Policy Review - August & September 2011, No. 168

THE GAZA FLOTILLA AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

PETER BERKOWITZ

THE GOP’S 2012 FIELDJON DECKER

INVADING IRAN: LESSONS FROM IRAQLEIF ECKHOLM

THE PERFECT OFFICERHENRIK BERING

ALSO: ESSAYS AND REVIEWS BYANDREW STARK, CHARLES WOLF, JR.,SADANAND DHUME, JAMES BOWMAN

August & September 2011, No. 168, $6.00

POLICYReview

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POLICYReviewAUGUST & SEPTEMBER 2011, No. 168

Features3 THE GAZA FLOTILLA AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

Further politicization of the global legal systemPeter Berkowitz

23 THE GOP’S 2012 FIELDWho has the White House most worried?Jon Decker

35 INVADING IRAN: LESSONS FROM IRAQBefore the battles, what the U.S. must knowLeif Eckholm

51 THE PERFECT OFFICERMilitary brass throughout historyHenrik Bering

69 CONSERVATIVE HUMILITY, LIBERAL IRONYGetting to the bottom of two temperamentsAndrew Stark

Books81 ECONOMISTS AT WAR

Charles Wolf, Jr. on Keep From All Thoughtful Men: How U.S.Economists Won World War II by Jim Lacey

86 PAKISTAN: FRIEND OR FOE?Sadanand Dhume on Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven andDeadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of Global Jihad byBruce Riedel

91 COMPLICATED LOYALTYJames Bowman on Loyalty: The Vexing Virture by Eric Felten

A Publ icat ion of the Hoover Inst i tut ionstanford un ivers i ty

POLICYReview

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August & September 2011 , No. 168

EditorTod Lindberg

Research Fellow, Hoover Institution

Consulting EditorMary Eberstadt


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Office ManagerSharon Ragland

On may 31, 2010, in defense of a naval blockade imposed onthe Gaza Strip, Israel seized control of the Mavi Marmara ininternational waters, detained the passengers, and towed theship to the Israeli port city of Ashdod. During the previousthree days and without incident, Israel had boarded, inspect-

ed, and brought to Ashdod the other five ships that had set sail from Turkeyas part of the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla.” But on the Mavi Marmara, passen-gers wielding pipes, knives, and axes attacked Israeli commandos as theyrappelled from helicopters down to the ship’s deck. Nine passengers werekilled in the operation and several dozen were injured. Seven commandoswere injured as well.

The flotilla’s ostensible purpose was to bring humanitarian goods to thePalestinian population of Gaza. In fact, humanitarian goods had been arriv-ing in Gaza over land through Israel, and Israel had repeatedly volunteeredto deliver the flotilla’s humanitarian cargo through the established land

The Gaza Flotilla andInternational LawBy Peter Berkowitz

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the HooverInstitution, Stanford University, where he chairs the Koret-Taube Task Force onnational security and law. His writings are posted at www.PeterBerkowitz.com.

August & September 2011 3 Policy Review

4 Policy Review

crossings. The flotilla’s real and obvious goal was, as one of the organizersput it, “breaking Israel’s siege.”

The international outcry in response to Israel’s raid on the Mavi Marmarawas immediate. Little attention was given to the Turkish flotilla’s deliberateprovocation or to the possibility that Israel had acted ineptly or unwisely.The focus rather was on the accusation, often couched as a conclusion, thatIsrael had acted unlawfully.

On May 31, almost as soon as the news broke, un Secretary General BanKi Moon insisted that it was incumbent upon Israel to explain its actions tothe world: “I condemn this violence . . . it is vital that there is a full investi-gation to determine exactly how this bloodshed took place . . . I believe

Israel must urgently provide a full explanation.”Also on May 31, Richard Falk, un special rap-

porteur on the Situation of Human Rights in theOccupied Palestinian Territory, immediately pro-nounced Israel in egregious violation of internation-al law: “Israel is guilty of shocking behavior byusing deadly weapons against unarmed civilians onships that were situated in the high seas where free-dom of navigation exists, according to the law ofthe seas.” Falk called for an investigation on thegrounds that “It is essential that those Israelisresponsible for this lawless and murderous behavior,including political leaders who issued the orders, beheld criminally accountable for their wrongfulacts.” He characterized the Gaza blockade as “a

massive form of collective punishment” constituting “a crime againsthumanity, as well as a gross violation of the prohibition on collective punish-ment in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He insisted that fail-ure to punish Israel’s lawlessness would itself be criminal: “As special rap-porteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, familiar with the sufferingof the people of Gaza, I find this latest instance of Israeli military lawlessnessto create a situation of regional and global emergency. Unless prompt anddecisive action is taken to challenge the Israeli approach to Gaza all of uswill be complicit in criminal policies that are challenging the survival of anentire beleaguered community.” Such was Israel’s “flagrant flouting of inter-national law” that, to end its blockade of Gaza, Falk concluded, “the world-wide campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel is now amoral and political imperative, and needs to be supported and strengthenedeverywhere.”

Many nations promptly condemned Israel and some presumed its guiltthat day. According to the bbc, within hours of the boarding of the MaviMarmara French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner announced he was“deeply shocked” by Israel’s action and called for an inquiry, and FrenchPresident Nicolas Sarkozy accused Israel of a “disproportionate use of

Peter Berkowitz

Little attentionwas given to theTurkish flotilla’sdeliberate provocation or to the possibilitythat Israel hadacted ineptly orunwisely.

force.” Sweden summoned the Israeli ambassador to discuss the “unaccept-able action.” The Turkish foreign ministry issued a statement declaring theincident a “flagrant breach of international law” while Turkish PrimeMinister Recep Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed Israel’s raid “totally contrary tothe principles of international law” and an act of “inhumane state terror-ism.” And the Arab League called for an emergency meeting the next day todiscuss Israel’s “terrorist act.”1

On June 1, the un Security Council issued a presidential statement. Bycondemning Israel’s raid and by demanding a “prompt, impartial, credible,and transparent investigation conforming to international standards,” theSecurity Council indicated that there was sufficient evidence to be concernedthat serious breaches of international law had occurred.

Not to be outdone, the notorious un Human Rights Council on June 2issued resolution 14/1 on “The Grave Attacks by Israeli Forces against theHumanitarian Boat Convoy.”2 The hrc resolution “condemns in thestrongest terms the outrageous attack by the Israeli forces against thehumanitarian flotilla of ships which resulted in the killing and injuring ofmany innocent civilians from different countries.” And it authorized “anindependent, international fact-finding mission to investigate violations ofinternational law, including international humanitarian and human rightslaw, resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla of ships carrying human-itarian assistance.”

The widespread accusations of unlawful conduct directed at Israel —coming, it should be said, not from some abstract international community,but from officers and official bodies of the un, European states, Turkey, andArab states — were high on outrage and low on legal analysis. This is inkeeping with the growing tendency in international affairs to transform hardpolitical questions into conclusive legal judgments. The transformationincreasingly yields gross abuses of law fraught with substantial politicalimplications. The denunciations of Israel’s response to the Gaza Flotilla pro-vide a case in point. To counteract the harm they can cause to a state’s inter-ests when they gain international currency and exert worldwide influence,even far-fetched and perverse legal arguments must be addressed and refutedin legal terms.

In fact, the legality of Israel’s stopping and seizing of the Mavi Marmaraand the other five ships of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla turned on the legality

August & September 2011 5

The Gaza Flotilla and International Law

1. The bbc timeline of events “As it happened: Israeli raid on Gaza flotilla” is available athttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10196585.

2. Available at http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/4d2 f5b28bb470a8e8525773d0051 f543?OpenDocument. In favor (32 ): Angola, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Bosnia andHerzegovina, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan,Kyrgyzstan, Mauritius, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, RussianFederation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Slovenia, South Africa, and Uruguay. Against (3): Italy, Netherlands,and United States of America. Abstentions (9): Belgium, Burkina Faso, France, Hungary, Japan, Republicof Korea, Slovakia, Ukraine, and United Kingdom. Vote count and discussion available athttp://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/64c49cb9efca5bab852577360055adf6.

6 Policy Review

under international humanitarian law (a part of the international law of wargoverning the conduct of war, also known as ihl, the law of armed conflict,or the laws of war) of the naval blockade. If the blockade was legal, thenIsrael was perfectly within its rights to stop on international waters shipswhose announced intention was to break it, and Israeli commandos werewithin their rights to defend themselves against the potentially lethal attacksto which they were subject as they boarded the Mavi Marmara. Israel’sblockade was legal given the state of armed conflict between Israel andHamas, the de facto ruler of Gaza; the widely accepted use of naval block-ades in war; and the conformity of Israel’s blockade to the requirements ofmaritime law — it was duly declared, effective, nondiscriminatory, and

allowed the passage of humanitarian assistance tothe civilian population of Gaza.

Many, however, continue to contend the block-ade is illegal. According to the standard argument,the blockade violates international law because —notwithstanding its disengagement from Gaza in thesummer of 2005, in which Israel withdrew everysoldier and every civilian, and despite the absence ofany Israeli soldiers or citizens in Gaza on May 31,2010, when the Mavi Marmara was seized — Israelcontinues to be an occupying power of Gaza, and assuch is barred from undertaking acts of war, such asa naval blockade, against the Palestinian people ofGaza.

The standard argument, however, is at best weak and generally ground-less and incoherent. It twists well-settled concepts, distorts basic categories,overlooks or obscures crucial facts, misreads critical cases, and ignores fun-damental legal principles. To put the matter succinctly, since it neither hastroops stationed in Gaza nor exercises the functions of government there,Israel does not exercise “effective control” of Gaza, and therefore does notmeet the test that international humanitarian law establishes to determinewhether a territory is occupied by a hostile power.

More importantly, the argument over whether Israel occupies Gaza is ulti-mately irrelevant to determining the legality of its naval blockade. Even ifIsrael were deemed the occupying power, it would not lose its inherent rightof self-defense, recognized by the un charter and international law, to repelacts of aggression. By virtue of its public declarations, its bombardment ofcivilian populations in Israel, its unremitting efforts to conduct terroristoperations against Israel, and, after Israel’s December 2008-January 2009Gaza operation, its rearmament in preparation for the renewal of rocket andmissile attacks, Hamas has been in a condition of persistent, widespread,and organized war with Israel since it seized control of Gaza by force in June2007. Accordingly, Israel is entitled under international law to impose anaval blockade to prevent Hamas from acquiring additional weapons of

Peter Berkowitz

Israel neither has troops stationed in Gaza nor exercises thefunctions of governmentthere.

war. Of course Israel remains obliged to permit civilians’ humanitarianrequirements to be met.

The acceptance of poor arguments on behalf of the widespread opinionthat the Israeli blockade of Gaza is illegal threatens the integrity of the inter-national law of war. As in the case of the Goldstone Report before it, in thecase of the Gaza Flotilla again, influential international public opinion hascoalesced around a view of the law of armed conflict that substitutes propa-ganda for credible legal analysis. As with the Goldstone Report controversy,so too with the Gaza Flotilla controversy: Exposing the abuses to which theinternational law of war has been subject and setting forth a sounder view iscritical to conserving it, and is a task in which all nations devoted to the ruleof law have a stake — liberal democracies in particular, and especially liberaldemocracies such as the United States that are actively engaged in armedstruggle against transnational terrorists. And as with the Goldstone Report,so too with the Gaza Flotilla controversy, that task requires a critique of themajority view; a restatement of longstanding principles of the law of armedconflict; and, above all, a recovery of the imperative to strike a reasonablebalance between military necessity and humanitarian responsibility, theimperative out of which the international law of war emerged and whichmust remain its governing goal.3

The occupation argument

To vindicate the standard argument that Israel is prohibitedfrom maintaining a naval blockade of Gaza because it is an occu-pying power, proponents must overcome the well-settled definition

of occupation and the established test for determining whether an occupa-tion has come into existence.

The law of occupation is rooted in two principal sources. According toArticle 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, “territory is considered occu-pied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. Theoccupation extends only to the territory where such authority has beenestablished and can be exercised.”4 And Article 6 of the Fourth GenevaConvention indicates that a state achieves established authority and becomesan occupying power in a territory “to the extent that such Power exercisesthe functions of government in such territory.”5

The legal test is whether the hostile army has placed territory and itspopulation under “effective control.” As Elizabeth Sampson, on the basisof an extensive review of the legal materials, observes, “In the context of



3. See also “The Goldstone Report and International Law,” Policy Review 162 (August & September2010), available at http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/43281.

4. Available at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/195.

5. Available at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/webart/380-600009?opendocument.

8 Policy Review

international occupation law, ‘effective control’ is a term of art with no def-inite source, but it has developed as the standard that combines the condi-tions for occupation outlined in the Hague Regulations and the FourthGeneva Convention.”6 Case law and state practice, moreover, indicate gen-eral agreement that to exercise effective control in the legally relevant senseis to perform the functions of government, which typically requires troopsin the territory.

Israel in Gaza obviously does not meet the test as commonly understood.Israel has not had troops stationed in Gaza, or indeed any permanent pres-ence there, military or civilian, since September 2005, when it completedthe disengagement process it began the month before. When Israel left

Gaza, the Palestinian Authority took over the func-tions of government, which it exercised until June2007, when Hamas violently overthrew it and tookcontrol. Since then, Hamas has exercised the func-tions of government in Gaza. In late December2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, theaim of which was to stop Hamas’s firing of shells,rockets, and missiles at civilian populations in thesouthern part of the country. Early on in the three-week operation, Israel imposed a naval blockade toprevent the arrival into Gaza of weapons and othermilitary supplies. At the conclusion of the opera-tion, Israel brought home all troops, but main-tained the blockade.

Nevertheless, influential segments of international public opinion andinternational legal opinion insist that Israel occupies Gaza. The routine char-acterization of Gaza as occupied — in, among other places, the un HumanRights Council, General Assembly, and Security Council resolutions7 — isbacked by a set of oft-repeated legal arguments. Among the leading advo-cates of the standard argument is Noura Erakat, adjunct professor of inter-national human rights law in the Middle East at Georgetown University andthe U.S.-based legal advocacy coordinator for Badil Resource Center forPalestinian Residency and Refugee Rights.

To maintain that since its complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 Israelhas occupied Gaza, Erakat must reinterpret the meaning of “effective con-trol.” Crucial to her position is rejection of the view that a hostile militarypresence throughout the territory is required by the “effective control” test.Rather, she points to decisions by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the

Peter Berkowitz

6. Elizabeth Sampson, “Is Gaza Occupied? Redefining the Legal Status of Gaza,” Mideast Security andPolicy Studies 83, available at http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/msps83.pdf.

7. un Security Council Resolution 1860 (2009). Also, from the most recent session, which began inSeptember 2010, General Assembly Resolutions 65/102, 65/103, 65/104, 65/105, 65/179, avail-able at http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/resguide/r65.shtml.

DuringOperation Cast Lead, Israelimposed a navalblockade to prevent thearrival into Gaza ofweapons.

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that, according toher, consider an occupation ongoing provided there remains “the capacity tosend troops within a reasonable time to make the authority of the occupyingpower felt.”8 Israel retains this capacity, Erakat contends, and, throughrepeated military operations since the Gaza disengagement, has demonstrat-ed its willingness to use it.

In practice, according to Erakat, Israel exercises control over thePalestinians of Gaza in a variety of ways. Because it controls entrance intoand exit from Gaza, including control of land crossings and all air and seaaccess to Gaza, Israel determines the flow of people and goods in and out ofGaza. Israel controls Gaza’s electricity supply, giving it the power to turn thelights on and off. Israel’s restrictions on the entry into Gaza of “dual-use”goods — that is, goods that can be used for military as well as civilian pur-poses — has created a shortage of spare parts to maintain wastewater treat-ment plants. Furthermore, Israel retains control over some of Gaza’stelecommunications networks, its electromagnetic sphere, its fuel supply,and its population registry, as well as the collection and distribution of asubstantial amount of Palestinian tax revenue.

Among proponents of the standard argument, some of whom are Israeli,it is commonly asserted that the primary purpose of the closure policy isnot to maintain security but to exert pressure.9 Even Israel’s TurkelCommission Report, authorized by the government to investigate the GazaFlotilla controversy, grants that “it would be a mistake to examine the cir-cumstances of imposing the naval blockade from a narrow security per-spective only” because the blockade is also intended as “indirect economicwarfare” to put political pressure on Hamas.10 Many opponents of theblockade allege that Israel has used disproportionate force by depriving anentire civilian population of sufficient quantities of basic goods because afew militants have been firing relatively ineffectual rockets.11 Furthermore,Erakat argues, Israeli troops might as well be stationed in Gaza inasmuchas in its disengagement plan, “Israel reserved the right to use force againstPalestinians living in Gaza in the name of preventive and reactive self-defense.”12



8. Noura Erakat, “It’s Not Wrong, It’s Illegal: Situating the Gaza Blockade Between International Lawand the un Response” (2010 ), 11 , available at http://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/ihrp/NouraErakatarticle.pdf.

9. “Gaza Closure Defined: Collective Punishment” is available at http://gisha.org/UserFiles/File/publica-tions/GazaClosureDefinedEng.pdf.

10. The Turkel Commission Report is available at http://www.turkel-committee.gov.il/files/wor-docs/8808report-eng.pdf. See part 1, page 71.

11. Victor Kattan, “Operation Cast Lead: Use of Force Discourses and Jus Ad Bellum Controversies,”The Palestine Handbook of International Law (2009), available at http://www.victorkattan.com/cmsAdmin/uploads/Victor_Kattan_brill.pdf.

12. Noura Erakat, “Collective Punishment or Not, Gaza Blockade Illegal (Part I)” (October 22, 2010),available at http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/16694/pid/895.

What the various forms of control Israel exercises over Gaza add up to,concludes Erakat, is clear: “The confluence of its ongoing control, its contin-uous military operations, as well as its capacity to redeploy its troops withina reasonable time demonstrate that Israel remains in effective control of theGaza Strip.”13 Therefore, despite lacking troops on the ground and theabsence of any involvement in the governing of Gaza, Israel should be seenunder international humanitarian law as occupying Gaza.

Accordingly, the standard argument continues, Israel is barred by interna-tional law from taking military action — attacks, blockades, or otherwise —against it. In particular, Article 43 of the Hague Regulations imposes signifi-cantly greater limits on the force that can be legally used by an occupier thanby belligerents at war, requiring that the occupier “shall take all the measuresin his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety,while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the coun-try.”14 Accordingly, as occupier, Israel shoulders responsibility for enforcingthe rule of law in Gaza. Some go so far as to suggest that any terrorist activi-ty originating there, such as the launching of mortars and rockets, is Israel’sfault for failing to fulfill its obligations to maintain law and order.15

Moreover, the standard argument holds that as occupier Israel is restrictedby international humanitarian law to the use of law enforcement measuresto respond to violence originating within Gaza. A military response wouldbe inherently disproportionate. Indeed, Erakat hints that even the use offirearms by Israel in the discharge of its obligation to police Gaza might beconsidered an “extreme measure.”16 If Israel were allowed under interna-tional law to use its military might rather than rely on law enforcement, itwould put the Palestinian residents of Gaza in the impossible position ofdefending themselves against one of the world’s most powerful armies“without the benefit either of its own military, or of any realistic means todefend itself.”17 Israel’s claim that it is compelled to use military force inGaza is, according to Erakat, nothing less than a “deliberate effort to shift[international humanitarian law] by insisting that it can simultaneously be atwar with the entity that it occupies.”18

Peter Berkowitz

13. Erakat, “It’s Not Wrong, It’s Illegal,” 13, available at http://www.law.utoronto.ca/documents/ihrp/NouraErakatarticle.pdf.

14. Available at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/Webat/195-200053?OpenDocument.

15. Kattan, “Operation Cast Lead,” 109–110; “The occupation of the Gaza Strip and the continuedrenouncement of responsibility,” International Law Observer (2008), available at http://internationalla-wobserver.eu/2008/10/24/the-occupation-of-the-gaza-strip-and-the-continued-renouncement-of-respon-sibility/.

16. Erakat, “It’s Not Wrong, It’s Illegal,” 15. (Erakat quotes from Marco Sassoli’s paper “Article 43 ofthe Hague Regulations and Peace Operations in the Twenty-First Century.”) See also Kattan, “OperationCast Lead.”

17. Erakat, “It’s Not Wrong, It’s Illegal,” 20. Erakat references George E. Bisharat et al, “Israel’sInvasion of Gaza in International Law,” Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, 38:1 (2009),available at http://law.du.edu/documents/djilp/38No1/Bisharat-Final.pdf.

18. Erakat, “It’s Not Wrong, It’s Illegal,” 14.

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The critique of the occupation argument

I n reality, it is proponents of the standard argument such asNoura Erakat who seek to shift international law, indeed to funda-mentally rewrite it. Their view that Israel occupies Gaza cannot with-

stand scrutiny. It lacks foundations in the principles of international law andis at odds with common sense understandings of war and peace.

The challenge for Erakat and the standard argument that she championsis to show that despite lacking boots on the ground and not performing thefunctions of government, Israel nevertheless exercises effective control overand therefore occupies Gaza. Such success as Erakat’s legal arguments haveenjoyed as legal arguments depends on sophistry. Erakat treats a singlepotential indicator of occupation — the ability to deploy troops at will — asif it were a conclusive determinant, and she substitutes the colloquial mean-ing of “effective control,” namely, the ability to exercise significant influ-ence, for the legal meaning under international law, which is to govern byforce.

The first part of Erakat’s argument for occupation — that Israel candeploy troops at will in Gaza — is exposed to an immediate objection:“Military superiority over a neighbor does not itself constitute occupation. Ifit did, the U.S. would have to be considered the occupier of Mexico andCanada, Egypt the occupier of Libya, Iran the occupier of Afghanistan, andRussia the occupier of Latvia.”19 In fact, Erakat suppresses the restricted cir-cumstances under which international law regards the ability to deploytroops at will as an indicator of occupation.

The icty case she cites as the leading authority, The Prosecutor v.Naletilic & Martinovic — Case No. IT-98-34-T (2003), states that “todetermine whether the authority of the occupying power has been actuallyestablished,” several “guidelines provide some assistance.” The court pro-vided a list:

• The occupying power must be in a position to substitute its ownauthority for that of the occupied authorities, which must have beenrendered incapable of functioning publicly.

• The enemy’s forces have surrendered, been defeated, or withdrawn. Inthis respect, battle areas may not be considered as occupied territory.However, sporadic local resistance, even successful, does not affectthe reality of occupation.



19. Avraham Bell and Justus Reid Weiner, “International Law and the Fighting in Gaza” (2008), 18,available at http://www.jcpa.org/text/puzzle1.pdf.

12 Policy Review

• The occupying power has a sufficient force present, or the capacity tosend troops within a reasonable time to make the authority of theoccupying power felt.

• A temporary administration has been established over the territory;the occupying power has issued and enforced directions to the civilianpopulation.20

No one of these guidelines is conclusive, none can be applied mechanically,and taken together they show that the core meaning of occupation underinternational law coincides with the common sense meaning and consists insubduing a civilian population by force and governing it by force.

Taken together, the guidelines elaborated in theicty case that Erakat takes as authoritative clearlyindicate that Israel’s relationship to Gaza falls welloutside the legal definition of occupier. Despite thereadiness of Israeli troops to defend against terroristincursions and mortar, rocket, and missile attacksfrom Gaza, Hamas continues to govern Gaza; it hasnot been rendered incapable of functioning publicly;it has not surrendered or been defeated or with-drawn; and Israel does not administer Gaza or issueand enforce directives to the civilian population.

The circumstances, according to the icty TrialChamber, under which the laws of occupation applyabsent physical occupation shed additional light on

the erroneousness of Erakat’s view that Israel’s ability to send troops intoGaza is legally decisive evidence that it is an occupying power. The courtexplained that the forced transfer of people and forced labor are prohibitedfrom the moment civilians fall into the hands of the opposing power, regard-less of the stage of hostilities and irrespective of whether the hostile powerhas established an actual state of occupation as defined in Article 42 of theHague Regulations. If a state has a degree of effective control that falls shortof actual control, it will only be considered an occupier for the purposes ofinternational law if that control is used to compel people to migrate or per-form work involuntarily. In such circumstances, Geneva protections foroccupied populations take effect, regardless of whether the hostile army hasboots on the ground or exercises the functions of government.

