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Charge on Baghdad, cry the Chicken
Hawks
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- A high-ranking State Department official was speaking
to a room full of senior military officers last month
when he cracked, "There's more combat experience on the
seventh floor of the State Department than in the entire
Office of the Secretary of Defense."
According
to an eyewitness who recounted the incident to Chris
Nelson, publisher of the Nelson Report, a private
newsletter that circulates to embassies and Capitol Hill
offices, "The remark generated riotous applause."
The anecdote illustrates what some are now
calling the "Chicken Hawk" factor, which could play an
important role in the increasingly intense and
personalized debate over the Bush administration's push
toward war with Iraq. Maureen Dowd raised this issue
last week in her New York Times column entitled "Coup de
Crawford", in which she noted that those who were
huddling at Bush's ranch planning war against Iraq were
mostly civilians with no wartime experience.
"We
used to worry about a military coup against civilian
authority. Now we worry about a civilian coup against
military authority," she pointedly observed.
Indeed, the fact that the greatest opposition to
the war is centered in the military brass, the source of
the most damaging leaks of the administration's battle
plans - as well as in the upper reaches of the State
Department and among the foreign policy veterans of the
first Bush administration - has made the hawks extremely
sensitive to the question of their own military service
or, rather, lack of it.
"It is interesting to me
that many of those who want to rush this country into
war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know
anything about war," observed Senator Chuck Hagel of
Nebraska, a Republican Vietnam veteran whose skepticism
about an Iraqi adventure has made him persona non grata
to the neoconservatives leading the charge.
According to the New Hampshire Gazette, which
maintains a database on the subject, this "is a term
often applied to public persons - generally male - who
(1) Tend to advocate … military solutions to political
problems and who have personally (2) Declined to take
advantage of a significant opportunity to serve in
uniform during wartime."
That description
applies to most senior administration officials in their
fifties who were subject to the military draft during
the Vietnam War. George W Bush himself, instead of being
drafted for the war, received a posting to the Texas
National Guard. It was the kind of dodge from military
service that, according to Secretary of State and former
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell's memoirs,
was generally reserved for "the sons of the powerful".
Cheney, however, avoided the uniform altogether,
insisting to one inquiring reporter that he "had other
priorities in the 1960s than military service".
Rumsfeld, the other leading cabinet hawk, flew navy jets
between the Korean and Vietnam wars but saw no combat.
Indeed, the only cabinet member with combat experience
is Powell.
The record at the sub-cabinet level
is worse. Cheney's hawkish and powerful chief of staff,
I Lewis Libby, spent the Vietnam War at Yale and
Columbia universities. Rumsfeld's top deputies in the
same age group - Paul Wolfowitz and Peter Rodman - were
similarly engaged, while Dougas Feith, the Pentagon's
most enthusiastic war booster, turned 18 only after the
draft ended but then opted for law school.
Other
major administration hawks - such as Elliott Abrams on
the National Security Council staff and Under Secretary
of State for Arms Control and International Strategy
John Bolton - also avoided military service during the
height of the Vietnam War, reportedly due to medical
problems.
Even more remarkable, the major
agitators for war outside the administration also lack
direct military experience. Of the 32 prominent signers
of a now-famous September 20 open letter from the
Project for the New America Century urging Bush to
include Iraq (as well as Syria, Lebanon, Iran and the
Palestinian Authority) as a target in the war on
terrorism, only three have ever donned a uniform.
Indeed, one of the key members of that group,
Richard Perle, chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy
Board and one of the most visible advocates of military
action to oust Saddam Hussein, spent Vietnam at the
University of Chicago (alongside Wolfowitz) and later
joined the staff of Senator Henry Jackson, virtually the
last Democrat in the Senate to support that war.
Because of his visibility and reputation as the
hub of a pro-Likud network of national security experts
and media commentators, Perle was the target of a
particularly sharp remark by Hagel, one of several
prominent lawmakers decorated for their Vietnam service
who oppose the rush to war. "Maybe Mr Perle would like
to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad,"
he said recently, earning him an outraged rebuke in a
Wall Street Journal editorial.
"They come at
it," Hagel said of the Chicken Hawks, "from an
intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or
foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown
off. I try to speak for those ghosts of the pasts a
little."
Another highly visible hyper-hawk and
Perle protege, Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for
Security Policy, also avoided military service during
Vietnam. Powell's chief deputy, Richard Armitage, a US
Naval Academy graduate who served in Vietnam, has
reportedly referred to Gaffney, as well as other members
of the war party who dodged the draft, as a "pissant".
"It's pretty interesting that all the generals
see it the same way, and all the others who have never
fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another,"
noted retired General Anthony Zinni, former chief of the
Central Command, which includes the Gulf region, just
last week. Gulf War hero retired General Norman
Schwarzkopf has also expressed strong doubts about a new
war.
It is not so much that they believe Iraq
represents a serious threat to US military might,
although they have openly scorned the notion put forward
by Perle and another influential hawk close to Rumsfeld,
Kenneth Adelman, that a military campaign would be a
"cakewalk". Rather, they are mainly worried about the
war's aftermath and the degree to which it will burden
the military with an impossible political task with no
clear exit. "Do we really want to occupy Iraq for the
next 30 years?" asked former navy secretary and Vietnam
veteran James Webb in a Washington Post column
Wednesday.
The Chicken Hawks have already begun
a counterattack, arguing, as did former French statesman
Georges Clemenceau, that "war is too important to be
left to the generals". Peter Beinert, the editor of The
New Republic, an influential neo-conservative weekly,
argued that "over and over during the 90s, the generals
with firsthand battlefield experience guessed wrong -
and the civilians without it guessed right - about what
would happen when the United States went to war". He
singled out Powell for supporting a "premature" end to
the Gulf War and to opposing US intervention in Bosnia.
Beinert argued that civilians better understood
the political context for both wars and that the brass
has tended to overestimate the enemy since the Vietnam
War.
Defense analyst Eliot Cohen, who proudly
notes that he served as an officer in the Army Reserve,
is one of the leading proponents of an attack on Iraq
and an embrace of a new militarism in US foreign policy.
In a Washington Post op-ed titled "Hunting Chicken
Hawks", he makes the case that civilian strategists like
himself should be the ones shaping US military
interventionism. At a time when the moderate
multilateralists and realists in the Republican camp are
already balking at the crusading mentality of the
administration's neo-conservative strategists, Cohen's
comments may serve to push US veterans toward the
"justice not war" camp on the center and left.
From Cohen's perch at Harvard, he observes, "The
expertise of generals lies chiefly in the operational,
not the strategic sphere - how to wage war, not whether
it should be fought." What's more, "There is no evidence
that generals as a class make wiser national security
policy makers than civilians." And when it comes to any
decision to wage war, "Being a veteran is no guarantee
of strategic wisdom" and as a consequence "in matters of
war and peace veterans should receive no special
consideration for their views."
The Chicken
Hawks are warning the uniformed military to keep their
reservations to themselves. Eliot Cohen, an academic
close to Perle and one of the signers of the influential
Project for a New American Century document outlining a
US supremacy agenda, made that point in a Wall Street
Journal column two weeks ago titled "Generals,
Politicians and Iraq" in which he reminded the brass of
their "obligation to present their views with utter
honesty in private, but to maintain silence in public".
The central message of Cohen's latest book,
Supreme Command, stresses the importance of
civilian supremacy in wartime and argues that the
military brass are habitually over-cautious. Cohen's
fellow hawks are making much of the fact that Bush told
reporters during his summer vacation in Texas that he
was reading the book.
(Inter Press Service)
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