ignorance, civilian leaders ceded too much
control to the Pentagon.
Under the Clinton administration it was felt that an
increasingly alienated military exercised too much autonomy,
whether in lecturing civilian authorities that gays simply would
not work as fully accepted members of the armed forces or in
voicing strong initial opposition to the prospect of humanitarian
intervention in the Balkans. Militaries for their part understand
that during “peace-keeping” exercises the rules of engagement
change, the cameras intrude, and they are asked to assume civilian
roles where their target profile increases, while their ability to
fight back without restrictions is checked.
During the current Bush presidency, by contrast, the charge was
often just the opposite: a compliant Pentagon had been bullied by
its civilian overseers into keeping quiet about doubts over the
feasibility of neoconservative nation-building. In fact, in 2006 we
witnessed a “revolt of the generals” against civilian leadership of
the Pentagon. Top brass came forward out of recent retirement to
lambaste Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the entire
civilian conduct of the war in Iraq. They complained that there had
been too much micromanagement of the war, too many policy demands
placed on a military that was stretched too thin to carry such
burdens, and too much utopian ideology guiding the conduct of the
war at the expense of realistic judgments of what in fact was
possible.
This insurrection of top retired officers was not quite
unprecedented, except in the left’s sudden muted silence in
response to this rare emergence of like-minded critics of the
policy in Iraq. Instead, it was more reminiscent of an earlier
“revolt of the admirals” in 1949-50. At that time, in the early
years of the Cold War, threatened postwar cutbacks in naval
operations led to a similar expression of public outrage by
admirals against their civilian overseers. The controversy brought
down Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and led to firings and
resignations of top military officers.
Why do democratic societies perennially worry about their own
military’s periodic objections to civilian oversight and larger
liberal values? Why, often in response, do military leaders
conclude that they are either misunderstood or manipulated by
civilian authorities whom they regard as naive or ignorant about
military affairs?
IT IS A FACT WORTH REMEMBERING that the armed forces are
inherently hierarchical organizations based on rank and the chain
of command. There is no opportunity in military units for decision
by majority vote when war begins. Once bullets fly, soldiers can
ill afford to debate the wisdom of assaulting the next hill. They
cannot worry about the “fairness” of a brilliant glib private
having no influence in the decisions taken by an obtuse or
blockheaded commanding officer.
Impatience, resolve, audacity — these necessary military traits
are not necessarily those that democratic legislators and
bureaucrats prize. Most politicians loathe a loud-mouthed George S.
Patton in peacetime as much as they hunt out his swashbuckling
style in time of war.
Sometimes the voting public suspects that professional soldiers
like violence and killing, or at least far more than civilians do.
And supposed sheep always worry about giving orders to hungry
wolves. One needs only to read the sad letters of poor Cicero to
see how in his arrogance he fatally misjudged entirely the military
minds of an Augustus or Antony. Civilian overseers in France and
later in Germany sought to solve emerging problems by dispatching
Napoleon to Egypt or by throwing Hitler in jail but found that in
the end these steps were but the beginning and not the end of their
troubles. They had fatally misjudged these “troublemakers.”
Then there is the ever-present fear of militarism — that is,
the fear of the cult of arms that transcends the battlefield and
becomes an ideology that celebrates power, rigid discipline,
fanatical devotion to a cause. Indeed, this exaggerated dimension
of military life often draws the most zealous and dangerous of
characters into its orbit. These can be truly scary folks, these
Spartan krypteia, the Praetorian guards, or Hitler’s SS.
Such groups in the past have often interfered with or intervened in
politics under the posture of being models of rigorous asceticism
for the nation.
Anti-constitutional military coups, and not the idealistic
promotion of democracy and liberal values, thus seem the more
logical vice of military figures when they intrude into politics.
History in some sense is the record of supposedly sober soldiers
intervening in times of perceived social chaos to bring society a
needed dose of their own order and obedience.
That was the rationale in 44 B.C. when Caesar crossed the
Rubicon and put a formal end to the Roman Republic, Napoleon
dismissed the Directorate, Hitler ended the Weimar Republic, and
the 20th-century Latin America caudillos, Greek colonels, and
Middle Eastern Baathist and Nasserite officers staged their various
coups. Communist dictators in the Soviet Union and China inserted
their own commissars into their militaries to ensure that they were
perpetual advocates for Communist ideology and indoctrination, at
home and abroad.