Such circumstances, however, are not present in Israel’s relation to Gaza.Israel is neither forcing anyone to leave Gaza nor compelling anyone tolabor against his or her will. Once again, the very icty opinion that Erakatcites as authority for the legal judgment that Israel, despite the absence oftroops and the fact of Hamas’s control of the government, occupies Gaza,

Peter Berkowitz

20. The icty’s Prosecutor v. Naletillic is available at http://www.icty.org/x/file/Legal%20Library/jud_supplement/supp42-e/naletilic.htm.

The guidelineselaborated in the ICTY caseclearly indicatethat Israel’s relationship toGaza is not thatof occupier.

explains why, under international law, Israel cannot properly be consideredGaza’s occupier.

The second part of Erakat’s argument for occupation — that Israel exer-cises extensive forms of control over Gaza — appeals, like the first part, tocertain observable facts but depends on disregarding the clear application ofthe law to them. To be sure, as Erakat stresses, Israel does strictly limit themovement of people and goods in and out of Gaza, thus creating conditionsthat make it difficult for all Gazans to travel and for many to work. Butextensive control is not, under the law of armed conflict, synonymous witheffective control.

To begin with, Erakat wrongly asserts that Israel exercises complete con-trol over Gaza’s borders.21 In fact, Egypt has con-trolled the Rafah crossing from Gaza into the SinaiPeninsula since Israel’s disengagement in the summerof 2005 and maintained severe restrictions on themovement of goods and people through Rafah upuntil May 2011, when it relaxed restrictions. Inaddition, the effects on movement and labor stem-ming from the forms of control Israel does exerciseover Gaza are exactly the opposite of those that theicty specifies as necessary, in the absence of bootson the ground and operation of the government, totrigger application of the laws of occupation. Insteadof suffering forced migration, Israeli policy causes Palestinians in Gaza tostay put; and rather than being subject to forced labor, Palestinians in Gazafind themselves, as a result of Israel’s response to Hamas, underemployed orunemployed.

Such hardships, however, do not define occupation. In fact, they areamong the consequences one would expect of war, even where the law ofarmed conflict is scrupulously observed. And Hamas not only believes that itis at war with Israel. It undertakes acts — launching mortars, rockets, andmissiles at Israeli civilian populations; continued mobilization for armedconflict; and constant planning and undertaking of terrorist incursions —that meet the settled definition of aggression, namely acts that threaten astate’s territorial integrity or political independence.22

Although Hamas’s precise legal status is open to question — Gaza is not astate, and Hamas came to power by overthrowing the Palestinian Authority— Hamas is the de facto ruler of Gaza and has exercised the functions ofgovernment there since it seized control in June 2007. Notwithstanding itsdesignation as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and theEuropean Union, Hamas operates in Gaza a full range of ministries, a police



21 Erakat, “It’s Not Wrong, It’s Illegal,” 12. .

22. un Charter, Article 2(4), is available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml.

Extensive control is not,

under the law ofarmed conflict,synonymouswith effective

control.

14 Policy Review

force, and a military, and makes and enforces the law. Consequently, Israelcannot be said to exercise effective control over Gaza in the legally relevantsense. Any attempt by Israel to exert the “effective control” Erakat insists itstill retains by imposing law and order on Gaza would quickly clarify thatIsrael lacks effective control in Gaza, in both the legal and the colloquialsense. To have prevented Hamas from launching rockets in the first place, asErakat and others suggest it should have, would have required Israel tomount a full-scale invasion in 2007 when Hamas overthrew the PalestinianAuthority. Such an action would have made Operation Cast Lead look like aminor border skirmish.23

At the same time, Hamas’s launching of mortars, rockets, and missilesagainst Israel does not reflect a failure on its partto maintain law and order. Rather, it displaysHamas’s determination to wage war against Israel,indeed a kind of war that is strictly forbidden byinternational law.

Hamas reaffirmed its criminal intentions in thewake of Justice Richard Goldstone’s stunningreconsideration, appearing April 1, 2011, in theWashington Post, in which, among other things, hewithdrew the gravest charge the Goldstone Reportleveled against Israel — that in Operation CastLead Israel had, as a deliberate policy, sought to ter-rorize the civilian population of Gaza.24 Goldstone

also applauded Israel for launching more than 400 investigations of allega-tions of criminal wrongdoing arising from the Gaza operation andexpressed disappointment that Hamas had not undertaken a single one.When asked by the New York Times to respond to Goldstone’s disappoint-ment, Hamas Justice Minister Mohammad al-Ghoul said that “there wasnothing to investigate because shooting rockets was ‘a right of self-defenseof the Palestinian people in the face of the Israeli invasion and mass killingof Palestinians.’”25

Justice Minister al-Ghoul’s statement is factually erroneous and legallywrong, but it gives clear expression to Hamas’s criminal military strategyand objectives. Contrary to Minister al-Ghoul, there is no right under inter-national law, in self-defense or otherwise, to deliberately target civilians. At

Peter Berkowitz

23. Bell and Weiner, “International Law and the Fighting in Gaza.” .

24. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/afg111jc_story.html. For the scurrilous charge withdrawn by Goldstone,see “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Commission on the Gaza Conflict,” Part V, Paragraph1690 , available at http://www2 .ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9 /docs/unffmgc_Report.pdf.

25. Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner, “Israel Grapples with Retraction on U.N. Report,” New YorkTimes (April 3, 2011), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/world/middleeast/04gold-stone.html.

Goldstoneapplauded Israelfor launchingmore than 400investigations of allegations of criminalwrongdoing.

the same time, the shooting of rockets at civilians for which Minister al-Ghoul matter-of-factly takes responsibility, and which the Goldstone Reportproperly characterized as war crimes, did not take place in response toIsrael’s Gaza operation. Indeed, Hamas launched thousands of projectiles atIsraeli civilians after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005 andbefore Operation Cast Lead began in December 2008. Israel’s Gaza opera-tion was a response to Hamas attacks on civilians, not the other wayaround.

Given Hamas’s officially declared intentions, its sustained aerial assaulton Israeli civilians should not be surprising. Hamas’s principal aim in wag-ing war against Israel is not to end a supposed occupation of Gaza or tobreak a naval blockade, but rather to annihilate Israel. Hamas’s Chartermakes this abundantly clear: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist untilIslam will obliterate it” (Preamble). “Hamas strives to raise the banner ofAllah over every inch of Palestine” (Article 6). “There is no solution for thePalestinian question except through Jihad” (Article 13).26

The emptiness of the standard argument that Israel occupies Gaza wasfurther confirmed in March of this year by an authoritative source — the unSecurity Council.27 un Security Council Resolution 1973 — adopted by avote of ten in favor, none against, and five abstentions — authorized the useof military force to protect civilians against Muammar Gadaffi’s fighters,imposed a no-fly zone across the entire country, and tightened the assetfreeze and arms embargo established by un Security Council Resolution1970, while at the same time declaring that Libya was not and would notbe occupied.28 If, despite the extensive forms of control that nato forcesand the Arab League exercise over Libya under Resolution 1973, theycould not be considered occupying powers, then it follows that Israel, whichexercises lesser forms of control over Gaza cannot, consistent with interna-tional law, be deemed an occupying power of Gaza.

The inherent right of self-defense

The ultimate ground of Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza — aswell as of Operation Cast Lead and of the various measures thatit continues to take to protect itself against Hamas mortar, rock-

et, and missile attacks and more — is its inherent right of self-defense. Inexercising this right, Israel is obliged to honor the cornerstones of inter-national humanitarian law: The principle of distinction requires fightersto distinguish civilians and civilian objects and prohibits attacking



26. Available at http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm. .

27. Eugene Kontorovich, “Is Gaza still Occupied?,” Jerusalem Post (June 2, 2011), available athttp://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=223231.

28. Available at http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm#Resolution.

16 Policy Review

them;29 and the principle of proportionality bars attacks on legitimatemilitary targets that knowingly produce harm to civilians and civilianobjects that is excessive in relation to the military advantage gained.30

The proper legal question to ask in regard to any exercise of force iswhether it conforms to the principles of distinction and proportionality.That would be true even if Israel were regarded as an occupying power.

The un Charter, Article 51, declares, “Nothing in the present Chartershall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if anarmed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until theSecurity Council has taken measures necessary to maintain internationalpeace and security.”31 The tendency among international lawyers is to adopt

a narrow reading, contending that the right of self-defense can only be exercised in response to anattack, and that once the Security Council is seizedof a matter states are barred from exercising theirright even if the attack continues. Yet as AbrahamSofaer points out, “Advocates of a narrow interpre-tation of Article 51 disregard the substantial author-ity that exists among scholars and in state practicefor a more flexible approach.”32 That more flexibleapproach is more consistent with the un Charter’slanguage, which recognizes that states’ inherentright of self-defense is not conferred upon them bythe un or by international law. Instead, as Michael

Walzer argues in his classic study, Just and Unjust Wars, nations’ inherentright to defend themselves stems from the inherent right of the individualswho compose states to defend themselves and provides the foundation of themodern state system and the international law of war.33

Proponents of a narrow reading of Article 51, moreover, argue from themistaken assumption that the more flexible interpretation of the inherentright of self-defense undermines international peace and security by invitingstates to take the law into their own hands. But, as Sofaer stresses, “Self-defense is a key element in any sensible program to supplement the inade-quate, collective efforts of the Security Council.”34 History provides ample

Peter Berkowitz

A state’s inherent right of self-defensestems from theright of the individuals in thestate to defendthemselves.

29. “Customary ihl,” Rule 1, is available at http://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_cha_chap-ter1_rule1?OpenDocument&highlight=distinction, and Rule 7 is available at http://www.icrc.org/custom-ary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_cha_chapter2_rule7?OpenDocument&highlight=distinction.

30 . “Customary ihl ,” Rule 14 , is available at http://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_rul_rule14.

31. Available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter7.shtml.

32. Abraham Sofaer, “International Security and the Use of Force,” Progress in International Law(2008), 561.

33. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Basic, 2000), 51–73 ( in particular 51–64).

34. Sofaer, “International Security and the Use of Force,” 561.

evidence that the Security Council cannot be counted upon to counteraggression swiftly and decisively. Consequently, exercise of the inherent rightof self-defense is critical to upholding international order and vindicating theprinciple that aggression is criminal and will not be tolerated. At the sametime, “Actions in self-defense,” as Sofaer observes, “should be judged bytheir reasonableness, as are issues of force in any other contests of lawenforcement and national law.”35 In international humanitarian law, thedecisive measures of reasonableness are the principles of distinction and pro-portionality.

In the last analysis, the question of the legality of Israel’s blockade shouldbe whether it distinguishes civilians and civilian objects and represents a pro-portionate response to Hamas’s declared jihadagainst it. As the Turkel Commission Report argues,Israel’s naval blockade conforms to the requirementsof international maritime law, including allowing forthe passage of humanitarian relief to the Gazan civil-ian population, and so does meet the requirementsof proportionality.36 Moreover, as an exercise offorce aimed at preventing armed attacks by Hamas,Israel’s naval blockade is considerably more protec-tive of Gaza’s civilians than the obvious alternative,a land invasion that would inevitably cause substan-tial civilian death and destruction because ofHamas’s criminal military strategy of operating incivilian areas while disguised as civilians.

Erakat displays the argumentative extremes to which she is willing to goby contending that Israel’s inherent right of self-defense does not apply toPalestinian aggression. Israel is barred from invoking a right of self-defenseagainst Hamas fighters, she argues, because they are nonstate actors. Herauthority for this remarkable notion is the International Court of Justice. Onthis occasion, Erakat, alas, accurately reports the court’s opinion. She fails tonote, however, that this aspect of the opinion is widely regarded as bizarre,and is inconsistent with state practice, for example that of the United Statesfor nearly a decade in its use of armed force against the Taliban inAfghanistan and Pakistan.

In her most comprehensive article on the blockade, Erakat maintains thatthe International Court of Justice’s “Advisory Opinion on the LegalConsequences on the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied PalestinianTerritory” (2004)37 stands for two crucial propositions: first, “that a non-state entity cannot trigger Article 51 self-defense”; and second, that attacks



Israel is barredfrom invoking a

right of self-defense againstHamas fighters,Erakat argues,

because they arenonstate actors.

35. Sofaer, “International Security and the Use of Force,” 561. .

36. Turkel Commission Report, 100–102.

37. Available at http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?p1=3&p2=4&k=5a&case=131&code=mwp&p3=4.

18 Policy Review

that originate within occupied territory where the law of occupation appliesdistinguish the case of Gaza attacks on Israel from al Qaeda’s September 11attack on the U.S. and therefore “[un Security Council] Resolutions 1368and 1373, which authorize the invocation of Article 51 self-defense againstal-Qaeda, are distinct from, and nonapplicable to, the Occupied PalestinianTerritories.”38

In regard to Erakat’s first proposition, in providing that “nothing in thepresent Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations,”Article 51 does not require the attacker to be a state. Nor is that surprising:Even as the rise of terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction has

confronted international law with novel and diffi-cult questions, there have always been nonstate enti-ties, within states as well as in border regions ofquestionable territorial allegiance, that presentthreats to states’ territorial integrity or political inde-pendence. And it is this criterion — whether an actpresents a threat to state’s territorial integrity orpolitical independence — that determines whetherthe crime of aggression has been committed andstates’ inherent right of self-defense has been trig-gered. Subjecting one million citizens to the dailydanger, and heavy civic and commercial disloca-tions, of mortar, rocket, and missile attacks as wellas the ever present threat of terrorist incursion — as

Hamas has done for many years to the civilians of southern Israel — threat-ens Israel’s territorial integrity and political independence and so constitutesunder the international law of war criminal aggression by Hamas.

Oddly, Erakat herself provides substantial and compelling scholarlyauthority to establish that she and the icj ruling on which she relies are inerror to argue that “a non-state entity cannot trigger Article 51 self-defense.” As it happens, several sources in support of the conclusion that anonstate entity can trigger Article 51 self-defense are contained in her foot-note 100, which she offers in defense of the proposition that it can’t:

See e.g., Ruth Wedgwood, “The icj Advisory Opinion on the IsraeliSecurity Fence and the Limits of Self-Defense” . . . (“The Charter’s lan-guage does not link the right of self-defense to the particular legal per-sonality of the attacker. In a different age, one might not have imaginedthat nonstate actors could mimic the force available to nation states, butthe events of September 11 have retired that assumption.”); See alsoGeoffrey Watson, Self-Defense and the Israeli Wall Advisory Opinion:The “Wall” Decisions in Legal and Political Context . . . (Watson argues

Peter Berkowitz

There havealways been nonstate entitiesthat presentthreats to states’territorial integrity or political independence.

38. Erakat, “It’s not Wrong, It’s Illegal,” 19–20. .

that the icj’s decision is “expansive and sweeping” and fails to conducta proper analysis of law and fact.); See also Sean D. Murphy, Self-Defense and the Israeli Wall Advisory Opinion: An Ipse Dixit From theicj . . . (“First, nothing in the language of Article 51 of the Charterrequires the exercise of self-defense to turn on whether an armed attackwas committed directly by, or can be imputed to, another state. Article51 speaks of the right of self-defense by a ‘Member of the UnitedNations’ against an armed attack, without any qualification as to whoor what is conducting the armed attack. The ‘ordinary meaning’ of theterms of Article 51 provides no basis for reading into the text a restric-tion on who the attacker must be.”)39

Contrary to her apparent intention, Erakat highlights international law’sconvergence with the common-sense idea that states may exercise their rightof self-defense against any actors, including nonstate actors, that threatentheir territorial integrity or political independence.

Even though Israel clearly does not occupy Gaza, it is worth noting thatErakat’s second proposition, that attacks coming from occupied territorycan never trigger a state’s inherent right of self-defense, is also in error. Manyarticles in the Geneva Conventions that deal with the protection of civiliansnevertheless recognize that in cases of military necessity humanitarianresponsibilities do not cancel the right of self-defense. For example, theGeneva Conventions, Additional Protocol 1 (1977), Article 54, Sect. 5,concerns the obligation of occupying powers to prevent starvation and pro-vide foodstuffs. It provides that

In recognition of the vital requirements of any Party to the conflict in thedefense of its national territory against invasion, derogation from theprohibitions contained in paragraph 2 may be made by a Party to theconflict within such territory under its own control where required byimperative military necessity.40

Thus, notwithstanding the responsibilities owed by occupiers to civiliansunder their control, a state that is an occupying power may, in a situation ofmilitary necessity, exercise its inherent right of self-defense, which meansusing military force to defeat threats to its territorial integrity or politicalindependence. And to repeat, a state’s exercise of its inherent right of self-defense does not suspend international law, because it remains obliged toexercise its right reasonably, that is, in conformity with the principles of dis-tinction and proportion.



39. Erakat, “It’s not Wrong, It’s Illegal,” 19–20. .

40. Available at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/470?opendocument. For additional examples, see theFourth Geneva Convention, Articles 18, 28, 49, 53, 55, 108, 143 , and 147 , available athttp://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/380?OpenDocument; and Additional Protocol 1, Articles 62, 67, and71, available at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/470?OpenDocument; and Additional Protocol II,Article 17, available at http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/475?OpenDocument.

20 Policy Review

In sum, one may plausibly argue that Israel’s handling of the seizure of theMavi Marmara was inept or unwise, and one may plausibly contend that itinvolved the application of disproportionate force. But one cannot — asNoura Erakat, the un Human Rights Council, Turkey, Arab states, andEuropean states try to — argue coherently and in keeping with well-estab-lished principles of international humanitarian law that Israel’s blockade isinherently illegal. In imposing a maritime blockade on Gaza that allows forthe passage into it of goods that satisfy the basic requirements of the civilianpopulation, Israel is exercising its inherent right of self-defense againstHamas, the ruling power in Gaza, which is waging against it a religious warthat aims at Israel’s total destruction.

Conserving the international law of war

The standard arguments for viewing Israel’s blockade ofGaza as unlawful are unsound and insubstantial. Their popularityreflects the determination to subordinate the international law of

war to partisan political goals. Since the international law of war stands orfalls with its claim to transcend partisan controversies and rise above thepolitical fray, and since the international law of war is a vital component ofa freer, more peaceful, and more prosperous world order, most nations andcertainly all liberal democracies have a vital interest in defending its integrity.That defense must devote considerable attention to the controversies inwhich Israel has become embroiled, because the sustained campaigns tocriminalize Israel’s exercise of its inherent right of self-defense are among thegravest abuses to which the international law of war has been subject.

When it comes to Israel’s exercise of military force, critics — lawyers andnon-lawyers alike — exhibit a tendency to infer criminal conduct from civil-ian harm. This is certainly true of the Gaza Flotilla controversy and theGoldstone Report. The inference, however, which involves an elevation ofhumanitarian responsibility and a disregard of military necessity, is invalidunder the law of armed conflict. The main tests of criminality in war are dis-tinction and proportionality. They require fighters to strike a reasonable bal-ance between humanitarian responsibility and military necessity, whichsometimes are mutually reinforcing but also can be in tragic tension. Properapplication of the laws of war necessitates an inquiry not only into the iden-tity and suffering of civilians but also into tactics and strategy, battlefieldsand weapons, what troops and commanders knew and what they reason-ably could have known. And thus their proper application depends not onlyon an understanding of fighters’ responsibilities toward noncombatants butalso on expertise in the intricacies of battle and the requirements of victory.The inherent difficulties of applying distinction and proportionality are com-pounded when, as is the case with Hamas, one side unlawfully abandons theuse of uniforms, refuses to carry its arms openly, hides amidst civilian popu-

Peter Berkowitz

lations, stores arms in ostensibly civilian facilities, and fires mortars, rockets,and missiles from civilian areas. Such blatantly unlawful conduct inevitablyincreases civilian casualties. But the international law of war is clear:Fighting forces that operate among civilians remain legitimate military tar-gets, and fighters who use civilian areas and structures for military purposescause them to lose their immunity.

The great revolution in military affairs over the last 60 years by means ofwhich the conduct of war has come under vastly greater legal supervisioncontinues apace. In many respects it has made war more humane. At thesame time, it has been accompanied by a politicization of the internationallaw of war that threatens to reward terrorism and impair the right of liberaldemocracies to defend themselves. No cure or corrective will succeed thatdoes not give close attention to the education of the next generation oflawyers, scholars, soldiers, and statesman. The young men and women whowill assume responsibility for the preservation and elaboration of the inter-national law of war need to be trained to appreciate both humanitarianresponsibility and military necessity, and to respect the distinction betweenpolitics and law. Consequently, conserving the international law of warawaits a major reform of educational affairs.



Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-6010www.hooverpress.org

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E lection 2012 has already begun. In fact, it’s in full gear.To no one’s surprise, President Barack Obama in early Aprilformed his reelection committee, which will allow his cam-paign to begin raising money for what is expected to be themost expensive presidential campaign in American history.

His reelection, though, is by no means a sure thing — thanks in large part tothe state of the U.S. economy.

With the U.S. unemployment rate hovering around nine percent, thenational average price of gas approaching four dollars per gallon, and thehousing market nationwide continuing to fall, Republicans are preparing fora presidential election that they hope will be a referendum on PresidentObama and his economic policies. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll shouldnot give “Obama for America” (ofa) much comfort: Only 37 percentapprove of the president’s handling of the economy.

With that as a backdrop, eight Republicans have already declared theircandidacies for the Republican nomination — sensing a real opportunity

The GOP’s 2012 FieldBy Jon Decker

Jon Decker, a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the White House correspondent for Reuters Television.


24 Policy Review

to make Barack Obama a one-term president. The White House, ofcourse, has taken notice of the polls and the competition. And it has readi-ly acknowledged that the electoral map that won Obama the Oval Officein 2008 will be strikingly different in 2012. What follows is an evalua-tion of the Republican field for the nomination, who the White Housefears most, and what will likely be the path to the presidency for the 2012Republican nominee.

The candidates

W ith a war chest that dwarfs his closest competitor, formerMassachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is seen by the WhiteHouse as the early front-runner for the nomination. Money

matters for Republicans — particularly in this election cycle. Obama thesenator raised $750 million in 2008. With the power of the presidency,ofa is widely expected to meet or exceed that total in 2012. Romney’sfundraising prowess was put on display in mid-May when he raised $10.25million in Las Vegas in a single one-day call-a-thon.

But it’s not just Romney’s network of wealthy donors that the WhiteHouse fears. It’s his ability to appeal to independents that won Romney thegovernorship in “liberal” Massachusetts. Since losing the Republican nomi-nation to John McCain in 2008, Romney has never really stopped cam-paigning. From Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina and Florida —the states that vote first in the Republican nominating process — Romneyhas touted his business experience as a way to attack President Obama andhis handling of the U.S. economy. The attacks on Obama (and Romney’shigh name identification) appear to be working. Romney now leads mostpolls of likely Republican voters. Even more impressive, he is the onlyRepublican presidential candidate who leads President Obama in a head-to-head match-up in some recent national polls.

Romney is betting that the faltering U.S. economy — combined with hisbusiness and executive experience — are the perfect ingredients to securehim the Republican nomination and ultimately the White House. As hiscampaign spokesman told me, “This election is about two things — jobsand the economy.” Romney gave a preview of his campaign message in thefirst Republican debate in New Hampshire. Obama, he argued, didn’t causethe economic recession. Instead, he said, his economic policies have pro-longed it.

Romney’s message has found some resonance with voters. An nbc/WallStreet Journal poll released in mid-June found that 62 percent of thosepolled believe the country is moving in the wrong direction — a jump oftwelve percent from a month earlier. Even the White House — both private-ly and publicly — acknowledges that the economy will likely be a focus ofthe 2012 presidential election.

Jon Decker

As David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior adviser, put it on cnn’s Stateof the Union: “The fundamental issue is how do people feel? Do they feellike we’re making progress? Do they feel like we’re moving in the rightdirection? And do they feel like the person on the other side of the ballotwould hold out greater hope?” Right now, if you ask the Romney campaignthose very questions, the answers would be: “Pessimistic”; “No”; “No”;and “Yes.” And that, the campaign argues, has created a “perfect storm” forMitt Romney.

