WHEN THE HISTORY of the Second Gulf War comes to be written, its authors will have to look hard at a slim, scholarly volume about four dead white men, none of whom ever heard of Scud missiles or Saddam Hussein.
The book is called Supreme Command, and the most obvious reason why it is relevant to the storm gathering over Baghdad is that President Bush says he has been reading it.
“Here’s what I know,” says Dr Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University, who wrote it. “When it first came out in the US in June, the White House asked for three copies, one autographed to the President, one to Karl Rove, his political adviser, and one blank. And then in August, while I was on vacation up in the mountains of New Hampshire, (Bush) told the journalists that he was reading it. That’s all.”
It was enough. The book has since been falling out of briefcases all over Washington, even though, on the face of it, it has little to do with Iraq. It’s about Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion — one long chapter each — and it sets out to show how they prevailed as civilian leaders of democratic nations caught up in wars of national survival. The answer has a lot to do with their individual greatnesses (there is a passage on Churchill’s mastery of rhetoric in which you can practically hear Cohen’s throat tightening in admiration). But at its core there is one simple assertion: these men triumphed not by leaving wars to their generals but by making them their own. They set the goals, moulded the strategy, meddled constantly with tactics and hounded their men in uniform to distraction and, in many cases, to early retirement.
The argument has powerful detractors. An entire cadre of Churchill biographers believes, for example, that he was a winner despite his meddling, not because of it. But these are not the biographies by Bush’s bedside. He will have devoured the Cohen view because it is America’s uniformed military that has come closest over the past year to derailing his plan to reinvade Iraq. Ever since the focus of the War on Terror shifted from Kabul to Baghdad, serving and retired generals have warned against a new Desert Storm on the grounds that the US Armed Forces are already overstretched, that they see no clear exit strategy once in Iraq, and that they are ill-suited to the delicate task of nation-building in the heart of the Middle East should they be asked to stay there. What Cohen’s book tells Bush about these voices is: you should listen to them but you can ignore them if you like. You are the boss.
Less flatteringly, Supreme Command also tells Bush that his father erred disastrously by leaving the ending of the first Gulf War to Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf. Left to handle the timing, Powell ended it too soon. Left to negotiate the terms of the armistice, Schwarzkopf let Saddam’s Republican Guard escape to fight another day.
The implicit conclusion is that, yes, Saddam represents unfinished American business that a new US President with energy and backbone should not be scared of taking on, whatever his risk-averse commanders say. “I think it was Lord Salisbury,” Cohen muses, “who said: ‘If you ask the generals, nothing is safe’.”
For those inclined to see the book as a goad to war, however, there is a problem. “Bush is not Churchill. No. Of course not.” Cohen cuts in to get this out of the way before it has a chance to dominate the interview, because his book has a way of highlighting Bush’s shortcomings simply by itemising its subjects’ strengths. It rhapsodises about the “probing searchlight” of Churchill’s incessant memoranda to subordinates; about his “massive common sense”, wide reading, masterful oratory and deep experience of war. If Bush lacks most of these, as even his strongest supporters concede, is he the right man to second-guess his generals? Or is he heading for a berth in later editions of Cohen’s book in the cautionary chapter entitled: “Leadership without genius” — a chapter largely about Lyndon Johnson and the humiliations of Vietnam?
Cohen’s answer is long, careful and fascinating. It gives a glimpse of an extraordinary, vaunting optimism that is driving White House policy on Iraq as much as fear of weapons of mass destruction, yet dare not speak its name.
Bush may not have a Churchillian grasp of the “big picture”, he begins, but “bear in mind he’s surrounded by an awful lot of others who are big-picture people — Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfovitz (deputy defence secretary) — and I think there is an overall picture these folks have that if you overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, in addition to averting some potentially disastrous things — an Iraqi nuclear weapon, Iraqi biologicals — there are a load of second and third-order consequences which will be beneficial.”
Such as? “First, it allows us to get out of Saudi Arabia, and it’s not good to have a military presence there because if you look at some of bin Laden’s writings, the first thing that drives him nuts is the presence of the infidels in Saudi Arabia. The second thing that drives him crazy is the suffering of the Iraqi people. Saddam imposed it but frankly we were part of that too. You then take a step back and say that Jordan is much better off if it has a friendly, relatively modern, relatively pro-American state to its east, rather than (Saddam’s) Iraq. Syria becomes a lot more manageable, life may get easier for the Turks and finally the hope would be for some helpful effect on what goes on in Iran.”
Cohen pauses. “No one has said it but I think that is the view in the White House. To the extent that there is a larger picture, that’s the larger picture.”
Why has no one said it? “I think it would be viewed by our allies as utopian or megalomaniacal or imperialistic.”
Cohen is intensely wary of being seen as a warmonger. When a BBC interviewer introduced him as such in almost as many words, he told her: “Ma’am, I don’t think you’ve read the dust jacket, let alone the book.” And yet Cohen is more parti pris than his geniality — and fondness for bow ties and circumlocution — might suggest. He is wary of the American military’s dabbling in geopolitics without sufficient expertise, one result of which, he says, is its possibly naive assumption that the “Arab street” would erupt in protest if America ousted Saddam. He is angry with Clinton for having ceded to the military so much control over their own affairs in the 1990s. And he is very close to the current administration: on first-name terms with Rice, the President’s national security adviser; friends with her deputy, Stephen Hadley; and a not-infrequent sounding-board for Wolfovitz, Washington’s chief hawk. No wonder he will be giving a speech at the White House next month.
The speech will be about the book, he says, not policy, yet the difference between the two may well be academic.
Supreme Command, by Dr Eliot Cohen, is published by Simon and Schuster at £17.99. Available from Times Books Direct (0870 1608080) for £14.39 plus £1.95 p&p
