Rumsfeld Revisited

There's an excellent debate on civil-military relations in the Bush administration in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

The exchange covers Michael Desch's earlier article on the administration, "Bush and the Generals," which argued that normal tensions between civilian policymakers and the military's general staff were exacerbated by the adminstration ideological campaign to transform the military and privilege civilian battle judgements over that of the uniformed personnel.

A noteworthy segment in the current exchange is Mackubin Thomas Owen's assessment of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's tenure. Owen's generally optimistic on the efficacy of civilian leadership; he looks at a number of historical examples, bringing his case up to the current administration:

In the case of Rumsfeld, it is clear that he was guilty of errors of judgment regarding the conduct of the Iraq war. However, as case after case makes clear, Rumsfeld's critics were no more prescient than he. Rumsfeld failed to foresee the insurgency and the shift from conventional to guerrilla war, but so did his critics in the uniformed services. The army's official historian of the campaign has placed the blame for this failure squarely on the army. "Reluctance in even defining the situation," the historian writes, "is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissonance on the part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it."

Critics also charge Rumsfeld's Pentagon with shortchanging the troops in Iraq -- by, for example, failing to provide them with armored Humvees. But a review of army budget submissions even after the war had turned into an insurgency reveals that the service's priority was to acquire big-ticket items. It was only after the danger of improvised explosive devices became obvious that the army began to push for supplemental spending to "up-armor" the utility vehicles.

And although it is true that Rumsfeld downplayed postconflict stabilization operations, it is also true that he was merely ratifying the preferences of the uniformed military, which has a cultural aversion to such operations. The real villain in this case is the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine -- a set of principles long internalized by the U.S. military emphasizing the requirement for an "exit strategy." When generals are thinking about an exit strategy, they are not thinking about "war termination" -- how to convert military success into political success.

In retrospect, it is easy to criticize Rumsfeld for pushing General Tommy Franks, the combatant commander, to develop a plan for a force smaller than the one called for in earlier plans, as well as for his interference with the time-phased force and deployment list (TPFDL), which lays out the schedule for deploying forces. But that charge focuses on the consequences of the chosen path (attacking earlier with a smaller force) while ignoring potential drawbacks of the alternative -- for example, that taking the time to build up a larger force would have meant losing the chance for surprise.

The debate over the size of the invasion force must also be understood in the context of the state of civil-military relations at the end of Clinton's presidency. Rumsfeld was correct that civilian control of the military had eroded during the Clinton years. When the army did not want to do something -- as in the Balkans in the 1990s -- it would simply overstate the force requirements: "The answer is 350,000 soldiers. What's the question?" Accordingly, Rumsfeld was inclined to interpret the army's call for a larger force as another case of foot-dragging. In retrospect, Rumsfeld's decision not to deploy the First Cavalry Division was a mistake, but at the time it was not unreasonable to argue that the TPFDL (like the "two major theater war" planning metric) had become little more than a bureaucratic tool that the services used to protect their share of the defense budget.

Uniformed officers have an obligation to stand up to civilian leaders when they think a policy is flawed. They must convey their concerns to civilian policymakers forcefully and truthfully. If they believe the door is closed to them at the Pentagon or the White House, they also have access to Congress. But the U.S. tradition of civil-military relations requires that they not engage in public debate over matters of foreign policy, including the decision to go to war. And once a policy decision is made, soldiers are obligated to carry it out to the best of their abilities, whether their advice has been heeded or not.

Read the whole thing.

For my earlier post on Desch's "Bush and the Generals, click here.

While I admire Desch's political science expertise, I'm not convinced his analysis of the Bush administration is free of hostily to the president's neoconservative foreign policy project.