But with the Republican National Convention in Tampa still almost thir-teen months away, Romney has quite a few obstacles to overcome. ManyRepublican voters view the health care plan that Governor Romney signedinto law in 2006 as the Achilles heel of his candida-cy. The plan, critics charge, bears a striking resem-blance to “ObamaCare” — the Patient Protectionand Affordable Care Act — that Obama signed intolaw in March of 2010.

Although Romney has repeatedly said thatObamaCare should be repealed, he has notexpressed any regrets for the Massachusetts healthcare bill that he signed into law, saying in a speech inNew Hampshire in March that “our experimentwasn’t perfect; some things worked, some thingsdidn’t, and some things I’d change.”

It’s that qualified support for his own health carelaw that complicates Romney’s efforts to win the Republican nomination.According to a recently released Rasmussen poll, 53 percent of likely votersfavor repeal of ObamaCare. The number jumps dramatically higher whenonly Republicans are asked this question. If Romney hopes to win the nomi-nation, he will need to explain to Republican primary voters exactly how hisplan differs from ObamaCare. And he’ll have to fend off an onslaught ofattacks in debates and in campaign ads. In 2008, the campaign of SenatorJohn McCain was very effective in portraying Mitt Romney as a “policy-shifter” and “flip-flopper” on a slew of issues — including abortion, guns,and immigration. Mindful of that experience, Romney’s Republican chal-lengers have already begun the attacks on the early front-runner. And for theconservative base of the Republican Party, Romney’s major sin of his publiclife is “RomneyCare.” If Mitt Romney can navigate himself through thisgauntlet in the early primaries, he will be in a very good position to securethe nomination and take on President Obama.

Mitt Romney isn’t the only Republican presidential candidate talkingabout jobs and the economy. So is two-term Minnesota Governor TimPawlenty. Pawlenty’s national stature rose in 2008 when John McCain let itbe known that the now-50-year-old was on his vice presidential short-list.

For 2012, Pawlenty has positioned himself as the “solid conservative”alternative to Mitt Romney. As Pawlenty’s campaign puts it, “Governor


The GOP’s 2012 Field

Many Republicanvoters view thehealth care planthat GovernorRomney signedin 2006 as theAchilles heel ofhis candidacy.

26 Policy Review

Pawlenty has had real results and has been a consistent conservative.” Infact, Pawlenty has won praise from conservatives for: his own health careplan with market-based reforms; eliminating a $4.3 billion state budgetdeficit without raising taxes; and his record as a pro-life advocate. And he’swon editorial plaudits from the Wall Street Journal for his recent proposallaying out his economic growth plan: entitlement reform, slashing govern-ment spending, a flatter tax system, lower corporate income tax rates, andelimination of capital gains taxes as a means to spur production and invest-ment in American businesses.

The Pawlenty campaign argues that the former governor is the only can-didate in the Republican field who can get the entire party united for the

November 2012 election. Without mentioning anynames (although the veiled reference is clearly aimedat Romney), a campaign spokesman told me that noother top-tier candidates will be fully acceptable tothe Tea Party and no other candidate will contrastas well with Obama.

Pawlenty also has an interesting personal story.His father drove a milk truck, and his mother diedof cancer when he was just sixteen. A trained lawyerand a native Minnesotan, Pawlenty got his start inpolitics when he was elected to the Eagan CityCouncil at the age of 28. Throughout his political

career, Pawlenty — despite his conservative record — has managed toappeal to moderates and independents.

Although many publications have derided Pawlenty as “bland,” he is verygood at retail politics. With a pleasant demeanor, Pawlenty appears at easetalking to voters of all walks of life — a necessary skill to have in Iowa, andbeyond. He also has an experienced group of political advisers — includingcampaign manager Nick Ayers, the former executive director of theRepublican Governors Association; Terry Nelson, who was the politicaldirector of George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign; and Sara Taylor, who servedas White House political director under Bush. The White House at this pointin the campaign process does not view Pawlenty as a threat — and hasderided his record.

In an interview with msnbc in early June, former White Housespokesman Robert Gibbs said that when Pawlenty left office at the begin-ning of 2011, Minnesota had added only 6,000 jobs. Still, despite trailingObama by nearly fifteen percent in the latest nbc News/Wall Street Journalpoll, the White House believes that Pawlenty — should he get the nomina-tion — would be a formidable opponent and could compete with the presi-dent for independents, particularly in the all-important swing states.

For all the positive attributes associated with Tim Pawlenty, he has notyet caught on among Republicans on the national level. He failed to takeon Romney over his health care plan at the New Hampshire debate — a

Jon Decker

Although manypublications have deridedPawlenty as“bland,” he isvery good atretail politics.

mistake that Pawlenty now acknowledges. And the most recent Rasmussenpoll (taken after the New Hampshire debate on June 13th) has Pawlenty at6 percent among likely gop Primary Voters — with Romney earning 33percent support. The Pawlenty campaign says the polls out now do notreflect how the campaign will sort itself out seven months from now inIowa. And they certainly have a point. At this point in the 2008 presiden-tial cycle, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were their party’s respectivefront-runners.

Pawlenty, though, is working hard to move higher in the polls and standout in Iowa. The campaign has just launched the first television ad campaignby a presidential candidate in Iowa.

“In a liberal state, I reduced spending in realterms for the first time, took on the governmentunions and won, appointed a conservative SupremeCourt, and passed health care reform the right way— no mandates, no takeovers,” Pawlenty says in the30 -second advertisement. “If I can do it inMinnesota, we can do it in Washington.”

Although the Pawlenty Campaign says it is com-peting everywhere — including hiring political direc-tors in South Carolina, Florida, and NewHampshire — the reality is that Pawlenty needs tohave a strong showing at the straw poll in Ames,Iowa, in August and at the Iowa caucuses in January. Anything less than astrong second-place showing would doom Pawlenty’s candidacy.

Money — or a lack of it — could also doom Pawlenty’s run for the WhiteHouse. Campaign advisers acknowledge that fundraising has proved diffi-cult for Pawlenty. The Pawlenty campaign reported raising $4.2 million inthe second quarter — compared with $18.3 million by the Romney cam-paign. That’s another reason why winning Iowa is so important to Pawlentyand his path to the Republican presidential nomination. Win Iowa, and themoney will follow.

Standing in Pawlenty’s way in Iowa is a fellow Minnesotan and nativeIowan, Representative Michelle Bachmann. Now in her third term inCongress, the 55-year-old fiscal conservative has risen to prominence inlarge part due to her harsh attacks on President Obama and her courting ofthe Tea Party movement.

Prior to the first big Republican debate in June, many analysts sawBachmann as a fringe candidate for the Republican nomination and astand-in for Sarah Palin — because of their similar firebrand politics andpersonalities.

But the Minnesota congresswoman had what could be considered abreakout performance in that New Hampshire debate. She introduced her-self to voters as the mother of five children and the foster mother to 23 oth-ers. She positioned herself as “true conservative” who has at times taken on



The Pawlentycampaign raised$4.2 million in

the second quarter —

Romney raised$18.3 million.

28 Policy Review

the Republican establishment in Washington. And she struck a chord withRepublican voters.

“This election will be about economics,” said Bachmann. “It will beabout how will we create jobs, how will we turn the economy around, howwill we have a pro-growth economy? That’s a great story for Republicans totell. President Obama can’t tell that story. His report card right now has abig failing grade on it. Make no mistake about it; I want to announcetonight, President Obama is a one-term president!”

Her performance was called “dynamic” and “poised,” and her stock hasbeen rising ever since. Bachmann comes in a surprising second (behindRomney), with the support of 19 percent of likely Republican voters in a

new Rasmussen national telephone survey. Representative Bachmann’s native ties to Iowa

and her appeal to the Tea Party and religious conser-vatives, combined with her prodigious fundraising,make her a real threat to win the Iowa caucuses.That possibility has thrust Bachmann into the toptier of Republican presidential hopefuls.

The problem for Bachmann is that she has poororganization in Iowa — and for the caucusprocess, the so-called “ground-game” is every-thing. It’s what Tim Pawlenty has been building upfor the past eighteen months and it’s what Mitt

Romney has been looking to improve upon since losing Iowa to MikeHuckabee in 2008.

According to the Des Moines Register, Pawlenty has visited Iowa 30times in the last fifteen months, compared to Bachmann’s ten days in thestate during the same period. For Bachmann to position herself as the alter-native to Mitt Romney, she needs to win Iowa. Her entire candidacydepends upon a victory in the Hawkeye State.

Although Romney is organizing in the state, he is downplaying Iowa’simportance in his path to the nomination. Indicative of that is his decision toskip the Ames, Iowa, straw poll in August. That decision leaves Pawlentyand Bachmann as the frontrunners for winning the Iowa Caucuses. The win-ner in Iowa will then emerge as the best-positioned candidate to take onRomney in New Hampshire, which votes eight days later.

Like Pawlenty, Bachmann’s chances at winning the Republican nomina-tion hinges primarily on the Iowa caucuses. Lose here, and the path is not aclear one. Win here, however, and the momentum (and the money) follows.Still, even with a win, it’s not clear what states Bachmann sees as winnableafter Iowa — particularly when the Tea Party vote will be divided amongseveral candidates.

The White House, perhaps in a bit of electoral mischief, has been publiclyheaping praise on Bachmann — complimenting her performance in thedebate in New Hampshire — while privately deriding the quality of candi-

Jon Decker

According to the Des MoinesRegister,Pawlenty has visited Iowa 30times in the lastfifteen months.

dates on the Republican side. Because Bachmann is a lightning rod for vot-ers, she is seen as unlikely to have a strong appeal beyond Tea Party activistsand religious conservatives. As a result, the White House does not see her asa threat to President Obama’s chances for reelection — even with a weakU.S. economy.

The latest entry into the race for the Republican nomination, JonHuntsman Jr., has perhaps the most unique take on President Obama. Heused to work for him. The popular two-term governor of Utah served asObama’s ambassador to China until late August.

“I respect the president of the United States,” Huntsman said as heannounced his candidacy for the 2012 nomination at Liberty State Park inNew Jersey. “He and I have a difference of opinionon how to help a country we both love. But thequestion each of us wants the voters to answer iswho will be the better president; not who’s the betterAmerican.”

Huntsman is a media favorite — but then again,so was Donald Trump just two months earlier. He isalso little known to most Americans, describinghimself as a “margin of error” candidate, reflectingthe single digits he garners in most public opinionpolls. But the 51-year-old billionaire — who is con-sidered a moderate Republican — believes there is apath to the Republican presidential nomination. And because Huntsman isskipping the Iowa caucuses, that path depends heavily on independent vot-ers and starts in New Hampshire.

Although Huntsman has a record of tax cuts and opposition to abortionduring the eight years he served as Utah’s governor, he has also taken moder-ate positions on same-sex civil unions, immigration, and the environment.It’s those positions — plus the fact that he served in the Obama administra-tion — which make it difficult for Huntsman to find appeal among the con-servative base. That’s why New Hampshire, whose election rules allow inde-pendents to cast their ballots in the Republican primary, is key to his elec-toral strategy.

“[I] think, given the fluidity of the race in these early states, that we standa pretty good chance, and we’re putting that to the test,” said Huntsman inan interview with Politico.

For Huntsman, the blueprint is one that former California GovernorRonald Reagan followed in 1980 and Senator John McCain repeated in2008: Skip the Iowa caucuses; make a strong showing in New Hampshireand South Carolina (which also has an open primary); and follow that upwith a victory in Florida, the native state of his wife and the home to hiscampaign headquarters.

Although Huntsman has the fundraising ability to compete in those earlyprimary states, the problem is that unlike Reagan and McCain, he is running



Huntsman is amedia favorite— but then

again, so wasDonald Trumpjust two months

earlier.

a campaign in which he has positioned himself as a moderate. Moderateshave not had a good history in winning the Republican presidential nomina-tion. Just ask Rudy Giuliani, Richard Lugar, Lamar Alexander, or ArlenSpecter.

Interestingly, the White House has not lost any time attacking Huntsman— their former man in Beijing. “Governor Huntsman called for a morecompetitive and compassionate country, but he has embraced a budget planthat would slash our commitment to education, wipe out investments thatwill foster the jobs of the future, and extend tax cuts for the richestAmericans while shifting the burden onto seniors and middle class families,”the Obama campaign said on the same day Huntsman entered the presiden-

tial race.The Obama campaign and the Democratic

National Committee are keeping tabs on Huntsman(as well as Romney and Pawlenty), reflecting theseriousness with which they regard his candidacy. IfHuntsman can somehow secure the Republicanpresidential nomination, the White House sees himas the type of mainstream candidate who could gotoe to toe with Obama in a handful of traditionallyred states (such as North Carolina, Virginia, andIndiana) that the president turned blue in 2008.Getting the nomination, though, is the tough part.

Four other candidates have taken formal steps to enter the Republicanpresidential primaries: Former Godfather’s Pizza ceo Herman Cain; formerHouse Speaker Newt Gingrich; U.S. Representative from Texas Ron Paul;and former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. Their chances of winning a presi-dential primary, let alone the Republican presidential nomination, areremote. The White House and the Obama campaign team in Chicago donot consider their candidacies a threat to unseating the president.

Radio talk-show host Herman Cain, who was chairman of the FederalReserve Bank of Kansas City’s board of directors, has never been electedto political office. Despite the lack of political experience, Cain has faredsurprisingly well in some early presidential polls. Rasmussen puts him atten percent and the nbc/Wall Street Journal poll has him at twelve per-cent among likely Republican voters. He has also been a frequent gueston Fox News — which has helped his voter id among Republican voters.However, unless Tea Party activists and religious conservatives coalescearound Cain in Iowa — a scenario that is very unlikely — there appearsto be no discernable path for Cain to be the 2012 Republican presidentialnominee.

Newt Gingrich’s candidacy went into free fall June 9th, when his seniorcampaign staff resigned en masse. Two weeks later, Gingrich’s nationalfinance chairman resigned. The mass exodus followed reports that theGingrich campaign is already $1 million in debt.

Jon Decker

Interestingly, the White House has not lost anytime attackingHuntsman —their former man in Beijing.

30 Policy Review

The 68-year-old former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives hastried to run a campaign based upon his track record of helping to balancethe federal budget in the mid-1990s. Instead, Gingrich has spent much ofhis time on the defensive. Since he announced his candidacy, the religiousright has criticized his personal life. The former congressman from Georgiais married to wife number three, with whom he had an affair while marriedto wife number two. An appearance on nbc’s Meet the Press in which hecriticized House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s Medicare reformplan led to an apology days later after criticism by fellow conservatives.Making matters worse: revelations that Gingrich, a fiscal conservative, owedmore than $500,000 to Tiffany’s. Gingrich will be lucky if he’s still aroundfor the Iowa caucuses in early February of 2012.

Rick Santorum’s prospects are also gloomy. Oncea leading Senate Republican, the 53-year-old wasbeaten by eighteen points in his bid for a third U.S.Senate term in 2006 . Santorum has touted hisunwavering opposition to abortion rights and gaymarriage during his years in Congress — in anappeal to social conservatives. Although Santorumwon informal Republican straw polls in NewHampshire and South Carolina, the reality is thatthe native Pennsylvanian has not caught fire. Heremains in the low single digits in recent publicopinion polls and is unlikely to win the a majority of the social conservativesand Tea Party activists that he has steadfastly courted. Like Gingrich, thereal question is whether his campaign even makes it to Iowa in February.

Finally, although he was not a factor in his last run for the Republicannomination in 2008, Congressman Ron Paul is running once again. The75-year-old, antiwar libertarian is known as “the intellectual godfather ofthe Tea Party.” Paul has had an unwavering record of calling for deep cuts inthe federal deficit and cutting the size of the federal government. A just-released Des Moines Register poll of likely participants in the state’sRepublican presidential caucuses has Paul garnering seven percent —putting him in a tie for fourth place with Gingrich. With Paul unlikely towin any Republican primary, his presence in the race for the nomination willlikely only divide the vote of those who identify themselves first and fore-most as Tea Party supporters.

Because Republican primary voters have not yet coalesced around thecurrent front-runner, Romney, it has created a possible opportunity forthree-term Texas Governor Rick Perry. Perry, as of this writing, has notdeclared his candidacy but has been flirting with a run. The nation’s longest-serving governor, a former Air Force pilot, has a compelling-enough storythat he could shake up the nominating process.

For Perry, the pros of a presidential run are many. His aides boast of thesuccess of the Texas economy. Since the economic recovery began in June



Gingrich will be lucky if he’s

still around whenthe Iowa caucuses

take place in early February

of 2012.

32 Policy Review

2009, Texas has created 37 percent of America’s new jobs. Its unemploy-ment rate of eight percent is a full percentage point lower than the nationalaverage. In addition, Team Perry also claims that the 61-year-old governor,with his pro-life and pro-guns record, could unite social conservatives andTea Party followers.

But Perry has a number of liabilities — chief among them a late entryinto the race. Other candidates have been campaigning for months (if notyears), building organizations in numerous states and raising millions incampaign cash. Although he’d be playing catch-up, getting in at such atlate stage has been done before. Bill Clinton entered the race for theDemocratic nomination in October of 1991. On the other hand, formerTennessee Senator Fred Thompson declared himself an official candidatein September of 2007. That run went nowhere. Should Perry throw hishat in the ring, the White House is prepared to hammer home the themethat the country is not ready for another Texas Republican after two termsof George W. Bush.

Electability

P olls show that whichever candidate emerges as the 2012Republican nominee will have a very good chance to defeat U.S.President Barack Obama. A mid-June Bloomberg Poll found that

only 30 percent of respondents said they are certain to vote for the presi-dent; among likely independent voters, only 23 percent said they wouldback his reelection. Those numbers are the reason why the Republican presi-dential nomination in this election cycle is so valuable. If the 2012 electionbecomes a referendum on the president’s job performance — particularly inimproving the nation’s economy — Republicans will be in a very good posi-tion to make Obama a one-term president. Of course, even with a weakeconomy, a growing federal budget deficit, and declining approval ratingsfor the president, nothing’s a certainty for Republicans.

Should Republican primary voters choose a nominee who cannot appealto independents and moderate Democrats, President Obama, despite all theheadwinds he faces, will likely win another term.

Senator Harry Reid’s reelection race in November 2010 should beinstructive to Republican voters. Despite Nevada’s fourteen percent unem-ployment rate; despite the highest bankruptcy rate in the country; despitethe highest home foreclosure rate in the country; Harry Reid won anothersix years in the U.S. Senate (and by a comfortable 5.6 percent margin).The reason: Sharron Angle. The Tea Party-backed Republican made noeffort to reach out to independent voters or disaffected Democrats.Similarly, if the 2012 Republican nominee is someone who is portrayedby the mainstream media as extreme or overly partisan, Team Obama willhave won half the battle. Harry Reid beat the odds and won a fifth term in

Jon Decker

a state battered by a bad economy. He won because he made Angle theissue, not the economy. Should the gop have such a flawed nominee astheir standard-bearer in 2012, President Barack Obama will likely followthat same Reid blueprint to victory.





Failing Liberty 101 How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society

By William Damon The most serious danger the United States now faces, says William Damon, is not that of a foreign enemy but that our country’s future may end up in the hands of a citizenry incapable of sustaining the liberty that has been America’s most precious legacy. In Failing Liberty 101, he argues that we are failing to prepare today’s young people to be responsible American citizens—to the detriment of their life prospects and those of liberty in the United States of the future. He identi�es the problems—the declines in civic purpose and patriotism, crises of faith, cynicism, self-absorption, ignorance, indi�erence to the common good—and shows that our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible e�ect on the attitudes, understanding, and behavior of large portions of the youth in our country today.

Damon explains why, unless we begin to pay attention and meet our challenge as stewards of a priceless heritage, our nation and the future prospects of all individuals dwelling here in years to come will su�er, moving away from liberty and toward despotism—and this movement will be both inevitable and astonishingly quick.

William Damon is a professor of education at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. For the past twenty years, Damon has written on character development at all ages of human life, most recently The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life (2008).

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The initial military successes in Iraq and Afghanistanwere overcome by protracted insurgencies and politicalinstability, resulting in tenuous gains in democratic develop-ment that came at an enormous cost. The United States isfast approaching a decade at war.

In these current conditions of political and military fatigue, a U.S. inva-sion of Iran seems unlikely; however, the Iranian regime’s pursuit of nuclearweapons and its fierce anti-Americanism create the imperative to consider afuture where diplomatic and economic coercion is exhausted, and nooptions remain other than military action. Should a war become necessary,lessons learned during the Coalition occupation of Iraq can be instructionalfor conjecture on a post-invasion Iran. The similarities are many: repressiveleadership, a brutal security apparatus, and a society in search of opportuni-ty, social mobility, and political inclusion. Ethnicity and sectarianism playkey roles both in public and in private life. And although Iraqi Baathism dif-

Invading Iran: Lessonsfrom IraqBy Leif Eckholm

Lieutenant Colonel Leif Eckholm, USAF, works in the Strategic Plans and PolicyDirectorate (J5) for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pentagon, wherehe focuses on issues pertinent to the Arabian Peninsula. Prior to this, he servedas a national defense fellow at the Hoover Institution.


36 Policy Review

fers drastically from Islamism, parallels exist in their use of oppression andstate control. These key similarities and distinctions between government,society, and security in Iraq and Iran, in light of Iraq’s immediate pre- andpost-war environment, can illuminate the major challenges of shaping thepeace in a post-war Iran.

Government, society, and security in Iraq

C oalition efforts to establish a democratic Iraqi governmentencountered societal challenges from the beginning. The Bushadministration operated under the impression that after Coalition

forces toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraqis would welcome the liberators. Thistheory was only partly true, and the part that was true was fleeting. Of the27 million Iraqis, 18.5 percent are Sunni Arabs and 55 percent are Shia —or, in the words of Hassan al-Alawi, the country is divided between the “sectof the rulers” (the former) and the “sect of the ruled.” The fall of SaddamHussein brought an end to Sunni Arab glory, and for them, there was no lib-eration in that. A sense of liberation did sweep over the Shia, and the Kurdsas well, who comprise nearly 20 percent of the population, but it was short-lived. The envisioned embrace of democracy, freedom, and equality was sup-planted by the distrust and suspicion that many Iraqis had for foreign occu-piers and for indigenous rival sects and ethnicities. The Coalition that sweptaway the regime could do nothing to assuage the pain caused by the massgraves filled with victims of Saddam’s brutality — a malice that left over150,000 Shia dead, an estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages destroyed, 1.5million people displaced, and up to 180,000 Kurds killed under orders ofSaddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid. As summer replaced spring in 2003,retribution among separate Iraqi social classes emerged, and internecine vio-lence increased as Iraqis settled old scores in the absence of law and order.Without ample military forces or a coherent plan to protect the population,security in Iraq disintegrated, and the liberators morphed into occupiers,rekindling memories of the British occupation after World War I during theformation of the modern Iraqi state.

A study of this period reveals a historical Iraqi loathing for occupationand a proclivity for heightened sectarian animosity relative to other Islamicsocieties. In April 1920, the League of Nations mandated that Britain pre-pare Iraq for self-rule. Having endured British occupation since 1914, mostIraqis were not receptive to an indefinite extension of colonial administra-tion, and in defiance, on June 30, 1920, Iraq embarked upon a six-month,Shia-inspired insurrection against the British. The British, reports WilliamRoe Polk in his book Understanding Iraq, lost 1,654 men and spent sixtimes what they had spent during their entire World War I Middle East cam-paign. Horrified by the losses and the financial drain, the British taste for apresence in Iraq soured. They put in motion a series of measures that would

Leif Eckholm

grant Iraq a shaky independence in 1932. They established a Sunni-ledmonarchy and filled key posts with Sunnis; this alienated the Shia communi-ty from the new Iraqi government, a trend that endured until 2003. Theseearly years of state development were characterized by Sunni cronyism,patronage, and volatility, culminating in the overthrow of the British-installed monarchy in 1958. A decade of immense political and social insta-bility ensued, ending as the Iraqi Baath party seized power in 1968. Saddamsoon emerged as its leader, and his ruthless consolidation of Sunni powerhidden under a veneer of Baathist ideology capped 82 years of authoritariangovernment littered with war, repression, corruption, and intrigue. Placedagainst this backdrop, the power shift associated with the Shia politicalascendancy after the fall of Saddam made buildingtrust, democracy, and stability in Iraq extremelyproblematic.

