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Lincoln, Churchill, Bush ? - -

By Thomas Donnelly

Lincoln, Churchill, Bush?
Of the president’s strengths and weaknesses as supreme commander

THOMAS DONNELLY

During his August vacation at his Texas ranch in 2002, George W. Bush was said to be spending the hours not spent cutting brush immersed in Eliot A. Cohen’s Supreme Command. The book presents an argument about the proper course of civil-military relations together with four case studies of the masters of wartime leadership: Lincoln, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Ben-Gurion. Whatever wisdom the president may have extracted from his studies, the effort suggests that, during the summer before the invasion of Iraq, he intuited the challenges he would face and set a high standard for meeting them.

Perhaps even this never-look-back man would acknowledge that he has fallen short of the bar he seemed to set. But a summary judgment of George W. Bush as supreme commander is less informative than an examination of the reasons things didn’t work out as planned. It is too early to undertake a thorough assessment of Bush’s performance, but perhaps we can begin to distinguish the troubles of the man from the troubles of his times.

BEFORE 9/11
The first step away from the heat and toward the light is to recover some sense of the context surrounding the events of the Bush years. The attacks of September 11, 2001, may not have “changed everything,” but they surely called into question the conventional wisdom about international relations. Bush’s presidential candidacy was very much a product of the 1990s zeitgeist. Conservatives have never been able to get the hang of post-historical “flat world” rhetoric, but Bush’s “Vulcans” — the foreign-policy advisory team he assembled for his 2000 run — did believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union had resulted in a “strategic pause,” possibly lasting several decades. Perceiving international politics as a great-power struggle, Bush’s inner circle focused on the rivalry with China. During the 2000 campaign, Candidate Bush spoke of China as a “strategic competitor” — distancing himself from the Clinton administration’s policy of promoting a “strategic partnership” with Beijing — and described a transformation of U.S. military forces that would exploit technology to discourage the People’s Liberation Army from accelerating an arms race it could not hope to win.

The new administration’s first test came in April 2001, when a Chinese fighter collided with a U.S. EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft. The Chinese MiG crashed, and the Navy surveillance plane was forced to land on Hainan Island, where it and its crew were seized, provoking a hostage standoff that caught Bush and his lieutenants flat-footed. The bellicose rhetoric coming out of Beijing did not follow the script: The Chinese seemed ready for confrontation immediately, not in the distant future, and what transpired was not a coldly calculated long-term strategic competition but an immediate crisis. The episode uncovered rifts in the senior Bush team. Neither Bush nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was able to fashion a decisive policy. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld agitated for a muscular response, but in the end Bush turned to Secretary of State Colin Powell to resolve the problem diplomatically. Bush acted as the “decider,” choosing rather than leading.

For his part, Rumsfeld embraced the project of defense transformation as his top job. From the moment he assumed office, he plainly meant to reform an entrenched military bureaucracy resistant to change. He regarded the Army as the epitome of Cold War irrelevance and planned to reduce its numbers by 15 to 20 percent. His defense transformation was to take the form of a corporate restructuring of the Pentagon, substituting capital for labor and divesting the military of outmoded missions. Portending troubles to come, Rumsfeld seemed to consider this transformation to be the military’s main mission, rather than a means to military ends.

TOPPLING THE TALIBAN

George Bush saw that the 9/11 attacks were acts of war. “Global War on Terror” is now so much a part of our vocabulary that we forget how long it took to recognize that we were at war. Despite the Khobar Towers bombing, the attacks on American embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole, and the repeated war declarations of Osama bin Laden, the Clinton administration was paralyzed in its response, first treating terrorism as a job for law enforcement, then responding with irresolute military action. We now see jihadi groups through Bush’s eyes: as ruthless and implacable enemies.

We “struck” into Afghanistan — even today our action is seldom described as an invasion. To a significant degree, this reflects Rumsfeld’s continuing influence. The image of special-operations forces on horseback, calling in satellite-guided bombs, remains seductive. And, to be sure, the initial invasion succeeded beyond the imagining of even the transformation enthusiasts. U.S. forces deployed rapidly to the far side of the world, fought a creative campaign, and toppled the Taliban in weeks. The president’s popularity soared, and the bitter partisan divisions of the 2000 election were submerged, for a time, as Democrats rallied behind the victorious commander-in-chief. The crusty defense secretary became the far-seeing prophet of a new way of war. Americans were overwhelmingly prepared to follow where Bush might lead.

Matthew Cavanaugh/UPI
The conventional wisdom is that, at this fraught moment, Bush, Dick Cheney, and their shadowy neoconservative cabal turned away from the real enemy and indulged their obsession with Iraq. But the truth is that once the Taliban had dispersed and al-Qaeda’s leadership had fled to Pakistan, it was far from clear what the next step ought to be. The invasion removed any immediate prospect that Afghanistan would again become the large-scale base for al-Qaeda that it had been in 2001. By early 2002, Bush had good reason to conclude that the war in Afghanistan, at least as he and his advisers understood it, had been won.

INTO IRAQ
The most lasting effect of Bush’s presidency probably will be his reframing of American strategy in the Islamic world. At some point in 2002, the Global War on Terror evolved into the Long War, at once a larger and a more specific project: the long-term political transformation of the greater Middle East, particularly its Arab heartland. To take this on was an audacious decision, and it is not clear how that decision was made or how rigorous the internal administration debate was. The most unfortunate result of the fixation on the question of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was to obscure this larger and, it is now clear, more consequential objective.

The 9/11 attacks made it incontestable that the traditional U.S. strategy in the Middle East, built upon devil’s bargains with oil princes, autocrats, and tyrants, was a shambles. To paraphrase the president, the United States had subordinated the cause of liberty in pursuit of stability but had realized neither. Bush began the attempt at regime change with the march to Baghdad, but his larger goal lay beyond. It is uncertain whether that greater object will be achieved, but the prospects appear far brighter now than they did in 2006. Whether progress since then outweighs the failures that immediately followed the invasion is an even more uncertain calculation. The errors in the conduct of the Iraq War already have filled many books, but the great puzzle of the Bush presidency remains the president’s c


    
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