Neoconservativism as Scourge of the Left

This morning's post over at Andrew Sullivan's blog asked "What Maketh a Neo-con?" Here's the main passage:

Today, it seems that a "neo-con" (at least in the fevered imaginations of the net-left) is someone who frequently calls attention to the unprovoked aggression of despotic regimes (e.g. Iran and Syria), the violation of human rights in other countries, and advocates the moral superiority of democratic countries in international affairs. A "neo-con" is now anyone who dares make an issue out of the aggressions and inhumanity of despotisms without explaining them away, and for advocating America do something about these aggressions and inhumanities. It is for this reason that so many on the left attacked Bayard Rustin in the 1970's and 1980's when, in addition to speaking out about racial injustices in the United States and condemning Reaganomics, he also spoke out, vociferously, against the PLO, Robert Mugabe, and the Sandinistas. But Rustin was hardly a proper neo-conservative, even if he happened to write the occasional article for Commentary and helped found the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. And so, simply for stating uncomfortable realities about the world, someone is called a "neocon" (which in today's political discourse--not just left-wing discourse--is akin to labeling someone a "pinko" in the 1950's) and readily dismissed.

I don't know if that last comparison is apt. "Pinkos" in the 1950s were those considered in alliance with the forces of Soviet totalitarianism. Those on the right who opposed these fellow travellers rightly warned against any domestic support for the Evil Empire's ideological and strategic hegemonic project.

Today, neoconservatives support the expansion of democracy around the world, and the rollback of Islamofascism's threatening advance against the developing world's outposts of freedom.

But what really is a "neoconservative"? I think about this a lot, because while I'm Burkean in my basic ideological affinities for traditional culture and values, I firmly believe that America has a mission in the world to advance freedom and justice. Readers here occasionally point out the inconsistency of holding both Burkean and neoconservative positions simultaneously.

But I don't worry too much about it, particularly if one sees Burkean conservativism as a cover for the most paleoconservative isolationism imaginable. If that's what Burke's come to stand for today, I'd come down on the neoconservative side, if I had to take my pick.

Mark Gerston, in his edited volume, The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader, notes that neoconservativism starts with Burkean essentialism, but it depart from Burkeanism's more reactionary inclinations:

In 1952, the sociologist Karl Mannheim wrote, "Conservativism arises as a counter-movement in conscious opposition to the highly organized, coherent, and systematic 'progressive' movement." From Edmund Burke to the present, systematic conservative theory tends to find much of its motivating impulse in critique. True to Mannheim's characterization, neoconservatism, too, has formulated its political positions in response to ideas generated by the left. From the early 1950s to the present day, neoconservatives have castigated liberalism for ignorance of the complexity of social action and the embedded wisdom in human systems, a lack of resolve in confronting evil, a laissez-faire attitude toward human virture, and an unwillingness to defend the critical ideas of American civilization from its discontents. Practically every neconservative argument and position can be seen as a reaction to one of the central ideas of liberalism.

And this is why the radical left mounts its frenzied campaign of demonization against the "neoconazis" in the Bush administration. Today's ideological battles center on competing visions of goodness in the world. For Americans who rightly see the forces of Islamic fundamentalism as the greatest threat to civilization since the Soviet empire, the hard-left represents a fifth column determined to undermine America's mission and values from within.

Much of the debate tends to caricature the views of those on both sides. All of those who support the global war on terror are not crazed Wolfowitz wannabes dead set on preventive airstrikes against Iran's nuclear program. Conversely, all of those troubled by the costs of America's liberation of Iraq - and especially the significant loss of human life on all sides - are not Chomskyite revolutionaries hellbent on the destruction of the United States and its purported project of global imperial expansion.

Yet, there are those who on the left would destroy America and the values of goodness for which she stands. Neoconservative belief - with its stress on anti-authoritarianism, domestic institutions of public order, personal propriety and responsibility - stands against such nihilism and deathlike ideology.

I gladly embrace the neoconservative label. I've been "Radicalized by the Radicals." I believe that if neoconservativism forms the locus of resistance against the forces now intending to destroy the United States, it's an ideational holding ground for the good, to which more right thinking peope will gravitate to some degree, no matter how hard the antiwar hordes try to discredit it.