The historical relevance of this social and politicalturmoil was misunderstood, and this led to an envi-ronment where planning for post-war Iraq waslargely overlooked. In sheer numbers, the “severalhundred thousand soldiers” that General Shinseki,then Army chief of staff, recommended to Congressto establish security in postwar Iraq was rebuffed onthe Hill two days later by Deputy Defense SecretaryPaul Wolfowitz, who stated that such numbers were“widely off the mark.” From a planning perspective, occupying a country,dismantling its government, and rebuilding its institutions are clearly chal-lenges that require extensive integration between civilian and militarybranches, but the opposite happened. A holistic approach between theDepartments of Defense and State was never defined. In his book Fiasco,Thomas Ricks points out that the first and only time the entire interagencyconvened, at the operator level, to discuss in detail integration of postwaractivities was not until February 21, 2003, just four weeks before combatcommenced with a force of 145,000 troops, well below General Shinseki’srecommended level. In lieu of exhaustive postwar planning, a higher thanwarranted reliance was placed upon the advice of various Iraqi exiles, all ofwhom were divided in their individual views and interests.

With the invasion looming, exiled Iraqi opposition groups in America,Europe, and Iran, as well as Kurds living in northern Iraq, ramped up theirefforts to jockey for power in postwar Iraq. Each had its own idea for thefuture political framework, and it soon became clear that visions of the newIraq differed greatly among exiles. From this disunited exiled front, the Bushadministration selected a 65-person committee that would, according to AliAllawi, a former exile who served in the Iraqi government early during theoccupation, “place a mantle of legitimacy” on the opposition. A six-manleadership council was also formed, composed of Jalal Talabani, MassoudBarzani, Ahmed Chalabi, Abdul el-Aziz al-Hakim, Ayad Allawi, and Adnan


Invading Iran: Lessons from Iraq

As the invasionof Iraq loomed,

exiled Iraqiopposition

groups beganto jockey for

power.

38 Policy Review

Pachachi. Subsequently, these six men served on the 25-member IraqiGoverning Council, which was established by and served under the UnitedStates-led Coalition Provisional Authority (cpa). But as the GoverningCouncil began to overhaul the Sunni-dominated system under the gaze ofthe cpa, the legitimacy of the exiles proved weaker than expected.

Many of these cpa-backed exiles suffered from the skepticism aroused bytheir extended absence and triumphant return, riding into Iraq on the heelsof an American conquest. While serving in Iraq in late 2003 to help its tran-sition to democracy, Larry Diamond observed this frustration during a pub-lic session in Balad when a man in the crowd declared, “The members of theGoverning Council do not represent the Iraqi people,” and his remark

brought the loudest ovation of the day. To hardcoreIraqi nationalists, the former exile groups with cpaendorsement evoked the historical memory ofBritish occupation; hence, the Governing Council’slegitimacy was inherently stained. The exiles carriedweight in the Green Zone, however, and their influ-ence there prompted three key decisions, whichevoked sharp criticism for their contribution to thebreakdown in security and intensification of theinsurgency: de-Baathification, disbanding the mili-tary, and institutionalizing an ethno-sectarian quotasystem for power-sharing in the new government. cpa Order 1 , entitled “De-Ba’athification of

Iraqi Society,” removed the four top echelons of the membership of theparty from all government posts and banned their future employment in thepublic sector. To Sunni Arabs, this signaled that Shia and Kurdish exilegroups had the ear of the cpa and that a Shia power grab was in motion,with full American support. Although dismantling the party and its politicalinstitutions was a necessity, the impartiality of its application toward mem-bers regardless of party loyalty prompted a wave of Iraqi middle-classmigration, which was unfortunate since not all of them were die-hardSaddam loyalists. Many of the newly disenfranchised Sunni technocrats,professionals, government officials, and bureaucrats joined the Baath Partyto gain perks and create a better life, in some cases to survive, and theycould have played key roles in the new Iraq. Instead, they migrated to neigh-boring countries amid the Shia political ascendency and the emerging sectar-ian crisis. The more extreme elements went underground to join the Sunniinsurgency. cpa Order 2 unilaterally disbanded the armed forces, the Republican

Guard units, the intelligence and security services, and their associated min-istries. This decision represented a misunderstanding of the society and thesecurity apparatus in Iraq. Aside from the security services and the 25,000-strong Special Republican Guard forces loyal to Saddam, most of the400,000 military rank-and-file were Shia and Sunnis loyal to Iraq. And

Leif Eckholm

CPA Order 1removed the fourtop echelons ofthe membershipof the BaathParty from allgovernmentposts.

although the army predominantly consisted of conscripts and officers whoseprofessional abilities and privileges had suffered under the sanctions regime,it was still a respected institution and vital to the Iraqi identity. Loss of selfand dignity accompanied the loss of livelihood when the army was dis-solved. True, a large portion of this military disappeared as the invasioncommenced, but when the dust settled, they were not called back. Ratherthan attempting to employ Iraq’s army, or portions of it, to help theCoalition protect the population against Salafists, hardcore Baathists, andIraqi nationalists, it was disbanded. The Coalition thus could not initiallycheck the influx of foreign jihadists or discern the evil from the innocent in away that native Iraqis might have. The Coalition remained the sole securityguarantor while undermanned for the postwarchaos. This resource deficiency and cultural divideprompted heavy-handed treatment of Iraqi civilians,which, according to Ahmed Hashim, author ofIraq’s Sunni Insurgency, exacerbated and perpetuat-ed the Sunni rebellion.

As violence swept across Iraq, the cpa and theformer exiles controlled the nascent government for-mation inside the Green Zone. In light of thesupreme complexity of the postwar environment,and considering that Iraq had no prior experience ofdemocracy, the pace was aggressive. In less than twoyears, an interim constitution would be written andadopted, an interim government would be chosenthrough a complex system of caucuses, a constitutional assembly would bedirectly elected, a permanent constitution would be drafted and approved byassembly and ratified by popular referendum, and a permanent governmentwould be elected for a four-year term. An early handoff of sovereignty to anIraqi body helped the Shia-based former exile groups solidify their powergains, but in the rush to form a government, Shia and Kurdish leaders influ-enced the cpa to institutionalize identity politics and adopt a quota system ofgovernment, which divided Iraq permanently along ethnic and sectarian lines.

This development exacerbated the previously muted sectarian discordinherent to Iraqi society. No longer repressed by Baathist secularism, a reli-gious-based political awakening began to spread across Arab Iraq. Whencombined with Kurdish demands to codify protection against future abusesof central power, political discourse in Baghdad fragmented. Although theethno-religious schisms along Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish lines were pre-dictable, the further fracturing within sects along disparate political ideolo-gies was surprising, the most notable of which emerged among, but was notrestricted to, the followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the youngercleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.

After twelve years of house arrest under Saddam Hussein, the promi-nence of Grand Ayatollah Sistani in the political arena signaled that the



Violence sweptacross Iraq as

the CPA and the former exiles

controlled thegovernment

formation insidethe Green Zone.

40 Policy Review

Shia, after thirteen centuries of political repression, would demand thelion’s share of power in the new Iraq. As the most respected Shia religiousscholar and jurist in the country, he commanded unparalleled religiousauthority and political influence. Unlike the dominant religious thread inneighboring Iran, however, Sistani endorsed representative democracy; con-sequently, many of the Shia-led exile groups sought Sistani’s endorsement tobolster their legitimacy.

The emergence of Muqtada al-Sadr signaled something altogether differ-ent. A young cleric lacking the religious clout of Sistani, he rallied support ofthe urban poor around the banners of Shia Islamism and fierce opposition toforeign occupation. Next to Sistani’s quietism and support of representativedemocracy, his fiery activism and Islamist ideology stood in stark contrast.Discord between these Shia rivals and their followers played out politicallyduring Iraqi elections and violently on the streets of Iraq. Sunni cohesion ini-tially suffered a similar fate. Unorganized in the new political disorder anddeeply suspicious of the Shia revival, Sunnis lacked strong leadership, andthey began to splinter along Baathist, Islamist, nationalist, and tribal lines.

As inter- and intra-sectarian tensions deepened, the security environmentdeclined. To make matters substantially worse, the horrific violence leviedon Shia communities by Sunni Salifi Jihadists, best-characterized by Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, sparked an explosion of sectarian bloodshed. In themidst of an escalating Sunni-Shia civil war, Iraqis were voting along thesesame sectarian schisms, deepening the divide. Thus, the predominant Sunni-Shia division worsened as a result of holding democratic elections beforepolitical consolidation was achieved. Seven years after the fall of Saddam,the effects were still visible in the wake of the March 2010 parliamentaryelections, where this institutionalized identity-based political system para-lyzed the Iraqi government formation for over eight months, and its futureremains fragile and uncertain.

Government, society, and security in Iran

I n 1979, ayatollah Khomeini led a revolution that sweptMohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi from power. Khomeini mobilized aradical religious movement against the Shah by depicting his

Western-leaning secular domestic and foreign policies as anathema to Iran’straditional culture and Shia identity. To strengthen the movement, he con-vinced more moderate elements to join the revolutionary vanguard bypromising to replace autocratic leadership with representative government.In the years that followed, however, Khomeini ignored his democraticpromises. Instead, he marginalized, purged, or executed his opposition, andhe established a Shia theocracy with himself at the head. Once he controlledthe levers of military force, Khomeini secured the survival of clerical rule,and he consolidated power within it. Real political power is wielded through

Leif Eckholm

a system of clerical councils which collectively rule above the fray of elec-toral politics. Even though a president and parliament are popularly elected,the candidates, their platforms, and the laws they pass must meet theapproval of these powerful mullahs. In the end, Khomeini did not deliverdemocracy, but the hope for it survived in many Iranians, quietly, beyondthe reach of the regime’s oppression. Over the years, inflation, unemploy-ment, and recession resulting from a chronic crisis of efficiency have led to asteady decline in the political legitimacy of Iran’s clerical elite. Popular dis-satisfaction to this effect boiled over in the aftermath of the 2009 Iranianpresidential elections.

In June 2009 the world witnessed the largest mass mobilization of oppo-sition in Iran since the 1979 Islamic ReJvolution.President Ahmadinejad, the incumbent hardliner,prevailed over the reformist front-runner MirHossein Moussavi amid widespread accusations ofvoter fraud. When Supreme Leader AyatollahKhamenei prematurely endorsed the election results,millions of people flooded the streets to protest theelection rigging. According to one of post-revolu-tionary Iran’s key political thinkers, HosseinBashiriyeh, the apparent collusion of the supremeleader irreversibly undermined the religious legitima-cy of the Islamic government, and it validated thepolitical frustration felt predominantly by the urban middle classes, whoconsider their vote to be of no consequence in the political system. In orderto silence the popular unrest, in typical fashion the regime unleashed a bru-tal wave of repression. It succeeded in quelling the uprising, but it escalatedthe enmity between the ruler and the ruled, and many Iranians who dreamof regime change longed for the world to show its support. Here a valuablelesson can be drawn from the Iraq experience. Iran’s popular desperationshould not be construed as an invitation for outside military intervention.American forces should not expect a liberator’s adoration. Like Iraq, Iran’ssimilar experiences with foreign control during modern state formation gavebirth to an enduring sense of nationalism that could render foreign armiesunwelcome and likewise undermine an extended modern-day occupation.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, British and Russian interests inIran revolved around its strategic location, trade, and oil. Repeatedlythroughout this time period, the ruling monarch entered into treaties andgranted concessions to foreign powers that engendered an increased foreignpresence and filled the royal coffers, yet penalized Iranian citizens’ individualeconomic interests. As a result, the merchant class aligned with the religiousulama to protest on the grounds of economic distress and Islamic principle.This marked the emergence of religious politics in modern Iran as well asnationalism predicated on anti-British and anti-Russian encroachment. Warand strategic interests provoked a Western presence until the Islamic



In June 2009the world

witnessed thelargest mass

mobilization ofopposition in Iran

since 1979.

Revolution in 1979, and throughout this period a strong sense of Iraniannationalism fueled a popular discontent. Similar to the Iraq experience,against the historical backdrop of ardent opposition to foreign domination,any consent to a modern-day occupation would be short-lived. The occupa-tion unfortunately would not. Drawing further conclusions from Iraq,invading forces would need to be prepared for a deeply embedded andenduring insurgency, due to extreme challenges presented by terrain, resolve,and the security apparatus present in Iran.

Admittedly, an American-led invasion of Iran is unlikely. During a speechat West Point in February 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates madethe claim that any future defense secretary who advises the president to

again send a big American land army into Asia orinto the Middle East or Africa should have his headexamined. Should tensions over nuclear ambitionsrise to the point of military intervention, an air cam-paign seems a more likely course of action. Militaryairstrikes provide a stand-off capability that couldseverely hamper or delay Iran’s march towardsweapon production without bearing the cost ofoccupation and reconstruction, but not without aprice of its own. Targeting the key nuclear infra-structure sites like the Bushehr Research Reactor, theArak Heavy-Water Reactor/Plutonium SeparationFacility, the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Plant, andthe Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center would cer-tainly be a major setback to Iran’s nuclear ambi-

tions, but the regime has devoted considerable effort to hide, diversify, andprotect its nuclear assets, and the regime’s determination to acquire nuclearweapons actually may well increase after such a strike. Furthermore, theregime would remain in place and likely benefit from a nationalistic reactionthat would strengthen domestic political support. Proponents of a morecomprehensive military intervention will argue that a full-scale invasion isthe only means by which to crush the regime and its military apparatus,guarantee total elimination of the Iranian nuclear enterprise, and create awindow for democratic change. But the price of invasion would be astro-nomical, and the nationalistic reaction would be fierce; thus, the projectedcost in life and treasure must be weighed against the envisioned, yet unpre-dictable, advantages of a new regime in Tehran.

In his book The Persian Puzzle, Kenneth Pollack makes a strong caseagainst invading Iran by way of comparison to Operation Iraqi Freedom.Iran has triple the population, four times the land mass, vast mountainranges and deserts, large cities, formidable guerrilla forces, all of which com-bine to produce an ideal landscape for a highly effective and protractedinsurgency. Trained Iranian guerillas could inflict heavy damage on occupa-tion forces along lengthy supply lines through harsh terrain and as they

Leif Eckholm

Iran has triplethe populationand four timesthe land mass ofIraq; it has vastmountain rangesand deserts andformidable guerrilla forces.

42 Policy Review

move through crowded city streets. Pollack also points out that requiredtroop levels in this occupation scenario, using the equation of one soldier per50 inhabitants that General Shinseki utilized in his Iraq pre-war assessment,rise above 1.4 million troops, nearly double the current end-strength of theactive duty U.S. Army and Marines combined. Even if this number is halved,absent a provocation of Desert Storm proportions prompting a massiveCoalition and full-scale activation of U.S. Guard and Reserve forces, provid-ing the troop levels required to completely dominate the security environ-ment is improbable, creating a high risk of insurgent effectiveness. This riskcan be mitigated by anticipating an insurgency this time around, allowingcivilian and military planners to apply a counterinsurgency doctrine fromthe onset of hostilities. But understanding whatspawns insurgency and predicting its players arevital to successful planning.

In the wake of a foreign invasion, the religioussectarianism that ripped Iraq apart would occur on afar lesser scale. In Iraq, the Sunni Arab minorityruthlessly held power over a Shia majority, but inIran, the Shia represent 89 percent of the popula-tion, and this majority sect rules. Further, foreignIslamic extremists that of the kind that poisoned Iraqare ill-positioned to create another sectarian battle-ground, since the wave of radical Salafists that camefrom neighboring Sunni Arab states would find norefuge across Iran’s Persian-Shia landscape.Repressed ethnic grievances, however, do create a concern. Aside from thePersian majority, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Baluchis, and Lorsmake up half of Iran’s 70 million people, and their sense of discriminationand deprivation vis-à-vis the regime in Tehran is widespread, giving cause forsome of the most severe ethnic violence in Iran’s modern history. Separatistmovements could arise from an implosion of the central government, andviolent reprisals avenging longstanding state-sanctioned abuses are likely.Occupation forces must consider these ethnic enclaves as highly volatile andmove swiftly to establish security to prevent a repeat of the ethnic and sectar-ian redressing that occurred in Iraq’s lawless days after Saddam’s demise.These disputes over sect and ethnicity will not monopolize the conflict, how-ever, as blood will shed most readily over the Revolutionary ideology,between those willing to abandon it and those resolved to defend it at allcosts.

Occupation forces in Iran would experience the greatest resistance fromthose with the most to lose — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps(irgc) loyal to the ruling clerics, and its force multiplier in societal intimida-tion, the Basij militia. The 120,000 strong irgc was originally establishedby Ayatollah Khomeini as an independent military wing to counterbalancethe conventional military and defend the regime against internal threats to



Occupationforces in Irancould expect

fierce resistance from

the IslamicRevolutionaryGuard Corps.

44 Policy Review

the Revolution. Since then, it has evolved into a ruthless and effectivemachine of domestic repression. They are well-equipped, and preparationsfor a U.S. invasion would involve an elaborate dispersal of substantial mili-tary arsenals. Seamlessly blending into society, transitioning with easebetween the roles of citizen and insurgent, well-versed in paramilitary activi-ty and domestic intimidation, the irgc would present considerable chal-lenges to an occupying force, both directly and indirectly by way ofinternecine violence. According to a 2010 rand report, the Basij claimactive numbers near 300,000 and a mobilization capability of five millionor more, and they have proven extremely loyal to the Islamic governmentthroughout its tenure. At Khomeini’s urging, the Basij demonstrated unyield-

ing allegiance to the Revolution during the Iran-Iraqwar, clearing minefields ahead of military forces inhuman sacrificial waves. Today, they are every-where, and they possess a notorious ability to intim-idate the population into submission. In the presentage of suicide bombers, a tiny fraction of Basij mili-tiamen with like resolve could produce a highlypotent operational effect.

A foreign invasion would most likely prompt theirgc and Basij to commence insurgent activitiesfrom the onset of military engagement. Falling backbehind an advancing army and attacking logisticsand communication lines is representative of Iran’snational defense strategy of drawing out a cam-paign, inflicting high costs, and wearing out the

invading forces by attrition. The likelihood of co-opting the irgc to assistwith security in a postwar environment where regime change and democra-cy replace the revolutionary order is low. However, blunting or bifurcatingan irgc-led insurgency should be attempted by exploiting existing faction-alism, appealing to pragmatism, and applying another valuable lessonlearned in Iraq.

The irgc has evolved over time. Once exclusively security-minded, it hasnow made extensive inroads into the political and economic fabric ofIranian society. It oversees or owns important interests in oil and gas, min-ing, transportation, defense, agriculture, and construction, with net worthwell into the billions of dollars. In the 2008 parliamentary elections theirgc captured about a third of the seats. President Ahmadinejad himselfwas at one time a commander in the irgc. According to rand, the result-ing reality is that the irgc is now a factionalized entity, consisting of anolder, more security-conscious generation intent on preserving the regime,and a group of younger, business-oriented members, rising in power andinfluence, open to a less-confrontational worldview. Regime change wouldcreate winners and losers, and exploiting personal interest and factionalismduring a period of upheaval might sway key irgc figures, prominent in

Leif Eckholm

At Khomeini’surging, the Basijdemonstratedunyielding allegiance to theRevolution during fightingbetween Iran and Iraq.

business and politics, to abandon the Revolutionary order and invest in anew republic. Therefore, a blanket repeat of “de-Baathification” applied tothe irgc should be avoided if possible. Disbanding the irgc as a paramili-tary force is critical, but banning government officials affiliated with theirgc, past or present, would ostracize key players in important public andprivate institutions. It could stimulate a migration of professionals and tech-nocrats and drive a significant number of them underground, leaving nooption but armed resistance. Unfortunately, the extent to which irgc mem-bers would choose political reconciliation over armed resistance is uncertain.More likely is the likely rejection by many ordinary Iranians of such anarrangement. After decades of irgc cruelty and corruption, reconciliationmay prove incomprehensible, but until the irgclays down arms, peace will be untenable.

As for the Basij, when planning the counterinsur-gency, they should not be underestimated; yet,according to Abbas Milani, head of Iranian studiesat Stanford University, they should not be overesti-mated either. Like the irgc, even among this res-olute stratum there is potential for fracture. Forsome, the revolutionary fire of Khomeini’s era hasextinguished. Now the material world, as much asheaven’s promise, motivates Basij involvement.Much like Baath party membership brought accessto higher pay and certain other perks, Basij trainingis an avenue to obtain loans, scholarships, subsidies,and other advantages. In the face of overwhelmingAmerican firepower, their resolve could fade, and economic incentives couldprove effective in motivating counterinsurgent behavior among the Basij.Providing these incentives and disincentives to the irgc and Basij are impor-tant lessons from cpa Order 1, but persuading Iran’s conventional military,the Artesh, to assist in post-war security is a lesson learned from cpa Order2, and would be a course of action worth pursuing.

Unlike Iraqi conventional forces, many of whom disappeared as the warcommenced, the 350,000-member Iranian conventional force should beexpected, initially at least, to resist a foreign invasion. But the army, theArtesh, is significantly outclassed by Coalition firepower, so conventionalresistance against heavily armed forces would be brief. Dissuading the mem-bers of the Artesh from joining an underground insurgency should be thetop priority. It is worth noting that the professional army mounted severalcoup attempts in 1980, but they ended in failure, and high-ranking officersand opposition forces were purged from its ranks shortly after the IslamicRevolution. Since that time, the Artesh has largely retained an apolitical alle-giance to the state, a characteristic defined under the Shah and continuedunder Ayatollah Khomeini. During the uprising in June 2009, there wereeven reports that members of the Artesh refused their orders to violently



Unlike in Iraq,the 350,000-

member Iranianconventional

force should beexpected, initially

at least, toresist a foreign

invasion.

46 Policy Review

repress the demonstration, leaving the dirty work to the irgc. Therefore,once Coalition military forces inevitably overcome the Artesh, take Tehran,and unseat the clerical regime, an attempt to co-opt the Artesh is in order.Gradually marginalized since the Revolution by the rise of the irgc, under-paid and under-resourced by comparison, they are neither revered nordetested in Iran, making them a prime target for co-opting. Their assistancein establishing security might be acquired by providing higher pay and insti-tutional survival, and promising a return to military preeminence in the newIran. Driving these wedges between the conventional and paramilitary secu-rity forces is essential to securing the people and establishing enough spacefor political maneuvering.

Crossing into the political arena, a bifurcatingstrategy that targets the ruling clerical establishmentis just as critical, for it too is a house divided. Forover a century, Iran’s ulama, have debated the prop-er role of religion in politics. Some Iranian ayatol-lahs, similar to Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, subscribe to“Quietism,” where religion rules the spiritual realm,and clerics merely guide temporal leaders in theirquest to rule justly in accordance to Islam. For them,democracy best facilitates this pact. Others, likeKhamenei, and Khomeini before him, hold fast tothe idea of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of thejurist), where a government with supreme power inthe hands of Islamic jurists is mandated. Ayatollah

Khamenei knows this rift between religious thought is paramount to Iran’spolitical future. Beginning in October 2010, he travelled four times fromTehran to Qom, the center of Islamic learning in Iran, where according toAlamal Hoda, a close associate of Khamenei, he tried to put down an insur-rection in the seminaries 100 times more serious than the insurrection in thestreets. Attempting to eliminate clerics from the political discourse woulddemonstrate a gross misunderstanding of this religious schism and theopportunities it presents. It’s vital to differentiate between the religious legiti-macy that many of these ulama still possess, akin to that of Ayatollah Sistaniin Iraq, from the waning political legitimacy, due to ineffective and repres-sive government, of those currently in power. Allowing top quietist andreformist ayatollahs, who, like Sistani, support democracy, to enter a newpolitical discourse is fundamental to the legitimization of government in thepost-Revolutionary era.

There is a true silver lining, and it exists in the strong constitutional legacyin Iran and the democratic undercurrent present in society since theConstitutional Revolution roughly a hundred years ago. During this period,a powerful alliance between merchants, clerics, and the intelligentsia forcedconstitutional limitations on a ruling monarch, heretofore unprecedented inthe Middle East. The intent of the movement was to codify a true constitu-

Leif Eckholm

In an invasion of Iran, drivingwedges between the conventional and paramilitarysecurity forceswould beessential.

tional monarchy, requiring legislative approval on important matters of statesuch as foreign loans and treaties, and to guarantee personal rights and free-doms. Initial success was short-lived, however, as absolute power migratedback to the Shah, but the Constitution and the Parliament, or the Majles,have survived, and they symbolize to the politically disenfranchised the lostpromise of genuine democracy. Akin to America’s reverence for itsConstitution, many Iranians romanticize the constitutional revolutionaryperiod and aspire to revitalize this vision if freed from the suffocatingoppression of the ruling clerics and the revolutionary guards. Furthermore,the democratic veneer in Iran, preserved in legislative and presidential elec-tions since 1979 — albeit restricted, but largely free from corruption until2009 — opens the possibility that democratic institutions, legitimate popu-lar sovereignty, and the passage of a new constitution could go moresmoothly in Iran once proper security is established to create the necessarypolitical space. Here lies the role of the opposition.

The uprisings after the 2009 presidential elections demonstrated the legit-imate existence in Iran of a political opposition willing to work within ademocratic framework yet frustrated by the complete absence of a socialcontract between the rulers and the ruled. This should encourage would-beinterventionists to avoid picking a winner from the vast Persian diaspora asplanning for a postwar political solution unfolds. For those willing, Iranianexiles can provide great value in terms of cultural knowledge, language assis-tance, institution building, and the strengthening of civil society. Some couldoffer important links to current members in government and security, pro-viding avenues to communicate and encourage participation in a new order.There will be ample opportunity for exiles to return and participate in gov-ernment, but any political capital they wield must be self-acquired. Lessonsfrom Iraq suggest that legitimacy of political figures dependent on foreignbacking will come under pressure as parties compete for power in theemerging system. However democracy materializes as a byproduct of regimechange, it must be left up to the Iranian opposition to shape it.

Learning lessons

A s the sun set on Saddam’s Iraq, the high hopes for peace, free-dom, and democracy evaporated as the Coalition faced an alto-gether different reality in the postwar environment. Insufficient

planning and integration between the State Department and the Departmentof Defense led to uninformed decision-making, reversing the momentumgained by the military success. Paying closer attention to Iraq’s relevant his-tory of occupation and repression, its political, social, and military cultures,and the inherent ethno-religious schisms would have revealed the promise ofethnic and sectarian violence in the absence of Baathist tyranny and the per-ils of building democracy in a land devoid of a democratic heritage. In a race



48 Policy Review

to dismantle the institutions of the old guard, many Sunnis willing and ableto share in Iraq’s rebirth were marginalized or demonized. The cpa ’sreliance on Iraqi exiles in government formation at the expense of residentactors put a Coalition stamp on an unfamiliar Governing Council thatharkened back to the British occupation and detracted from its popular sup-port. An overly sanguine strategy to expeditiously transfer sovereigntyignored the adequate troop levels and timeline necessary to establish com-prehensive security first, grass roots legitimacy next, and democratic institu-tions third, once the political climate was adequately set.

Should America embark upon regime change in Tehran, shaping thepeace will be every bit as gruesome, but understanding how miscalculations

with respect to government, society, and security ledto increased violence and instability in Iraq could beinstructive in a postwar Iran. Like Saddam, theSupreme Leader has sacrificed his political legitima-cy, yet he still commands the monopoly of force,and his will to use it repressively keeps a lid on theopposition. Mass uprisings following the 2009presidential elections demonstrated the growingpopular frustration, but this should not be interpret-ed as a national call for foreign intervention. Anephemeral sense of liberation would fade in the faceof a violent insurgency, powered by a militarized

irgc and Basij militia with numbers conceivably reaching into the millions.Like Iraq’s Sunni insurgency, motivation for resistance would stem from theeclipse of power. It would be heightened by the strong religious elementembodied by the Islamic Revolution, which presents the potential for suicidebombers to excite chaos on a massive scale. The extent to which the irgcand the Basij have infiltrated the fabric of Iranian society requires enormoustroop levels to protect those Iranians willing to work with an emerging gov-ernment, necessitating large-scale activation of reserve forces and the exis-tence of a strong Coalition.

While clearly resistance would be robust, it could possibly fracture alongfactional lines most prevalent in religious ideology, debates over the role ofIslam in politics, conflicting economic interest, and the vision of Iran’s prop-er place in the international community. Preserving the integrity of theArtesh, co-opting their allegiance to an emerging government, and ensuringtheir return to prominence in the new Iran could be the most significant fac-tor in securing the landscape, protecting the population, and curbing theeffects of the irgc. Ensuring open political participation for all in favor ofrepresentative government, including irgc politicians and businessmen, willmake armed resistance more costly for them, and such a measure couldexpedite reconciliation and buy-in to the new order. On the other hand, itmight stimulate wide-scale resentment among a population long terrorizedby the irgc, and reconciliation may not come easy. The existence of a con-

Leif Eckholm

Understandingwhat happenedafter the U.S.invasion of Iraq could be instructive in apostwar Iran.

stitutional heritage in Iran and a democratic framework for popular presi-dential and legislative elections puts the starting point for an Iranian transi-tion to democracy well ahead of where the Iraqi Governing Council stood in2003. This advantage is aided further by the existence of opposition leaderson the ground in Iran who can put an immediate stamp of legitimacy on thenew government that the former Iraqi exiles originally lacked.

Even so, optimism is not a prudent policy. Because of the opacity ofIranian society, it is impossible to assess the true nature of factionalism andthe extent to which regime insiders will desert the Revolution for a newfuture. If there is one essential takeaway from Iraq, America should compre-hensively integrate preparations between civilian and military agencies to layout a host of different outcomes, and then plan for the worst.





Corn Ethanol Who Pays? Who Bene�ts?

By Ken G. Glozer In the �rst decade of the twenty-�rst century, both the Bush and Obama administrations, along with Congress, have been enamored of an energy policy that relies on federal mandates and import tari�s to promote domestic ethanol use as a cure-all for a host of problems. Yet the rationale for those policies does not rest on any objective empirical evidence that they work or are more e�ective than a policy of simply relying on competitive markets to realize our goals of energy security, economic security, and environmental quality. In this book, Ken Glozer provides a factual evaluation of the major claims made by those who have advocated an ethanol policy for the past thirty years and answers a number of important questions: When did the policy start? How did it evolve? Are petroleum imports and budget costs reduced? Who pays and who bene�ts?

After a detailed review of the history of the policy since 1977, the author presents the results of an evaluation of the claims made by the architects of the Renewal Fuels Standard (a mandate that requires an increasing percentage of ethanol to be blended in all gasoline sold in the United States). He compares the current interventionist policy to a competitive market policy using Energy Information Administration projections for each. His surprising �ndings—that federal ethanol policy has little to do with energy and everything to do with wealth transfers from consumers and taxpayers to corn and ethanol producers—is particularly compelling because, after three decades of federal subsidies, ethanol remains uneconomical even with the subsidies, trade protection, and blending mandate. Glozer’s sobering conclusion is that taxpayers and consumers are the victims of the current policy. They have no choice but to pay and pay and receive no bene�ts in return.

Ken G. Glozer is currently president of OMB Professionals, a Washington, DC– based energy consulting �rm. He was a senior executive service career professional with the White House O�ce of Management and Budget in the energy, environment, and agriculture areas for twenty-six years.

April 2011, 256 pagesISBN: 978-0-8179-4961-7 $19.95, cloth


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M ilitary establishments cherish heroesthat confirm their self-image, and as the embod-iment of British cool, Sir John Moore has fewrivals: Described by his biographer CarolaOman as an Achilles without the heel, Moorewas one of Britain’s most accomplished com-

manders during the Napoleonic wars, and he has a timeless quality abouthim. Having risen in the army ranks due to ability rather than wealth, heserved in the hotspots of the war against the French: in the West Indies, inEgypt, in Sicily, and on the Iberian Peninsula.With his direct and unaffected manner, he was the very opposite of a

show-off like the navy’s Sir Sydney Smith, who had blocked Napoleon’sadvance at Acre and who was busy promoting himself as a second Nelson.Reporting home on the battle of Alexandria, Smith turned up at theAdmiralty decked out in a Turkish outfit, complete with turban, shawl, andtwo pistols in his girdle. Smith was long on daring, but short on judgment.Moore had both. Needless to say, the two of them did not get along.

The Perfect OfficerBy Henrik Bering

Henrik Bering is a writer and a critic. .


52 Policy Review

In the British effort to drive the French out of Egypt, where Napoleon hadleft his army to fend for itself after Nelson had destroyed the French fleet inAbukir Bay, General Moore was sent to coordinate with the Ottoman armyin Jaffa; his equanimity was deemed to have a calming effect on the volatileOrientals.In the ensuing battle of Alexandria, the reserve under Moore bore the

brunt of the French onslaught and stood firm despite running out of ammu-nition, confirming Moore’s image as “a man impossible to alarm.” The sur-render of the garrisons of Cairo and Alexandria marked the definitive end ofthe French adventure in Egypt.Not only could Moore fight. His reputation as a trainer of men was

established as commander of the Light Brigade atShorncliffe Camp on the Kentish coast, whence hedirected defense preparations against the forceNapoleon had assembled across the Channel duringthe 1803-1805 invasion scare. Moore did notshare the enthusiasm for Prussian tactics shown bySir David Dundas, the army’s adjutant-general,whose drill manual boiled the Prussian methoddown to eighteen maneuvers, to which Moorereferred dismissively as those “damned eighteenmaneuvers”: Prussian precision maneuvers mightlook fine on the parade ground, but on the battle-field, they were outdated.What Moore sought, he noted, was “not a new

drill, but a new discipline, a new spirit that shouldmake of the whole a living organism to replace a mechanical instrument.”Thus the much looser light infantry tactics that became known as “Sir JohnMoore’s system” required “not so much men of stature as it requires themto be intelligent, hardy and active.” The point was to “encourage to theutmost the initiative of the individual, treating soldiers as men and not asmachines.” A well-read and humane man, he was sparing in his use of thelash. Of the 52nd, “there is not a better regiment and there is none wherethere is less punishment,” he proudly noted.What was to be his final assignment was with the British expeditionary

force on the Iberian Peninsula, an ill-planned and ill-led venture. Moore hadto take over after its commander was recalled. The efforts of the Spanishallies had collapsed, but in a daring move, designed to lure Napoleon north,Moore attacked his line of communication, forcing the French emperor tomove against him personally, but managing to give him the slip. In disgustNapoleon left it to Marshal Soult to take over the chase.A retreat is considered the most depressing maneuver a commander can

undertake. After untold sufferings in the Spanish winter and casualties of3,000 dead and 500 wounded that had to be left behind, Moore managedto get his force into position to be extracted by the navy. But first they had

Henrik Bering

Not only couldMoore fight. He also had a reputation as atrainer of men,established as commander onthe Kentish coast.

to make a stand to beat off their French pursuers, which they successfullydid in the battle of Corunna. Moore, however, was among the casualties. AFrench cannonball smashed his shoulder, and he was buried in his cloak inone of the bastions.Moore’s death was mourned in Britain like Wolfe’s before Quebec. His

diversion had upset Napoleon’s schemes in Spain and a planned thrustagainst Portugal. Wellington paid tribute to Moore after Waterloo for hav-ing saved the British army, allowing it to fight another day, much likeDunkirk in our own time. Throughout the conflict, he had kept promotingMoore’s protégés.As a result of Moore’s system, which stressed the effectiveness of aimed

fire, the French suffered great losses, particularly among officers: “TheEnglish were the only troops who were perfectly practiced in the use of smallarms whence their firing was much more accurate than that of any otherinfantry,” a Frenchman wrote. Another grumbled about the killing power ofthe rifle: “It was an unsuitable weapon for the French soldier, and wouldonly have suited phlegmatic, patient assassins.”

An officer’s work

O f all the jobs in the world, then as now, the wartime officer’s isthe most dangerous and demanding, physically and emotionally. It ishis job to order men to do something they would rather not, i.e.,

expose themselves to mortal danger. He must care about his subordinates,yet he cannot afford to identify too closely with them individually, as themission always comes first. In return, the men need to know that he will notexpend their lives frivolously. Needless to say, and as John Moore’s examplestarkly demonstrates, he must be willing to lay down his own life.On the plus side, as Moore’s career also illustrates, the job can also be one

of the most challenging intellectually. Clausewitz, distilling the lessons of theNapoleonic wars in On War, pointed out that “In war, everything is simple,but the most simple thing is difficult to perform,” since the other side gets asay, too. Thus Clausewitz wished to “expose the error in believing that amere bravo without intellect can make himself distinguished in war.” TheGerman army’s manual from 1936, Truppenfuhrung, goes further: “War isan art, a free creative activity resting on scientific foundations. It makes thehighest demands on a man’s entire personality.”Among the characteristics required in a successful commander are imagi-

nation, intuition, and an ability to improvise, all qualities associated with afree and independent mind. The commanders we revere are invariably theones who have broken the rules. Thus, Nelson spoke of the need for an offi-cer to use his head when given an order that runs counter to the overall mis-sion: “To serve my king, and to destroy the French, I consider the greatorder of all, from which the little ones spring; and if one of these little orders


The Perfect Officer

54 Policy Review

militate against it (for who can tell exactly at a distance?) I go back and obeythe great order and object.” Of course, this is not without risk, as a pen-chant for ignoring orders is generally not encouraged in the armed forces.What further characterizes a great commander is the ability to keep calm

under stressful circumstances, the ability to tune out irrelevant informationand to keep functioning when things go wrong. It was famously remarkedabout Napoleon’s Marshal Massena that his mental faculties redoubledamid the roar of the cannon.Superior generalship explains why Napoleon’s armies for so long could

terrify the rest of Europe, and why the resource-poor South in the AmericanCivil War held out against the industrial North for four years before finallysurrendering. The same goes for the Wehrmacht’s performance in WorldWar II; it took the Allies five-and-a-half years to smash the GermanJuggernaut. Fortunately, as the war progressed, Hitler’s constant interven-tions and overrulings of his generals ended up being an Allied asset.Counterinsurgency wars pose even greater demands in terms of creativity

and adaptability. As Mark Moyar, a lecturer at the U.S. Marine CorpsUniversity, demonstrates in A Question of Command, good conventionalcommanders do not necessarily make good counterinsurgency commanders.In the Peninsular War, Napoleon’s marshals, Soult, Ney, and Massena, thefinest conventional commanders of their day, had to fight both British andSpanish regular forces and merciless guerillas, and proved incapable of thetask, showing for the first time that Napoleon was not invincible.Similarly, notes Moyar, generals Grant and Sheridan had triumphed in

their Civil War battles, but in the immediate post-Civil War years theyproved themselves to be less than skillful in handling the South. Sheridan’sfrustration comes through in his statement that if he “owned Hell andTexas, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.” Because of their mailed-fistapproach to force and their lack of empathy for legitimate Reconstructiongrievances, Moyar says, resentment kept seething among the Southern elites.All of which highlights the crucial importance of officer selection, which

according to Moyar should be a top priority. “The perfect officer” — asWilliam Pitt once referred to John Moore — is clearly the elusive ideal everymilitary organization strives for and wishes to produce: How have variousarmies set about the task, what are the obstacles, and how come there aren’tmore of him around?

When they falter

B ack in the mid-1970s, the British psychologist Norman Dixoncaused a stir with his book On the Psychology of MilitaryIncompetence by suggesting that generals be judged by the same

criteria normally reserved for pilots and platoon commanders. He causedfurther heartburn by suggesting that those characteristics which are required

Henrik Bering

in a war leader, i.e., an open mind and an ability to cope with uncertainty,tended to be the exact opposite of what he found among men tempted by anarmy career: These were often immature and insecure individuals drawn tothe army’s offer of a well-ordered and controlled existence.Thus, he viewed military organizations as conformist, anti-intellectual,

and reactionary institutions, institutions “that attract and then reinforce thevery characteristics that will prove antithetical to competent military perfor-mance.” He found it “ironic that one of the most conservative of professionsshould be called on to engage in activities that require the very obverse ofconservative mental traits.”Dixon denied having any subversive intent. His purpose was not to mock

the profession, but to study failure and its origina-tors because the price of their mistakes can be so ter-rifyingly high. “For devotees of the military to takeexception to the study of military incompetence is asunjustified as it would be for admirers of teeth tocomplain about a book on dental caries,” he wrote.Whereupon he proceeded to reel off a massive list

of hopeless commanders: General Braddock in theWar of Independence ordering his troops not to hidebehinds tress when ambushed by French-led Indiansbecause seeking cover was an unprofessional andcowardly thing to do. Lord Elphinstone, who afterthe Kabul uprising naively accepted Afghan promis-es of free passage for his army out of the country and saw his entire forcewiped out as a result. Or Lord Raglan, who with “moon faced complacen-cy” let his troops rot in the Crimean winter for want of firewood, blankets,and greatcoats. In his whole life, Raglan had read only one book, The Countof Monte Cristo, which was of little use in the Crimea.The American Civil War had already demonstrated that frontal attacks

over open ground are a bad idea, but in the Second Boer War, we findGenerals Methuen and Buller ordering them against Boer marksmen hidingin narrow trenches, with disastrous consequences. At Colenso, Buller hadforbidden his own troops to dig trenches and foxholes on aesthetic grounds,as this would disturb the pleasant terrain and soil their uniforms. LordRoberts, who replaced Buller as commander in chief, castigated his fellowofficers for obsessing with order and regularity while neglecting to encour-age individuality and imagination.That the Brits had learned nothing from their experience against the Boers

became obvious in World War I, where attacks across open country werestill the order of the day. The set procedure adhered to by Field MarshalHaig, and never varied, consisted of a massive bombardment, followed by abrief pause, followed by the infantry attack. This allowed the Germanmachine gunners just enough time to emerge from their dugouts and greetthe oncoming infantry.


The Perfect Officer

In the SecondBoer War,Generals

Methuen andBuller foolishlyordered frontal

attacks over open ground.

56 Policy Review

Despite a bad start, to Dixon, World War II represented a major advancein military competence and in the determination not to spend men’s livesfrivolously: Still, the war afforded plenty of examples of cock-ups, such asthe Norwegian campaign, the failure to acquire intelligence before theArdennes offensive, or the ill-considered parachute drop at Arnhem. In theFar East, you had General Percival in Singapore refusing to order defensivemeasures against the coming Japanese onslaught, deeming them “bad for themorale of troops and civilians.”If all this were just a question of lack of intelligence, if all those screwing

up were idiots, the problem would be easier to address. Regrettably, theywere not. A case like Percival is particularly interesting, notes Dixon, asPercival disproves the traditional “bloody fools theory”: The general was asophisticated man and was considered a brilliant staff officer; yet he made adisastrous decision.

To build a better officer

D ixon is certainly right in stressing the need to subject theselection of commanders to close scrutiny. In what has becomeknown as Von Manstein’s Matrix, German Marshall Erich von

Manstein, in Lost Victories, breezily distinguishes between four kinds of mil-itary personality: “There are only four types of officer. First, there are thelazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm . . . Second, there arethe hard-working intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensur-ing that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard-work-ing stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. Theycreate irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent lazyones. They are suited for the highest office,” i.e., suited for the top job sincethey are likely to choose the simplest solutions — and hence the easiest totranslate into action on the battlefield — and they are good at delegating.Of von Manstein’s four categories, the lethal combination is obviously the

third, the stupid and hardworking officer. Not only will he create irrelevantwork for others, but he is also likely to squander the lives of others to fur-ther his own ambition.Dixon was also right in pointing out that military establishments have a

track record of resistance to innovation and new ideas, and the people whorepresent them. As the Boer war correspondent A.G. Hales complained,“The English cling to old traditions like sand crabs cling to seaweed in stormtime.”Stellar examples cited include General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the British

army’s most brilliant minds in the interwar years and a leading proponent oftank warfare whose career was ended in 1933 by a military establishmentstill emotionally attached to the horse. Captain Liddell Hart, whose essayMechanization of the Army lost out in a military competition to an entry

Henrik Bering

entitled Limitations of the Tank, suffered a similar fate. According to LiddellHart, who became military correspondent for the Times of London, a goodidea can only succeed if the man proposing it is willing to sacrifice himself.What finally brought the brass around was the fact that the Germans had

so enthusiastically embraced the tank and proved its worth in Poland andFrance. According to Dixon, it was “1941 before the British began toimplement the lessons of 1916.” The same resistance is found in the navy,where innovations often have been introduced only because they had beensuccessfully adopted by rival navies.In the past, the book notes, it has often taken great upheavals such as the

French and the Russian Revolutions to open armies up to the innovative andambitious. Napoleon was an obscure captain fromCorsica, and many of his commanders came frommodest backgrounds. The bustling, classlessAmerica that developed in the 19th century likewiseencouraged talent. Generally, Dixon says, the mostsuccessful military organizations are those notencrusted in rituals and stuck in set ways of doingbusiness, like the Boers of the old days, or theIsraelis today. So far, so good. But Dixon goes over the top

when, after a tremendous buildup of trenchantanalysis and amusing detail, he triumphantly con-cludes that since not all incompetent generals can bedismissed as stupid, instead what unites them is anauthoritarian and obsessive personality, brought on by unhappy childhoodsand dominant mothers; anal obsessiveness thus becomes the great unlockingsecret to military failure.Mishandled potty training is of course a riveting subject, but as a portent

and explanation of military failure it is so sweeping as to be useless. What,for instance, is one to make of boy-man like T.E. Lawrence, who was asweird and immature as they come, requiring the occasional spanking to keephim happy, yet proved to be a highly successful commander in the desert?(Curiously, Dixon presents Lawrence as an example of an officer with anundamaged ego.) Or, as Eliot Cohen and John Gooch wonder in MilitaryMisfortunes, where does this leave Douglas MacArthur, who demonstratedhis brilliance in insisting on the Inchon landing over the objections of prettymuch everyone else, but then totally misjudged the Chinese response whenadvancing up to the Yalu river: “Was he struck by a sudden attack of analretentiveness between June and October 1950?” the authors ask acidly.In analyzing failure, instead of operating with abstractions like “the mili-

tary mind,” and automatically heaping all the blame on a single individual,Cohen and Gooch recommend also paying close attention to the organiza-tional weaknesses of the armies that generals command. In addition, theyintroduce the notion of “complex failure,” involving “more than one kind


The Perfect Officer

Mishandled pottytraining is of

course a rivetingsubject, but asexplanation of

military failure itis so sweeping as

to be useless.

of error,” and they demonstrate in their case studies how various factorsinteract to produce catastrophe. This model is especially useful in analyzingmodern war, where responsibility no longer rests on one person, but isspread out over a great many people.While in World War I, for instance, it is certainly true that Haig, French,

and the rest had plenty of flaws, John Baynes in his book Morale argues that“the best answer to complaints about British generals is given by pointingout the inability of the ultra professional German high command and gener-al staff to produce any better ideas.” Rather than the result of faulty pottytraining on the part of the commanders, the problem was that at that pointin time, conditions favored the defense even more than usual. Commandand control functions had not followed suit with weapons development,leaving the commander back in his chateau unable to exploit developmentson the battlefield. The airplane was still in its infancy, and the tank came latein the game and was used incorrectly, piecemeal rather than in mass, andunaccompanied by infantry.By succumbing to routine psychobabble, Dixon himself becomes a carica-

ture, namely the caricature of the anally obsessed psychoanalyst, to whomthe world consists entirely of permanently impaired potty performers.

The Germans

D ixon’s argument may have ended in caricature, but the clas-sic problem, as he framed it, persists: How do you combine theneed for obedience and discipline with the need for imaginative

and independent thought? How does one overcome the boredom, inertia,and “inevitable leveling down effect” of large organizations, which tend to“encourage the mediocre, but cramp the gifted?”As Dixon himself admits, military life does require rules, drill, and disci-

pline: “Without it armies would cease to function.” War fighting is a teameffort. If every officer were just to follow his own inclination, chaos wouldensue. Moreover, deadly weaponry requires strict supervision, and make-work activities can be needed to keep soldiers occupied in dull periods. Drillis equally important for producing reflex responses in times of intense stress,where freezing up would be a natural reaction. At the start of World War I,for instance, the Germans were convinced the Brits had more machine gunsthan they actually had because of the speed with which the Tommys handledtheir bolt-action rifles. That kind of speed is only achieved by endless repeti-tion.Unfortunately for the rest of the world, among those who have best

understood how to fuse these opposites was the German Wehrmacht inWorld War II. As British Field-Marshal Lord Carver has argued, contrary towhatever preconceptions one might have about the Prussians as rigidautomatons, German commanders “generally left their subordinates a

Henrik Bering

58 Policy Review

greater freedom of action than did most British commanders.” Or mostAmerican ones, one might add.Thus Field Marshal von Manstein flatly states in Lost Victories, “the

blind obedience of the Prussian is a myth.” Manstein’s leadership philoso-phy, as set out in his memoir, was that a commander define the goals clearlyand unambiguously and deploy his forces accordingly, and then let his sub-ordinates get on with it. Too-tight control means that initiative is lost andopportunity left unexploited. The commander should of course carefullymonitor their performances and intervene if things develop in an unwanteddirection.The Israeli military analyst Martin van Creveld attributes the

Wehrmacht’s frighteningly effective performanceduring World War II to its fighting power, orKampfkraft, which he defines as “the sum total ofmental qualities that makes armies fight.” As henotes in his book, Fighting Power, while weaponryand tactics undergo changes due to the advance oftechnology, the nature of fighting power remainsconstant. Thus, according to his equation, “withinthe limits of its size, the military worth of an armyequals the quantity and quality of its equipmentmultiplied by its fighting power.”Because of Germany’s limited resources and the

risk of a two-front war, van Creveld writes that vic-tory needed to be quick. Partly out of necessity, butpartly deliberately, the Germans starved the army’s rear of talent and stakedeverything on the aggressiveness of its frontline officers, the production ofwhich its whole system of rewards and promotions was geared toward. “Itwent for quality and quality was what it got. In this, without a doubt, laythe secret of its fighting power.” The key element of fighting power is leadership. In screening for officer

material, the German emphasis was on all-around personality, rather thanon intelligence and education alone. Intelligence is important, but even moreimportant is character. A man can be clever and a coward. Or he can beindecisive. What the Germans were looking for was determination, the indi-vidual’s willingness to assume responsibility, and his ability to handle adver-sity. Here van Creveld uses the German word: the officer had to beKrisenfest, “crisisproof,” i.e., steady in emergencies.Those with the final say were the regimental commanders. They had a

vested interest in making the right choice because, after having completedtheir training, the newly commissioned officers reported for duty in theiroriginal regiment. On a more advanced level, candidates for the general staffreceived part of their training at the front, since in the German view “war isthe best teacher of war.” Unavoidably, this meant casualties, but the benefitsof direct experience were thought to outweigh the downsides.


The Perfect Officer

The key elementof fighting poweris leadership. In

screening for officers, the

Germans lookedat all-around personality.

60 Policy Review

All efforts centered on fostering group cohesion. Here van Creveld citesthe French 19th-century military theorist Ardant du Picq, according towhom four brave men who do not know each other are less likely to take ona lion than four less brave men who know each other well. Thus Germanregiments recruited locally, and close ties were maintained between trainingunits and parent divisions, with officers being rotated between frontline dutyand training units.As important, each field division had its own replacement battalion, and

replacements joined their units in marching battalions, often commanded byofficers newly recovered from wounds and now returning to active duty;they never travelled alone. The Germans rotated whole units in and out ofthe front, not individuals. These were complicated ways of operating, vanCreveld says, but they produced results.Creating a self-contained world, the system produced soldiers of great

resilience, who fought on long after any hope of victory had evaporated.Van Creveld cites Colonel Trevor Dupuy’s findings: “On a man to man basisthe German ground soldier inflicted casualties at about 50 percent higherrate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troopsunder all circumstances,” whether attacking or defending.But it also made soldiers of the German Army indifferent to the outside

and capable of committing atrocities that forever tainted its image. “Sostrong was the grip in which the organization held its personnel that the lat-ter simply did not care where they fought, against whom or why.” Thus thepoint of his study of the German system, van Creveld notes, is not to advo-cate a return to outdated forms of organization or to boost the secret — ornot so secret — admiration for the Wehrmacht found in some quarters. Hisdispassionate analysis aims solely at highlighting those universal and emula-ble aspects of the system which address the social and psychological needs ofthe frontline soldier.

The Americans

B y comparison, the U.S. officer selection process was muchmore impersonal and centralized, and had more of an assemblyline feel to it. Focusing less on fighting power, the U.S. trusted its

huge industrial might to get the job done: Superior firepower would decidethe outcome. Bringing this to bear, van Creveld says, was above all a tri-umph of logistics, and he cites the characterization of General Marshall as“the organizer of Victory.”Thus, though U.S. regulations echoed the language of the German ones,

speaking of initiative and imagination, the American emphasis, says vanCreveld, was on scientific management. And while in determining officerpotential, the Germans emphasized character and went to great lengths toconsider the whole personality, the Americans relied on standardized tests

Henrik Bering

and were chiefly concerned with intelligence. Once his training was over, theschool commanders would never again see the officer, who was assignedwherever a vacancy existed.There were good reasons for this way of going about things. The U.S. had

not planned to go to war, which meant that its forces had to undergo a dra-matic expansion. According to the book’s figures, U.S. Army ranks swelledfrom a small force of 243,000 officers and men to one of more than eightmillion; for its officer corps, this meant a 40-fold expansion. Thus the U.S.Army was basically an army of civilians in uniform with officers and menhurriedly thrown together from all parts of the country.While from the administrative point of view the American approach was

a perfectly logical way of proceeding, from the moreintangible vantage of creating cohesion and produc-ing quality it was less advantageous. A less experi-enced officer corps also meant that less could be leftto the discretion of the individual officer, whorequired greater supervision and control fromabove. In its regulations, the U.S. was forced to use amuch more prescriptive approach, spelling out indetail how to handle a wide variety of situations.Thus, rather than following Patton’s recipe for

deep and daring thrusts, Eisenhower, mainly foralliance reasons, but also out of caution, chose themore workmanlike solution of advancing againstGermany over a broad front, which required less skill on the part of the offi-cers. This was a case of the limitations of the organization of which the com-mander found himself in charge deciding his approach.Still, while much is explicable, van Creveld refuses to find any excuse for

an inhuman and harmful system in which new replacements had to maketheir way alone to their units and were thrown into the battle lines withoutknowing a soul, an error that was repeated in Vietnam. And one in whichrear echelon officers often would gain faster promotion than front line ones.After the war, the U.S. Army asked the former German Chief of the

General Staff Franz Halder to critique the U.S. effort and offer his sugges-tions for improvement. “Compared to the German concept of war, theAmerican regulations display a repeated tendency to try and foresee situa-tions and lay down modes of behavior in great detail,” he wrote. The prob-lem in providing set procedures is that the officer’s responses become morepredictable and thus vulnerable to countermeasures. Halder further advisedthat this sentence be included in U.S. Army instruction: “In war, the qualitiesof the character are more important than those of the intellect.”Fortunately, for whatever faults one may find with the U.S. approach, it

was good enough for the American soldier to win the war. “And not onlydid he win the war. He did so without assaulting, raping, and otherwisemolesting too many people,” writes van Creveld. “Wherever he came, even


The Perfect Officer

The Americanapproach to its

officers was perfectly logical

but did notalways createcohesion and

produce quality.

62 Policy Review

within Germany itself, he was received with relief, or at any rate withoutfear. To him, no greater praise than this is conceivable.”After World War II, as David Hackworth notes in About Face, his classic,

primal-scream critique of American war leadership in Vietnam, theAmerican Army took over a great many things from the Wehrmacht, fromweapons systems all the way down to the uniform. “Somebody up there wasdefinitely fascinated by the German war machine,” he writes. “It seemedthat we copied virtually everything the Germans had to offer except theirleadership and discipline techniques.”Colonel Hackworth was the embodiment of the American warrior spirit,

a highly decorated officer who became disillusioned with conditions in theU.S. Army and retired amidst much controversy. Buthis analysis of what ailed the U.S. Army of his dayremains among the most trenchant. In Korea, wherehe first saw fighting, America’s industrial and tech-nological supremacy was, after the initial shock,enough to bring about a stalemate. And up throughthe 1950s, the trends towards what Hackworthdescribes as “impersonal, almost corporate army”were strengthened, designed for the big war inEurope. “Under Eisenhower, it was all management.Officers became managers.”But that was not the kind of war the U.S. found

itself facing in the 1960s. When things heated up inVietnam, the old reliance on firepower did not work: “Vietnam was a warthat was fought on platoon, company, and battalion levels, but very littletime was devoted to individual and small unit training.” The U.S. ArmyInfantry School at Fort Benning would only pay lip service to counterinsur-gency, he writes: Instead, they derived all the wrong lessons from the stale-mate in Korea and “made them the standard for Vietnam.” Hackworthdescribes the base camp mentality of Vietnam as “an outgrowth of the staticdays of the Korean war.”“To win in Vietnam we need a Wingate, a Giap, Rommel or Jackson

McNair type soldier,” he writes. “But I doubt if our present system will pro-duce such individuals. They are abrasive, opinionated, undiplomatic, non-conformist and effective.” The Patton kind, he notes “would be invaluablein time of war, but is a disturbing element in time of peace.”Instead, the U.S. had developed a conformist “zero defects” mentality,

where the slightest admission of error was enough to derail an officer’scareer. To satisfy the bureaucratic obsession with meaningless statistics andphony measurements of success such as the body count, number of bombsdropped, and sorties flown, officers were forced to lie to obtain promotion.If, as the German 1936 Truppenfuhrung manual put it, “a readiness toassume responsibility is the most important of all qualities of leadership,”this is not the best way to set about it.

Henrik Bering

ColonelHackworthwrote, “UnderEisenhower, itwas all management.Officers becamemanagers.”

The ratings inflation of the period meant “any attempt to evaluate eventhe best young officer objectively and realistically was in essence cutting histhroat.” In this environment, the ones getting ahead were the bureaucrats inuniform, “the dancers and prancers” — Alexander Haig being a pet peeve— while the real fighters were sidelined. Hackworth cites an officer’s effi-ciency report: “Lieutenant Col. Gibson has strong emotional feelings andfrequently expressed his opinion that a soldier’s duty is to fight. This attitudelimits his value to the service, his desire for self improvement, and adverselyaffects his subordinates.”Equally counterproductive was the rotation system, the purpose of which

was to give as many officers as possible a taste of the command experiencein a war zone. But the Company co’s tour was amere three months, which meant that “just when hewas getting the hang of it, he was yanked out,”Hackworth writes. “The practice of the constantlyrotating company, battalion, and brigade comman-ders through Vietnam was not leading to an armywith great depth in experienced battlefield leader-ship . . . but instead to the loss of more blood andmore lives.”At one point, Hackworth’s superior tells him to

prepare for bigger things, to which Hackworthresponds: “I am not over here to prepare myself forbigger things. We are fighting a war. I want us to win.What bigger things are there?” This sentiment is echoed by a general quotedin Prodigal Soldiers, James Kitfield’s brilliant study of how the generation ofofficers coming out of the Vietnam debacle set about rebuilding America’sarmed forces, “It was almost as if the services were using Vietnam to trainofficers for the next war, as opposed to fighting the one very much at hand.” The rebirth of the U.S. Army as a professional army, as told by Kitfield

and others, is a stirring story. Inspired by the old gi Bill after World War II,to attract bright officer material the army would pay for their education inexchange for a stint in uniform. A new doctrine was introduced, theAirLand Battle, which involved deep strikes behind enemy lines. New train-ing facilities were created, offering ultra-realistic combat training that forcedofficers to confront their weaknesses and admit mistakes. The new slogan ofthe professional army was “Be all you can be,” presenting the army as anattractive career choice, not a last resort.By the time of the Gulf War, the U.S. had built a superb conventional

army. Norman Schwarzkopf’s imaginative plan, striking deep in the enemy’srear, was brilliantly executed — except for the end, which was bungledbecause of the political decision to stop the war too early, which allowed theRepublican Guards to escape.In Round II, a decade later, the initial phase went beautifully, as Tommy

Franks’s forces sliced through the Iraqi defense and resistance simply melted


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The rotationsystem was

intended to giveas many officers

as possible a tasteof the commandexperience in a

war zone.

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away. But when the war turned into an insurgency, a different mindset and awider set of skills were needed, and army planners had to scramble to studythe counterinsurgency lessons of Vietnam, which had been suppressed in themistaken belief that the U.S. would never again become involved in this typeof war. Here the urgent need was once more for the unconventional officer,and the same applied in Afghanistan with the resurgence of the Taliban.“At the start of Afghanistan and Iraq, precious few American civilian or

military leaders understood the leader centric nature of counterinsurgency,”writes Mark Moyar in A Question of Command. “Under the baking Afghansun we are rediscovering, by way of pain, that the first determinants in warare human.” In unpleasant, faraway villages, the U.S. needed intuitive

thinkers who understood the local dynamics, theintricate tribal patterns and customs, and couldtransmit this understanding to their men.Colonel Michael Starz, quoted in David Cloud

and Greg Jaffe’s The Fourth Star, has described thechallenge posed by the alien universe of Iraq, whereall normal moral laws have been suspended:“Loyalty is constantly shifting here and there is nomoral component to it. It is so foreign to our way ofthinking and it is hard to respect. But you have toremember it is a different way of looking at theworld.” Similarly, when engaged in urban fighting, the

U.S. officer could not just use Stalingrad rules andwaste everybody inside, as the Russians did in Chechnya. He had to workunder complicated rules of engagement, constantly escalating and de-escalat-ing, often risking the lives of himself and his troops in the process. And withthe media on hand to second-guess his every move, he always had to consid-er the political side of his actions.Which brings us back to the promotion process: All too often in the past,

U.S. promotion boards have been dominated by conventional officers,blocking the advancement of innovative thinkers. Unfortunately, some ofthis still goes on. In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Renny McPherson, a for-mer Marine Corps intelligence officer, found it significant that that whenStanley McChrystal was fired as commander of the U.S. forces inAfghanistan for his injudicious comments, General Petraeus had to take astep down to take over, suggesting a scarcity of commanders with the requi-site qualifications at the top.While joint fighting is the name of the game, McPherson noted, crossing

service lines is still not encouraged. McPherson based his piece on a longerarticle he co-wrote for Parameters, the U.S. Army War College journal, forwhich 37 high officers were interviewed: All of them praised the value ofbroader experience for today’s complex battlefield, such as attending jointschools, acquiring a Ph.D., working with civilian agencies, or serving with

Henrik Bering

All too often in the past, U.S.promotionboards have been dominatedby conventionalofficers whoblock innovativethinkers.

nato partners, but noted that these were regarded as career distractions.These officers, he wrote, “succeeded despite the military training priorities,not because of them.” “We don’t educate to be generals,” one complained.Because of frustration with the system, too many officers are leaving. In AQuestion of Command, Mark Moyar found it equally telling that inDecember 2007 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had General Petraeusflown back home to preside over the U.S. Army’s promotion board to makesure some of the clever and outspoken colonels from the war in Iraq gotpromoted to brigadier general. The often-voiced objection that one cannot afford solely to concentrate

on producing counterinsurgency officers but must also be prepared to fight amore conventional type of war Moyar meets head on: Today’s officer mustbe able to handle both conventional and asymmetrical warfare, he believes.And while good conventional commanders may not always prove them-selves adept at handling counterinsurgency, “a good counterinsurgencyleader will also be a good conventional leader.”The trick then is to scatter such leaders in strategic positions throughout

the organization, which will invariably lift its performance. Smart officerstend to pick smart disciples.

The Israelis

O f modern armies, the Israelis have managed to strike an effec-tive balance between obeying orders and the need for independentthought. As David Ben-Gurion wrote in The Way and the Vision,

“We need the spiritual advantage more than any other army in the world,because we are few.” Surrounded by neighbors intent on throwing them intothe sea, the Israelis are fighting for survival, a powerful motivator: To limitcasualties and international fallout, their wars must be won quickly anddecisively. They need constantly to anticipate, as even a single defeat couldspell catastrophe.Formed in 1948, the core of the Israel Defense Forces’ (idf) officers

came from the Palmach, the Haganah’s elite commando force during theBritish Mandate in Palestine. The idf fought the 1948 War ofIndependence, a war in which the officers’ task included leading Jewish new-comers straight off the boats into battle after a short weapons demonstra-tion. Many had never touched a rifle before. The Israelis prevailed, but bythe early 1950s, many officers had left the army, and Israel found itself ill-equipped to respond to the constant Fedayeen cross-border terrorist attacks.The idf doctrine of taking the war to the enemy was established with the

1954 creation of the 101 elite unit, headed by Major Ariel Sharon, whichworld retaliate deep behind ceasefire lines against Egyptian positions in theGaza strip and Palestinian targets in Jordan, and which reported directly tothe General Staff. The aggressive spirit of the unit, which was merged with


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the paratroop brigade later that year, offered a model for the rest of thearmy. The result was seen in the Six Day War.Culturally, the Israelis are programmed to argue, and this invariably

translates into the army. From the very start, the Palmach had downplayedthe value of discipline and hailed free spiritedness. Thus, Israeli soldiers donot salute their officers, and they address them by first name. In officers’training, the emphasis is on initiative and self reliance; officers are encour-aged to raise questions and suggest alternatives; however, once the discus-sion is over, they obey. As Moshe Dayan once put it, “I would rather harnessten wild horses than prod lazy mules.”A fundamental difference between the U.S. and the Israeli system is that

the idf is a conscript army which relies heavily onits reserves: Men serve for three years, women for21 months; for the men follows 20 years in thereserves, usually with the same group they were con-scripted with. While navy and air force applicantsattend officer school directly, the idf chooses itsofficers among soldiers who are already in the ser-vice and have already been tested. Thus everybodyin the idf starts out as a private, and those whoshow promise are encouraged to apply for officerschool. When their training is finished, they returnto their original units, which strengthens cohesion. Italso means that every general knows from his ownexperience what war looks like from the private’sperspective.As regards discipline, one should not be deceived

by the informality. As an example of the Israeli notion of discipline Dixonmentions General Tal’s tightening up of the rules when taking over as com-mander of the armored corps in 1964, which he ordered not out of concernfor discipline for its own sake, but for the entirely functional reason that atanker had been killed in a training exercise due to not having followed thecorrect procedures in storing ammunition. But as Dixon points out, even the best armies can become complacent

and lose their sharpness. This was the case in the 1973 Yom Kippur War,when the Israelis were taken by surprise and faced near disaster before turn-ing the situation around. A bird’s-eye view of the war and of the breakdown is afforded by the

memoir of retired air-force Brigadier General Iftach Spector, Loud andClear. Having first fought in the Six Day War, Spector commanded asquadron of Phantom Orange Tails during the Yom Kippur War. In this war,the Israeli high command was badly surprised by new mobile sam 6 batter-ies which rendered its plans of attack useless: The Israelis lost 104 aircraft,almost all to anti-aircraft and Soviet missile defenses. Finding the high com-mand in disarray, issuing contradictory and incoherent orders, Spector was

Henrik Bering

A fundamentaldifferencebetween the U.S. and theIsraeli system isthat the IDF is a conscriptarmy which relies on itsreserves.

forced to use his own judgment, in some instance aborting hopeless missionsand finding other targets: “We knew how to improvise, and when all therules were thrown in the trashcan and procedures torn up, the Orange Tailsfound ways to survive in the heart of danger and do our job.”That the Israelis managed to turn things around was thus not due to the

high command, nor to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who completely lostit, but to officers like Spector in the air and his idf colleagues on theground, who knew how to take charge when the system failed. Afterwards, retired General Chaim Herzog provided an in-depth analysis

of what went wrong in The War of Atonement, including the acute intelli-gence failure. As for the battlefield lessons, while in World War II it hadtaken some thirteen attempts for a tank to wipe out its target at 1,500meters, it now stood an even chance of accomplishing the task with a singleshot; at the same time, guided antitank missiles had doubled the reach of aninfantry man. Both developments had profound implications, also for futureAmerican doctrine. A similar lack of preparation was found in the idf’s unimpressive perfor-

mance in the Second Lebanon War, when, after a long period of police-typeduty in Gaza and the West Bank, dealing with rock-throwers and suicidebombers, the idf was faced with Hezbollah, a wholly different animal, anIranian-backed organization halfway between a militia and a more profes-sional force, which had antitank weapons and thousands of rockets andmortars, and knew how to use them. This led to another round of intenseself-examination and the development of new tactics; many weaknesses hadbeen corrected in time for the 2008 Cast Lead operation against the Hamasterrorist regime in the Gaza. As is the case with his American and British colleagues, the Israeli officer

faces enemies who, realizing they cannot prevail in a conventional conflict,launch their attacks while hiding among the civilian population —a warcrime. To further complicate matters, in Israeli civil society, one finds thesame legalistic approach to war, the same collaboration between the mediaand the legal system as in the U.S. Unavoidably, this debate affects the Israeli armed forces. Thus, Iftach

Spector’s judgment failed him on the question of targeted killings in Gaza,when in 2003, he was the senior signatory of a statement by 28 veteran andactive-duty pilots, who refused to hit targets in Gaza and on the West Bank. On numerous occasions, the Israeli Air Force and the idf have refrained

from hitting terrorist targets to avoid civilian casualties. But in someinstances, where the target was deemed important enough, they have goneahead. One such case was the 2004 killing of Sheikh Yassim, a founder ofthe Hamas; nine bystanders were killed. Another was that of Nizar Rayan,Yassim’s successor, who placed his whole family on the roof in the mistakenbelief that the Israelis would not hit him during Cast Lead. In each instance,a careful assessment was made to determine whether the international out-cry was worth enduring.


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Today, Israeli officers ask why the targeted killing of Sheikh Yassim, aman who had ordered numerous suicide attacks against Israeli civilians,would produce international outrage, while there was general approvalwhen Osama Bin Laden was killed. What exactly, they wonder, is the differ-ence? Objectively, both idf and Israeli Air Force officers have shown them-

selves to be ultra careful in avoiding civilian casualties, as testified to by pro-fessionals such as Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander in chief ofthe British forces in Afghanistan, who noted that no army in human historyhad done more to reduce civilian suffering than the Israelis during Cast Leadin Gaza. Since then, to further reduce civilian distress in future wars, theIsraelis now train a group of army officers to serve as humanitarian officers,to be attached as an organic part of the battalion and the brigade. This car-ries more weight than civilian outsiders. Unfortunately, however careful the Israelis are, this is unlikely to help

them, as proved by the un-sponsored Goldstone Report, which allegedIsraeli war crimes in Gaza during Cast Lead while passing lightly overHamas methods. By the time Judge Richard Goldstone’s retractions came inthe Washington Post, the damage had been done. In the court of “worldopinion,” while Israel’s enemies are free to commit any atrocity, even thesmallest accident is held against the Israelis. Under such conditions, even theperfect officer would come up short.

Henrik Bering

Three books on American conservatism were publishedlast year by prominent university presses, and taken togeth-er they raise an intriguing question. .

It’s not that the books themselves say anything deeplynovel. In fact each devotes itself to crafting its own varia-

tion on a well-worn theme: that in both domestic and foreign policy,American conservatism is a camp divided against itself. In domestic affairs,the intramural conservative conflict pits libertarians (or “economic conserv-atives”) against traditionalists (a.k.a. “social” or “religious” conservatives).As David Courtwright, for example, tells it in No Right Turn: ConservativePolitics in a Liberal America, American conservatism exhibits a “sociologi-cal disunity” between “libertarians” who believe in the “free market,” withits assumption that the pursuit of individual self-interest leads to maximalsocial well being, and “Christian conservatives,” who worry that “capital-ism create[s] . . . temptations, intrusions, and distractions at odds with con-servative religious values and moral self-discipline.” In The Rise and Fall of

Conservative Humility,Liberal IronyBy Andrew Stark

Andrew Stark is a professor of strategic management and political science at theUniversity of Toronto. He is the author of Conflict of Interest in American PublicLife (Harvard University Press, 2000) and Drawing the Line: Public and Privatein America (Brookings Institution Press, 2010).


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Modern American Conservatism: A Short History, David Farber gives thesame point a historic spin: In the 1960s, “William Buckley worried thatsome economic conservatives failed to pay obeisance to the Christian veri-ties, whereas Barry Goldwater was uncomfortable mixing religion and poli-tics.” The upshot is that while libertarians are noninterventionists when itcomes to government, believing that each individual knows best how to pur-sue his own interests, social conservatives are interventionists. They see arole for government in “soulcraft” — in the molding of character throughaid to parochial schools, for example, or measures to strengthen the tradi-tional family.

When it comes to foreign policy, as the books recount it, conservatives areequally riven. In Neoconservatism: The Biographyof a Movement, Justin Vaisse explores at length thetension between what he terms the neoconservative“moralism” of Robert Kagan and William Kristol,with its overriding goal of spreading global democ-racy, and the realism of Henry Kissinger and BrentScowcroft, with its supreme doctrinal principle thatAmerica should act beyond its borders only to theextent that its interests dictate. David Farber chimesin on this point as well: “Phyllis Schlafly and otherprominent conservatives,” he writes, “were some-times mortified by President George Bush’s vigoroususe of state power . . . abroad.” While realists thuslean heavily toward noninterventionism in almost

all cases, neoconservatives are much more open to intervention on the inter-national stage.

Each book, not surprisingly, concludes on a pessimistic note about theprospects for conservatism in America. For Farber, these twin tensions sug-gest that American conservatism may have “outlasted its historic purpose.”According to Vaisse, although neoconservatism may have a long-term“future,” “its fortunes now seem on the decline.” Courtwright, though dis-claiming any explicit predictions, concludes that the conservatism of the last40 years was a “messy failure.”

Warnings of a conservative crack-up in either foreign or domestic policyhave of course long been sounded, and conservatives themselves franklyacknowledge and debate the libertarian/social conservative and realist/neo-conservative tensions. But in coming out at the same time, and in so fullyexploring both conservatism’s domestic-policy and foreign-policy fault lines,these books raise questions without answering a deeper issue: Is there, per-haps, an intellectual connection between conservatism’s two tensions, thelibertarian/social-conservative conflict in domestic affairs, and the neocon-servative/realist divide in foreign policy? And if so, does such a connectionactually point to a deeper coherence within contemporary American conser-vatism?

Andrew Stark

Warnings of aconservativecrack-up in either foreign ordomestic policyhave of courselong been sounded.

Interest and restraint, values and freedom

H ere is one way of identifying a pattern — a kind of symmetry— between the two tensions. Consider realists, for whom thekeynote of U.S. foreign policy should be the pursuit of American

interests. This is a goal that America most reliably promotes when it acts, asVaisse describes the realist position, in a “restrained manner,” resisting thetemptation to rush off to police far corners of the globe in the name ofAmerican ideals, such as freedom and human rights. Owen Harries, a con-servative foreign-policy intellectual of the realist school, emphasizes the samekey word in his writings: restraint. For Harries, America can conserve itsglobal power — its dominance in human, military, and financial resources— only if it “restrains” itself from expending that power unless U.S. inter-ests are directly threatened.

If “interest” and “restraint” are the watchwords of foreign-policy realism,“values” and “freedom” occupy analogous roles in the foreign-policy doc-trine that has come to be known as neoconservatism. For neoconservatives,as Vaisse shows, America should be animated on the global stage by the pro-motion of its values, not simply its interests, and central among those valuesis the ideal of freedom, along with allied concerns such as democracy andhuman rights. In recognizing a moral imperative in America’s acting abroadto promote the value of human freedom, instead of restraining itself to mat-ters of direct national self-interest, neoconservatism offers a comparativelyinterventionist foreign policy.

So conceived, conservatism’s foreign-policy tension is related to its domes-tic-policy tension as a kind of mirror image. For in the conservative domes-tic-policy tension, it is freedom that becomes a matter of self-interest, andrestraint a question of moral values. So, for example, domestic-policy liber-tarians champion freedom. But being by nature relatively unmoralistic, liber-tarians advance freedom not as a moral value — as do neoconservatives inforeign policy — but simply because it is the most effective mechanism foradvancing the interests of individuals, especially their interests in the market-place. The market, as George Will says in describing this position, is an“expedient,” not an “ultimate value,” much less the “ultimate arbiter of allvalues.” Conversely, social conservative domestic-policy intellectualsadvance restraint. But since they focus much more on morality — DavidCourtwright calls them “moral conservatives” — they advance restraint notmerely as a matter of self-interest, as foreign-policy realists do when theyadvocate restraint in the national interest, but as a personal moral value, orvirtue. The “virtues of self-reliance and self-restraint,” as Will says, underpinthe traditional structures of family, neighborhood, and church.

As a first cut, then, when we look in tandem at conservatism’s twin policytensions, foreign and domestic — when we search for a set of concepts


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through which each of the four conservatisms can be related to the others —a pattern seems to emerge. The four dovetail, with realism treating restraintas the best means of advancing national self-interest, neoconservatives view-ing freedom as a moral value, libertarians vaunting freedom as the bestmeans of advancing personal self-interest, and social conservatives advocat-ing restraint as a moral value.

Humility

E ven at this level, although the four dovetail, the tensions thatCourtwright, Farber, and Vaisse identify of course do not disappear.But the fact that the two tensions at least show a relationship raises

the possibility that, if we burrow down further, we might be able to identifya deeper principle that all four conservative doctrines hold in common. Andin fact there is such a principle. Each in its own way — realism and neocon-servatism in foreign policy, libertarianism and social conservatism in domes-tic policy — exhibits a kind of humility about human abilities.

That doesn’t mean that all conservative thinkers advance their views withhumility, nor that humility is the only principle to be found in each of thefour doctrines. Far from it. It’s simply that if we lend the four conservativedoctrines what the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin calls a “constructive inter-pretation” — a constructive interpretation looks for the best, most appealingnorm that a set of doctrines can be “taken to serve or express or exemplify”— then that norm is humility in the case of American conservatism. Or, putanother way, each of the conservative doctrines carries within itself thenotion that it’s very difficult for human beings, when they act as politicalcreatures, to get matters right.

This is perhaps most evident with realism in foreign policy. Its principalnostrum — that restraint is almost always in the nation’s interests — stemsfrom a fear of foreign entanglements or quagmires. It originates, in otherwords, in a worry that even a carefully delimited sacrifice of those interests,say a modest expenditure of treasure or manpower in the name of humani-tarianism (e.g., Rwanda), or an initially circumscribed military campaign inthe name of democratization (e.g., Iraq), will inevitably snowball out of thecontrol of officials and strategists, imperfect mortals that they are, into everlarger sacrifices at ever increasing cost. Above all, then, humility about whatwe can manage abroad is to be counseled.

There is a parallel between this central concern of realism in foreign poli-cy, and that of libertarianism in domestic policy. Libertarianism’s key princi-ple — that individual interests are always served by policies that maximizefreedom — stems from a fear that even an initially circumscribed sacrifice offreedom, say a modest state intervention in the name of equity (rent con-trols, for example, or limiting the deductibility of ceo salaries) risksembarking government on a slippery slope. Events can easily slip out of the

Andrew Stark

control of officials and regulators, with the result that ever greater amountsof market freedom get sacrificed. Rent controls, for example, cause apart-ment shortages which create pressure for government-subsidized housing;limitation of ceo salary deductibility leads corporations to reward theirexecutives through other mechanisms which themselves provoke calls foradditional regulation.

If there is a common temperament to both forms of conservative nonin-terventionism, foreign-policy realism, and domestic-policy libertarianism, itis a basic humility about our hobbled abilities, as fallible beings, to bend theworld to our will. Each doctrine originates in a sense that human affairs canquickly ramify beyond the ability of policy makers to control. Even smalldeviations from restraint in foreign policy, or frompersonal freedom in domestic policy, lie beyond ourcapacity to safely manage. The most initially modesttinkering is almost always a fool’s errand of hubris.

Though it is perhaps less obvious, conservatism’stwo interventionisms, foreign-policy neoconser-vatism and domestic-policy social conservatism, alsofundamentally display a temperament of humility.The neoconservative doctrine that foreign policyshould promote freedom as a moral value rests, atleast in its current iteration, on the view that thereare limits to what America can do on its own toshape world events. It “is unclear,” as Robert Kagan writes, “whether theUnited States can operate effectively over time without the moral support orapproval of the democratic world.” In order to attain that approval, theU.S., contra realism, “can neither appear to be acting, nor in fact act, as ifonly its self-interest mattered. It must act in ways that benefit all humanityor, at the very least, the part of humanity that shares its liberal principles.”

One can thus discern a nonhubristic view of America’s capacity to go italone, as opposed to a hubristic view that America can remake the world inits own image, within neoconservative arguments for interventions abroadto promote the moral value of freedom. Of course, neoconservatives mayultimately be wrong to think that promoting the values of freedom thatother democracies share, and not simply restraining itself to acts that furtherits own national interests, is going to win for America the hearts and mindsof the world’s free nations, getting them to put their shoulder to the wheel.The point is simply that, for neoconservatives, those nations will be morewilling to do so if America shows that it is prepared to subordinate its owninterests to its value of freedom — that it is willing to sacrifice men and trea-sure to vigorously promote freedom abroad — than if it restrains its interna-tional forays only to those that advance its own interests. The ultimate ori-entation, though, is one of humility: America needs the help of othernations, and treating the promotion of global freedom as a key moral valueis the best way of winning that support.



Both socialconservatism andneoconservatismfundamentally

display a temperament of humility.

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In a kind of echo of foreign-policy neoconservatism, domestic social-poli-cy conservatism — which sees personal restraint as a key moral virtue —rests, too, on an orientation of humility. Individuals need the help of govern-ment in cultivating the personal virtue of restraint; they cannot do it on theirown. Government intervention to promote sobriety, chastity, prudence, rev-erence, moral fiber, and respect for persons and property are all vital ingredi-ents, social conservatives believe, in the soulcraft that instills the virtue ofrestraint. That is because our own individual capacities are limited. In theabsence of government policies that encourage restraint, social conservativesfear, too many of us would be incapable of properly handling personal free-dom on our own, instead indulging it to the point where we would nolonger remain capable of either exercising or defending it. Intervention bythe state to cultivate the virtue of restraint, whether through the support ofreligious education, the encouragement of family values in popular culture,or the promotion of abstinence in the schools, becomes necessary.

Both variants of conservative interventionism, neoconservative foreignpolicy and social-conservative domestic policy, thus rely on a kind of humili-ty too. Neoconservatism stems from the awareness that it lies beyond thenation’s capacity to act boundlessly and alone, and that it must thereforeattract international support by promoting the value of freedom. Social con-servatism stems from an awareness that it lies beyond the capacity of indi-viduals to act properly when they are left alone without boundaries, andthat they thus must rely on government to bolster within them the virtues ofrestraint.

More broadly, if there is a conceptual level at which all four conservativedoctrines exhibit the same principle — at which their tensions, the twodomestic and the two foreign, melt away — it is in the underlying tempera-ment of humility that they all exhibit. It may be a humility about govern-ment’s capacities to manage even small deviations from restraint in foreignpolicy (realism) or from freedom in domestic policy (libertarianism). Or itmay be a humility about human capacities to pursue freedom internationallyunassisted by other democracies (neoconservatism) or to display restraint inpersonal life unassisted by our own government (social conservatism).

Irony

There is, though, another way to look at all of this. Why focuson the tension between interventionists and noninterventionists ineither domestic- or foreign-policy conservatism, one might ask,

when American liberalism, in both its foreign and domestic policy variants,is cloven in much the same way? After all, in foreign policy, liberal noninter-ventionists have long sought to end what they view as American interferencewith the self-determination of other nations, while interventionists have con-sistently urged America to work assiduously, even if it’s not a priority as far

Andrew Stark

as the nation’s interests are concerned, to promote humanitarian goals —environmentalism, public health, labor standards, and civil rights — abroad.Likewise, when it comes to domestic policy, there have always been liberalnoninterventionists who call upon government to retreat in almost everyarena having to do with moral values — religious education, the definitionof marriage, abortion, sex on tv — while liberal interventionists haverepeatedly sought government’s active presence in areas having to do witheconomic matters: taxation, redistribution, regulation. Whatever the cracksin conservatism may be, surely they are met one for one by those in liberal-ism.

Again, though, this is old news. At this stage, it might be more revealingto ask not whether conservatism’s various tensionsare simply matched by liberalism’s, but whether — ifconservatism’s various interventionisms and nonin-terventionisms are reconcilable in a basic tempera-ment of humility — liberalism’s, too, are reconcil-able in some fundamental stance or another. And infact they are: in a basic temperament not of humilitybut of irony.

Each of American liberalism’s two noninterven-tionisms, its foreign-policy stance that shrinks from“imperialistic” interference in the self-determination of other nations and itsdomestic-policy stance that recoils from imposing moral strictures on thelives of individuals, is driven to accept the irony that other nations, or otherindividuals, may well use the resulting freedom to in fact undermine free-dom. A belief that other nations should be free to determine their ownregimes according to their own norms and cultures, the linchpin of liberalforeign-policy noninterventionism, entails their being free to adopt thedespotism of a Chavez, or the theocracy of a Khameini. Similarly, a beliefthat other individuals should be free to pursue their own lifestyles accordingto their own beliefs and values, the keystone of liberal domestic-policy non-interventionism, necessarily implies their being free to pursue “multicultural”values that may be at odds with America’s creedal freedoms, including thefreedoms of expression, association, physical well-being, choice of mate, thedetermination of one’s occupation, and even the selection of one’s clothing.

It is not that these ironies are figments of the liberal imagination. It’s justthat conservatives by and large do not get hamstrung by them, believing thatpursuing freedom internationally means bringing other nations closer to anAmerican understanding of freedom and democracy, thus implacably oppos-ing foreign despotism or theocracy, and that pursuing freedom at homemeans integrating groups into a shared American understanding of freedom,thus resolutely contesting domestic groups that would freely opt for a con-flicting value system.

Liberalism’s noninterventionist strands, both foreign and domestic, thusrequire an acceptance of the irony that to promote freedom for other nations



Are liberalism’svarious tensionsreconcilable in

some or anotherfundamental

stance?

and individuals involves allowing for and accepting that they might wellchoose to undermine those freedoms. By the same token, liberalism’s inter-ventionist strands, both foreign and domestic, are fixated on the ironic pos-sibility that when nations and individuals pursue their own interests theymight actually act to undermine those interests.

In foreign policy, liberal interventionism rests on the idea that wheneverAmerica allows itself to act self-interestedly on the world stage, it risks taint-ing its conduct in the eyes of other nations. Norman Podhoretz captures thisliberal foreign-policy irony well when he writes that for liberal intervention-ism, “selflessness” is critical. Because (for example) the “Gulf War had beenfought to secure a major source of our supply of oil, it had been tainted by

self-interest in the eyes of liberals. But to those sameliberal eyes, no clear national interest or materialadvantage was visible in the Bosnian or Kosovointerventions: both were undertaken, or so it wasthought, purely for humanitarian reasons, and forthe sake of protecting people whose human rightswere being violated by Milosevic. Hence they werepermissible, even mandatory.”

Ironically, the best way of commanding the inter-national legitimacy that will ultimately conduce tothe national interest is, then, to adopt a foreign poli-cy that often is explicitly not aimed to achieve thenation’s interests. The difference here with neocon-servative interventionism is worth noting. For neo-

conservatives, foreign policy should also frequently depart from America’sself-interest, but the accent lies in departing from the “interest,” not the“self.” In other words, for neoconservative interventionists, America shouldpromote its own values — values of freedom, democracy, and civil society —and not just its own interests. For liberal interventionists, America shouldpursue the interests of other nations — in peacekeeping, environmental pro-tection, fair trade — and not just its own interests. For neoconservative for-eign-policy interventionists, the stress is on principle as opposed to interest;for liberal foreign-policy interventionists, it is on altruism as opposed to self-ishness. These may often lead to the same specific foreign-policy stance, suchas intervention in Kosovo, but the underlying animus differs. Whatever theircomparative merits on other scores might be, there is less irony to the neo-conservative idea that pursuing the nation’s principles is compatible with thenation’s long-run interests than there is to the liberal idea that pursuingother nations’ interests is compatible with the nation’s long-run interests.

Finally, liberal domestic-policy interventionism — interventionism in themarketplace — rests as well on the irony that, as the philosopher NormanBowie puts it, the “collective pursuit of self-interest by all members of a soci-ety has the collective result of undermining the interests of all.” When weeach merely pursue our own economic interests — working harder, driving

Andrew Stark

For liberal interventionists,America shouldpursue the interests of othernations and notjust its own interests.

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costs down, and buying more — we at the same time undermine our owninterests in personal well-being, job satisfaction, and the environment.Government intervention is thus required to provide safety nets, mandatedecent working conditions, and prohibit environmental degradation. Aswith liberal foreign-policy interventionism, so with liberal domestic-policyinterventionism: Both are shaped around an ironic awareness that the pur-suit of self-interest, whether national or personal, often actually underminesthose interests. But of course, to go too far in barring the pursuit of self-interest, whether national or personal, can be counterproductive too.

The Enlightenment

M y goal here lies not in vindicating conservatism over liberal-ism, but in considering whether, because of its foreign anddomestic policy tensions, American conservatism has, as David

Farber says, “outlasted its historical purpose.” I have suggested that its ten-sions are resolvable at a certain level, but to fully examine Farber’s proposi-tion, we need a historic perspective as well. And from a historic perspective,the first thing to note is that it’s strange that American conservatism’s vari-ous strands find reconciliation in a basic temperament of humility, as liberal-ism’s do in a series of ironies. After all, as Michael Oakeshott and LionelTrilling in their different ways noted, it is conservatism that has historicallybeen associated with irony. As for liberalism, it was certainly once deeplylinked to a sense of humility: or, in John Stuart Mill’s usage, a sense of falli-bility. Since no one can claim a monopoly on truth, Mill argued — since weshould all be humble with respect to our own beliefs — we must cultivate aclimate of liberal pluralism in which ideas can clash, with the stronger argu-ments driving out the weaker.

These images of conservatism and liberalism — in which conservatism islinked with irony and liberalism with humility — are rooted in a particulartime and place, the era of the European Enlightenment and its aftermath.Conservative writers from Maistre to Tocqueville had to rely on ironybecause, however nostalgic they may have been for the age-old aristocraticor clerical order, with its claims to pride or infallibility, they understood thatit was dying. The better rhetorical strategy, then, was not to try to defendthat old order — a lost cause — but to call attention to the contradictions,the ironies, in the rising thought of Enlightenment liberalism.

Albert O. Hirschman, whose 1991 book The Rhetoric of Reaction ana-lyzed this phenomenon, put it this way: “Because of the stubbornly progres-sive temper of the [Enlightenment] era,” conservatives were “up against anintellectual climate in which a positive value attached to whatever loftyobjective [was] placed on the social agenda by self-proclaimed ‘progres-sives.’” Conservatives were thus “not likely to launch an all-out attack onthat objective” but rather would understandably “attempt to demonstrate



78 Policy Review

that the action proposed [to reach it would] produce . . . the exact contraryof the objective proclaimed . . . Attempts to reach for liberty [would] makesociety sink into slavery, the quest for democracy [would] produce oligarchyand tyranny,” and so forth. For everything pursued in the name of a givenliberal value, conservatives found reason to argue that it would backfire,causing a setback by the lights of that same value — or another closelyaligned. Enlightenment-era conservatives thus used liberal values to chal-lenge and impeach liberalism itself, searching, as outsiders, for ironies withinliberalism.

Enlightenment liberals, of course, had no converse need to appeal to theconservative values of hierarchy and tradition in order to challenge conserv-atives: no need, that is, to find ironies internal to conservatism. Instead, sinceit was their own liberal value system that was rising, they used it to attackconservative values of prescription and authority from the outside. Nolonger willing to accept prescribed ideas simply because they were laid downby self-professedly infallible ecclesiastical or political authorities,Enlightenment liberals placed stress on the idea that no one is infallible. Noone has an a priori claim to the truth; and religious, political, and intellectu-al life can proceed only on the basis of a personal and institutional aware-ness of the universality of human fallibility. Proponents of any given ideolo-gy — aristocratic, democratic, socialist, theological, atheistic — would allhave to display sufficient humility about their own access to the highesttruth and wisdom to allow their mettle to be tested in the marketplace ofideas, where only the most rationally argued and empirically valid wouldprevail.

Conservatism: Not dead yet

W hen writers link irony to conservatism, or make claims forthe centrality of humility to liberalism, they are thus thinking ofbodies of argument that unfolded in the wake of the European

Enlightenment and its aftermath. They are thinking of a rising liberalismbesieging a declining authority-based aristocratic and clerical order, in whichboth sides made recourse to those ascending liberal values. In Americatoday, however, the situation is different. Enlightenment liberalism is nolonger new, its meaning and implications having been most fully adumbrat-ed and explored for 200 years in the American creed. Enlightenment liberal-ism, though, faces challenges from new authoritarian opponents: opponents,that is, who draw their authority from their dominance of either secularsociety (e.g., China) or theocratic apparatuses (e.g., Iran). This has conse-quences for both American liberalism and American conservatism — andfor humility and irony.

American liberals, who have for two centuries been elaborating the prin-ciples of a liberal order in which individuals are free to pursue their own

Andrew Stark

interests, have for some time been bumping up against the ways in whichthose principles can fall into conflict as each is pursued more fully. Think ofhow the quest for “positive liberty” can erode “negative liberty,” for exam-ple, or how guaranteeing “equality of result” can diminish “equality ofopportunity.” Hence, what characterizes American liberalism’s variousstrands, at the most basic level, is a continuing confrontation with a series ofironies, among them how the promotion of freedom abroad (understood asself-determination) can lead to a flowering of unfree regimes; how the pro-motion of freedom at home (understood as diversity) can lead to the flour-ishing of unfree cultural enclaves; how the promotion of the nation’s inter-ests abroad can undermine them, as when America is seen to be motivatedby the desire to accumulate its own wealth andpower; and how allowing free rein for the pursuit ofindividual interests at home can undermine them, aswhen the market generates perverse social externali-ties such as environmental pollution or financial col-lapse. What’s key is that unlike conservatives of theEnlightenment era, who exploited the ironies of lib-eralism as outsiders, for liberals today, who confrontthem as insiders, they pose vexing, perplexing, andeven paralyzing tradeoffs.

American conservatives, for their part, are lesshamstrung by conflicts within America’s creedal lib-eral values than they are animated by the conflictbetween those values and their authoritarian opponents. But unlikeEnlightenment liberals, who demanded that their authoritarian opponents— aristocrats, clerics, and their defenders — admit their own fallibility, forcontemporary conservatives it is not so much the hubris of America’s oppo-nents, but the hazards of America’s own overreaching in a dangerousworld, that calls for constant monitoring and reflection. Thus realists worryabout the capacity of government to properly manage even small deviationsfrom the pursuit of American self-interest abroad, while libertarians worryabout the capacity of government to manage even small deviations fromthe unfettered pursuit of individual interest in the marketplace at home.Neoconservatives worry that advances in freedom abroad cannot beattained by America without the help of other free nations in providingpolitical, economic, and moral support, while social conservatives worrythat advances in personal freedom at home cannot be managed by individ-uals without the help of government in buttressing family, church, andcommunity. A sense of humility about human capacity has thus become thetemperament that the major branches of American conservatism hold incommon.

Not all American conservatives are paragons of humility, certainly, norare all liberals caught in a thicket of irony. My observation is simply that ifone goes looking for a temperament that the various strands of American



American conservatives areanimated by theconflict betweenAmerica’s creedalvalues and their authoritarianopponents.

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conservatism all share, a good candidate is humility, just as irony is for liber-alism. This temperamental level is of course only one of many from which toexamine these two sprawling, vaguely bordered bodies of thought and opin-ion. But, when we do view the two from this underlying plane, Farber’sclaim that American conservatism has become a superannuated, dead ideol-ogy seems problematic — certainly to the extent that history is a guide. Afterall, in the Enlightenment, it was a sense of humility that animated the risingideology and a fixation on irony that characterized the one in stasis. If thatprinciple still holds, then American conservatism has a vital role to play.

Or put it this way, in thinking about America today: Has there everbefore been both such a need to strategically defend basic Enlightenmentprinciples from external assault, coupled with such an awareness of the diffi-cult internal tradeoffs involved in further refining and developing those prin-ciples? If not, then it’s hard to believe that American conservatism has “out-lasted its historic purpose.”

Andrew Stark

Economistsat War

By Charles Wolf, Jr.

J im Lacey . Keep From AllThoughtful Men: How U.S.Economists Won World War II.Naval Inst i tute Pres s . 288Pages. $34.95

To understand the storyline of this unique piece ofmilitary history requires deci-

phering its elliptical title and suspend-ing disbelief in its subtitle. The title isquoted from a memorandum written inOctober 1942 by the U.S. Army’s chiefmilitary supply officer, General BrehonSomervell, in which he urged PresidentRoosevelt’s War Production Board toreject and suppress the findings of twoU.S. economists, Robert Nathan andSimon Kuznets, pertaining to the estab-lishment of targets for U.S. militaryproduction required to wage and winthe war against the Axis Powers. In theevent, the Somervell critique was reject-ed, the Nathan/Kuznets findings were

accepted, and three years and ninemonths later the war was won! Hence,the subtitle’s hyperbole. (Incidentally,and largely unrelated to this story,Kuznets received the Nobel prize ineconomic science in 1971.)

Jim Lacey, a retired military officerwith twelve years active-duty experi-ence in the U.S. Army infantry, and aPh.D. in history from the University ofLeeds, is a professor of strategy, war,and policy at the Marine War Collegeand an adjunct professor in the JohnHopkins National Security Program.Keep From All Thoughtful Men is amorsel of revisionist military historywhose focus is on top-level logistics:specifically, military requirements (forboth U.S. and Allied military forces,plus Lend Lease for the U.K., and laterthe Soviet Union), the industrial pro-duction capabilities to meet theserequirements, the anticipation of short-falls and bottlenecks that might disruptand prevent meeting the requirements,and whether and how to limit if notremedy the shortfalls and their conse-quences.

Underlying the logistics of war ingeneral and of World War II in particu-lar is the military strategy that gener-ates the requirements, while the feasi-bility of meeting requirements dependson both existing production andfinancing capabilities, and on opportu-nities and realistic possibilities forexpanding these capabilities within aspecified time period.

One might expect that military his-tory focusing on these matters wouldbe dull and dreary, reflecting the “dis-mal science” that fills many ofKFATM’s pages. Indeed, substantialparts of the book are devoted to dis-cussing the size of the U.S. Gross


B o o k s

Charles Wolf, Jr. holds the distin-guished corporate chair in internation-al economics at the RANDCorporation, and is a senior researchfellow at the Hoover Institution

82 Policy Review

National Product in 1942, its maxi-mum potential growth in the followingyear, and the availability of critical rawmaterials, industrial facilities, machinetools, and skilled and unskilled labor tofuel this growth. The profusion ofnumbers in KFATM makes it a moder-ately heavy read, especially if comparedto other recent revisionist histories ofWorld War II which focus on such eye-catching and exciting subjects asWinston Churchill’s “ravishing ofIndia” in an attempt to preserve theBritish empire, or the questionablemorality of “carpet bombing” ofDresden and Frankfurt by the raf, letalone America’s atomic bombing ofHiroshima and Nagasaki.

But KFATM, though occasionallyheavy reading, remains lively, becauseit connects the logistic issues to thebureaucratic politics in which theywere immersed. Lacey recounts theissues through the key actors and orga-nizations that represented conflictingpositions on the main issues, interlard-ing his narrative with brief vignettescharacterizing the principal players inthe bureaucratic wrangling thatensued.

As they are tracked in KFATM, thekey issues can be summarized in termsof the feasibility of matching require-ments for military forces to the indus-trial production needed for equippingthem, and doing so in a specified timeperiod. In the event of a mismatch, thecritical issue that emerged was thelength of delay that would result.

The military services asserted earlyin 1942 that defeating Germany andthe Axis Powers in Europe through asuccessful invasion of the continentwould require U.S. forces of fourteenmillion. (At the war’s peak, mobiliza-

tion actually reached twelve million.)Production targets were derived bylinking the manpower total to theweapons and munitions required toequip the targeted ground, air, andnaval forces and the sea and air trans-port needed to move and supply them.The debate focused on the feasibility ofmatching force requirements to produc-tion capabilities to achieve a successfulinvasion in 1943.

Lacey’s account of the ensuing feasi-bility debate is based on careful readingand analysis of key memoranda andminutes of meetings (which are includ-ed as appendices) among the principalmilitary and civilian participants con-cerned with the issues. The debate pit-ted General Somervell, AdmiralRobinson (chief of NavalProcurement), and Undersecretary ofWar Patterson (acting for SecretaryStimson) against the three economists,Robert Nathan, Kuznets, and StacyMay. (All of the latter were top staffmembers of the War ProductionBoard.) In the middle, initially leaningeither one way or the other, toward themilitary or toward the economists,were Donald Nelson (Chairman ofwpb), Vice President Henry Wallace,General George Marshall (chairman ofthe Joint Chiefs of Staff), HarryHopkins (special assistant to the presi-dent), Charles Wilson (vice chairman ofwpb , formerly ceo of GeneralMotors, and a subsequent secretary ofdefense), Ferdinand Eberstadt (also avice chairman of wpb ), LeonHenderson (administrator of the Officeof Price Administration), and otherluminaries of the time.

Several of these dramatis personaemight well have been designated byHollywood central casting. Somervell

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was described at the time as “out of thetradition of the ElizabethanEnglishman, all lace and velvet andcourtliness outside, fury and purpose-fulness within . . . working . . . consci-entiously to water down his own triple-distilled portion of the grapes of wrath. . . His problem is not to work up atemper but to control one.”

The principal protagonist on theother side was Robert Nathan,described in KFATM as “a huge bulk ofa man with a kettledrum voice. He isno dreamy brain-truster. Rather, he ismore like a wrestler than a thinker andtalks more like a barker than a savant.”(Some 30 years after the eventsrecounted in the book, Bob Nathanbecame a close friend of mine. Thequotation is accurate as concerns hisvoice and demeanor. It omits the factsthat he was a sharp and well-trainedeconomist with a lively if sometimesacerbic sense of humor.)

In contrast to Nathan, Kuznets wasa scholarly archetype: low-key,thoughtful, deliberate, balanced, andsoft-spoken. Among the three econo-mists, Kuznets’s analytical care andclarity in parsing the issues, andaddressing them with facts and opin-ions — the latter clearly labeled as suchwherever they were expressed — pro-vided much of the substantive materialin the debate.

The crux of what Lacey refers to as“The Great Feasibility Debate” in theautumn of 1942 was the question ofwhether the materiel and related indus-trial output that the American economycould produce would be sufficient forthe U.S. and the British to launch adecisive invasion of Europe in 1943.Strongly in favor of an affirmativeanswer to this question were General

Marshall and Undersecretary of WarPatterson, as well as General Somervell;also, initially leaning toward this posi-tion, which they later deserted, wereHarry Hopkins on behalf of the presi-dent, as well as wpb Chairman Nelson.Later, and most reluctantly, Marshallalso changed his mind.

Nathan tasked Simon Kuznets, as

chief of the Analysis and ResearchSection of Nathan’s wpb PlanningCommittee, to study and answer thisoutput question. In formulating it,Nathan distinguished three variants ofthe feasibility concept: productiongoals that were feasible “now” (that is,in October 1942 ), characterized as“minimum feasibility”; goals thatwould be feasible “with an all-outeffort” (“realistic maximum feasibili-ty”); and production goals feasible“under ideal conditions.” Kuznets’sstudy appeared six months later, inMarch 1942.

The sections of his reportare a model of clarity, de-jar-gonized prose, careful mar-

shalling of facts, and plain acknowledg-ment of uncertainties and opinions.


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In the autumn of 1942, the question was whether the materiel and related

industrial output that theAmerican economy could

produce would be sufficient for the U.S.

and the British to launch a decisive invasion of

Europe in 1943.

84 Policy Review

The report’s first section concentrateson macroeconomics: the actual gnp in1941, and expectations for 1942 andbeyond. Kuznets’s estimates includeallowance for nonmilitary civilian con-sumption and investment, especially forconsumers’ durable goods, for produc-ers’ goods, and for distribution costs.1

He acknowledges the assumptionsmade in each case, generally opting forassumptions that are optimistic fromthe standpoint of the maximum shareof gnp that would be available forexpanding investment and productionfor military uses.

The next three sections of Kuznets’sfeasibility study contain analyses ofraw materials supplies, industrial facili-ties including machine tools, and laborsupply, respectively. These sectionsforeshadow what became the field ofinput-output analysis in the later devel-opment of economics.

The report’s second section concen-trates on raw materials that are criticalfor meeting established requirementsfor aircraft, for additional army equip-ment besides aircraft (at the time, theAir Force was still part of the Army),for naval and maritime shipping, andfor Army and Navy construction.Based on what he admits is an “incom-plete picture of essential needs,”Kuznets concluded that he and others

who have studied the problem expectedthere would be in 1942 “a definiteshortage in rubber, nickel, tnt andsmokeless powder,” and very likely also“critical shortages in aluminum, vana-dium, wool, and toluol.” Looking for-ward to 1943, the report further antic-ipated that “the war munitions pro-gram . . . seems to be impossible”because of “supply shortages for cop-per, zinc, nickel, rubber, ammoniumnitrate,” as well as “an acute shortage”of “such basic materials as steel andaluminum” when allowance is madefor “essential civilian uses.”

Section three of Kuznets’s report,dealing with industrial facilities, is rela-tively more optimistic than is the sec-tion dealing with raw materials.Nevertheless, using several contempo-rary studies done outside wpb , andcomparing “requirements and currentshipment rates” for specific types ofmachine tools and special purposeinstruments, the Kuznets report antici-pated “a shortage . . . of specific typesof tools so great . . . it would take over2 years to provide the units required in1942.”

The report concludes in its fourthsection that “next to foreign raw mate-rials that cannot be easily replaced, thesupply of labor is the most fundamen-tal factor in evaluating the feasibility ofa huge production program.” This sec-tion then proceeds with conservativeestimates (that is, ones deliberately cho-sen to be on the low side) of manpowerrequirements in 1942 for military pro-duction and construction, for civilianproduction and agriculture, and for thearmed forces themselves. These esti-mates are expressed in terms both ofnumbers of workers and military per-sonnel, and in dollar terms required for

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1. Kuznets’s report uses Gross National Product,rather than the more frequent current use ofGross Domestic Product. The difference betweengnp and gdp is the amount of the product thataccrues to foreign (i.e., non-national) recipients,e.g., earnings of U.S. companies owned by for-eign nationals versus earnings accruing to U.S.nationals from their ownership of foreign compa-nies. If earnings paid to U.S. owners of foreigncompanies exceed earnings paid to foreign own-ers of U.S. companies, gnp will exceed gdp; ifearnings paid to foreign owners of U.S. compa-nies exceed earnings paid to U.S. owners of for-eign companies, gdp will exceed gnp.

payments to those who would beemployed in military and civilian pro-duction. The report concludes that thecombined totals are “beyond thebounds of possible labor supply,” aswell as beyond the available financingderived from Kuznets’s calculations ofthe size and attainable growth ofnational income in 1942.

Nathan followed the Kuznets feasi-bility study with his own distillation ofit, as well as recommendations basedon the study. As discussed in KFATM,Nathan’s action memorandum empha-sized the serious disruptions that wouldresult from the shortfalls and bottle-necks forecasted by Kuznets, and rec-ommended scrupulous attention toimprovements in “production controland scheduling.” In effect, the Nathanand Kuznets efforts led to a recommen-dation that goals for 1942 would haveto be stretched out through 1943, andhence that the intended major invasionof Europe must be delayed at least until1944. This was the economists’ bot-tom line in the “Great FeasibilityDebate.”

Unsurprisingly, General Somervellresponded with a vigorous and at timesabrasive dissent from the Kuznetsreport, and from Nathan’s recommen-dations that were largely based on it.Expressing agreement that productioncontrol and scheduling should beimproved, he went on to express “com-plete disagreement” with everythingelse in the economists’ findings and rec-ommendations, explicitly dissentingfrom the report’s findings because “thedata are unreliable” and the “varia-tions between Mr. Kuznets’ ‘probabili-ties’ are not percentage-wise enough tojustify a wholesale change in goals.”He went on to say that aspects of the

report show “a complete lack of under-standing of the [production] problem.”Furthermore, Somervell expressed hispreference “to trust . . . proper deci-sions from the President, Mr. Nelson,and military personnel knowing some-thing of production, than to this boardof ‘economists and statisticians’ . . .without any responsibility or knowl-edge of production.” His concludingrecommendation was that the report“be carefully hidden from the eyes ofthoughtful men” — hence, the title ofLacey’s book.

Some of the details touched on inthis review, and their elaboration in thebook, resonate with policy debates wecurrently engage in. Both similaritieswith and differences between 1942and the current debates warrant furtherreflection. The wrangling in 1942 wasno less heated and intense in the midstor at least early stages of World War IIthan is our wrangling now in the midstof three smaller wars. Nor were thewranglers, or at least some of them,any less intense or vituperative than arethe wranglers today. Partisanship wasalso intense then as now, although theparties in contention had less of a polit-ical slant than a professional one (forexample, military vs. business vs. eco-nomic). Another difference between thewranglings was the nearly total absenceof concern then about how the mediawould play one position or another,while now much if not all of the dispu-tation seems to be governed by antici-pating and influencing media play.

Reflecting on the issues then com-pared with those we currently argueabout, it’s not at all clear that ours areany more complicated than the issueswhich KFATM addresses: For instance,analyzing and costing alternative poli-


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cies for Medicare seems to me no morecomplicated or difficult now than wasthe analysis of feasibility in 1943 andits translation into something calcula-ble and usable for policy purposes atthat time.

A final as well as still more soberingthought prompted by reading Lacey’sbook is this: It’s not at all clear whetherthe quality and depth of analysis ofsuch current policy disputes as thoseconcerning Medicare, or paring the fed-eral deficit, or managing war endings inIraq and Afghanistan reach let aloneexceed the level accompanying the fea-sibility debate seven decades ago.

Pakistan:Friend or Foe?By Sadanand Dhume

Anatol Lieven. Pakistan: A HardCountry. Publ ic Affa irs . 576pages. $35.00

Bruce Riedel . Deadly Embrace:Pakistan, America and the Future ofGlobal Jihad. BrookingsInstitution Press. 180 pages.$24.95

E ven by the standards of aturbulent land, this has been atumultuous year for Pakistan.

In January, a bodyguard assassinated

Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjabprovince, for speaking up for an illiter-ate Christian woman on death rowunder Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws.Two months later, Taliban militantsmurdered Shahbaz Bhatti, federal min-ister for minority affairs, and the onlyChristian in the overwhelminglyMuslim nation’s cabinet. In May camethe dramatic U.S. raid on Osama binLaden’s compound in the garrisontown of Abbottabad, near Islamabad.Since then Islamist militants haveassaulted a naval base in Karachi andkilled 40 people in separate bombingsof a market and a police station inPeshawar.

Over the same period, U.S.-Pakistanrelations — challenging at the best oftimes — have struck a new low. Themost recent downturn began inJanuary after Pakistani authoritiesarrested Raymond Davis, a cia opera-tive posted at the U.S. embassy, forshooting two motorcycle-borne men inwhat was most likely a botched rob-bery. Despite his diplomatic immunity,Pakistan imprisoned Davis for nearlytwo months before releasing him inreturn for a reported blood money pay-out of between $2.1 million and $3million to the dead men’s relatives. InJuly, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairmanof the Joint Cheifs of Staff, accused thePakistani army’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, of green-lightingthe killing of a prominent local journal-ist who had written about the radical-ization of the country’s armed forces.

The Abbottabad raid raises trou-bling questions about Pakistan’s com-plicity in hiding the world’s most want-ed terrorist. But even before, U.S. offi-cials had stepped up criticism ofIslamabad for not doing enough to

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Sadanand Dhume is a resident fellowat the American Enterprise Institute inWashington, and a South Asia colum-nist for the Wall Street Journal.

combat terrorism or to eradicate safehavens used to target nato troops inAfghanistan. According to a Fox Newspoll post-Abbottabad, three out of fourAmericans would like the U.S. to cutoff aid, which has totaled upward of$20 billion since the 9/11 terroristattacks on New York and Washington.

For its part, Pakistan has respondedto U.S. concerns with belligerencerather than contrition. Parliamentpassed a resolution condemning theU.S. for violating Pakistan’s sovereigntyin Abbottabad and demanding an endto drone strikes. Pakistani officials haveallegedly leaked the name of the ciastation chief in Islamabad to localnewspapers, a particularly reckless actin a nation crawling with militants.And in a show of priorities bewilderingto many Americans, the ISI has arrestedlocals who (unknowingly) helped theU.S. track bin Laden rather than thosewho gave him shelter.

Against this backdrop — Pakistancareening from one crisis to the nextand the U.S.-Pakistan relationship at itslowest point in years — come two con-trasting books from experts on thecountry.

Anatol Lieven is a British journalistand historian, and a fellow at the NewAmerica Foundation in Washington. Inthe 1980s, Lieven covered Pakistanand Afghanistan for the London Times,and Pakistan: A Hard Country followsa long tradition of books by foreigncorrespondents, among them ChristinaLamb’s Waiting for Allah, OwenBennett Jones’s Pakistan: Eye of theStorm, and Mary Anne Weaver’sPakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad andAfghanistan. His experience as areporter gives Lieven both the tone ofan insider and a vast affection for the

country, which he credits for giving him“some of the best moments” of his life.

In an attempt to explain the world’ssixth-most populous nation in under600 pages, Lieven ranges widely,touching upon everything from the riseand fall of landed families in thePunjab to the sloth of the nationalpolice to the garish décor in wealthyhomes. To this ambitious task theauthor brings both thoroughness andan impressive familiarity with his sub-ject. Each of Pakistan’s four provincesgets a chapter, as do matters that illu-minate the country’s day-to-day work-ings: politics, the economy, the justicesystem, and so on. Despite this grab-bag approach, two themes stand out:the struggle between moderate and fun-damentalist strains of Islam in theworld’s first country created as a home-land for Muslims, and the role of themilitary in national life.

Lieven builds a meticulous case forthe essential moderation of Pakistanisociety, and against what he sees asoverheated speculation that Pakistanmay go the way of Iran and succumbto a full-blooded Islamist revolution.Despite the rise of the Pakistani Talibanover the past three and a half years,and the existence of a plethora ofjihadist groups, many with strong linksto the i s i , the odds of a jihadisttakeover of the Pakistani state, andwith it of the country’s 100 -oddnuclear weapons, strike him as exceed-ingly slim.

To begin with, widespread supportfor Islamist rebellion — as opposed toconcentrated pockets of support —exist only in the Pashtun dominatedareas of Northwest Pakistan, whichcontain only 5 percent of the country’spopulation. Unlike Shia Iran, largely


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88 Policy Review

Sunni Pakistan houses no unified andcentralized form of Islam. And whileIslamism in the Indian subcontinent —dating back to the 18th-century funda-mentalist Shah Waliullah, who found-ed Deobandism, the subcontinentalequivalent of Wahhabism — has large-ly been an urban phenomenon,Pakistan remains mostly rural. Sufishrines such as the famous SehwanSharif in Sindh — whose dervishesLieven memorably likens to “thou-sand-year-old hippies” — act as break-ers against any Islamist tide.

Dim prospects for a PakistaniKhomeini aside, the portrait of societythat emerges from Lieven’s travels ishardly reassuring. Conspiracy theories,it appears, are the norm rather than theexception. Most Pakistanis Lieveninterviews believe that the U.S. “runstheir country as a neocolonial clientstate.” The overwhelming majority —both the masses and educated elites —think the 9/11 attacks were not in factcarried out by al Qaeda, but were partof an elaborate plot by either the U.S.or Israel (or both) intended to “providea pretext for the U.S. invasion ofAfghanistan as part of the U.S. strategyof dominating the Muslim world.”

Everyone from senior military offi-cers to black-coated lawyers to stu-dents at an elite boarding school witha British sounding name spout bizarretheories about scheming Christiansand Jews. A brief interview withMehmood Ashraf Khan, a leadinglight of the 2007 Lawyers’ Movementthat helped depose the military regimeof General Pervez Musharraf and wasoften portrayed by the internationalpress as a vanguard of Jeffersonianideals, captures the flavor of suchthinking.

“At the Lal Masjid [Islamabad’s

Red Mosque, the scene of a 2007

battle between pro-Taliban mili-

tants and the army] thousands of

innocent women were killed. I

believe that this was really done by

Jews and Christians to create civil

war in Pakistan . . . . They say that

the Taleban are burning girls’

schools, but very little of this is

being done by the Taleban. Most is

being done by other forces to dis-

credit the Taleban. India has dozens

of consulates in Afghanistan, not to

help the Karzai administration, but

to help the Taleban to destroy

Pakistan.”

Lieven does not dwell much on ter-rorism beyond providing useful pottedhistories of Pakistan’s alphabet soup ofjihadist and sectarian (anti-Shia)groups, among them Lashkar-e-Taiba,Jaish-e-Mohammed, and the Pakistaniand Afghan variants of the Taliban.Nonetheless, on occasion he comes upwith a nugget of insight, such as theobservation that while most Talibanfighters are educated in madrassas,most Pakistani terrorists boast a gov-ernment education, and quite often ahigher education as well. In a some-what clumsy but nonetheless accuratemetaphor, Lieven likens Pakistan’sjihadist world to “a cloud of interplan-etary gas in which individuals joinsome clump for one operation and thenpart again to form new ad hoc groupsfor other attacks.”

On the military, Lieven takes a curi-ously sentimental line quite at oddswith the dominant view of Pakistanwatchers. Indeed, the book is studdedwith encomiums to “the only Pakistaniinstitution that works as it is officially

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meant to.” No fan of the country’ssquabbling politicians, at times Lievenputs the word democracy in quotes tosuggest his regard for its Pakistani vari-ant. He appears to recoil in horror atthe thought of elected civilian politi-cians in charge of military appoint-ments. He worries about soldiers find-ing it harder to find brides on accountof being seen by their compatriots asAmerican lackeys in the war on terror.

Somewhat disingenuously, Lievendownplays evidence of Pakistan’snuclear proliferation to Iran and Libyato make the case that a purely national-istic impulse drove what Pakistan’sown leaders have referred to as theIslamic bomb. Indeed, except for apassing jab at the army’s obsessionwith India and the disputed territory ofKashmir, Lieven’s book reads a bit likeit was written by a general’s house-guest. At times one can’t help but won-der whether the author’s self-declaredaffection for the country finds its deep-est expression in regard for its men inkhaki.

F or a contrasting view ofthat institution, and of thethreat emanating from

Pakistan more broadly, one can turn toBruce Riedel’s Deadly Embrace. Riedel,a senior scholar at the BrookingsInstitution and one of Washington’smost widely respected South Asiahands, chaired President Obama’sinteragency review of policy towardAfghanistan and Pakistan completed in2009 . As a former cia officer andadvisor to three presidents on theMiddle East and South Asia, Riedel hashad a ringside view of Pakistan’s evolu-tion over three decades, and of its dys-functional relationship with the U.S.

Riedel builds his narrative aroundthe four major jihads that have shapedPakistan’s history over the past 30-oddyears. The fanatical general Zia ul-Haqseized power in a coup in 1977, andused his twelve years in office toIslamize his own society while co-opt-ing U.S. and Saudi Arabian support towage a successful holy war against theSoviet Union in Afghanistan. The one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar roseto prominence in the mid-1990s and,with extensive support from thePakistani government, briefly estab-lished perhaps the world’s most brutalIslamist regime in Kabul before beingswept from power by the U.S. and itsallies in 2001. Omar gave shelter toOsama bin Laden and his vanguard ofArab terrorists in the run up to the9/11 attacks. Lastly, what Riedel termsthe global jihad encompasses continuedthreats from al Qaeda’s senior leader-ship in Pakistan, its allies in Pakistanand Afghanistan, al Qaeda franchisesin other parts of the global Muslimcommunity, and sympathizers embed-ded among immigrants in the West,including 800 ,000 Britons ofPakistani descent.

To put it mildly, Riedel’s view ofwhat he calls “the most dangerouscountry in the world” is not as san-guine as Lieven’s. He believes thatthere’s a serious possibility — albeit notyet the probability — of a “jihadisttakeover of the country” either by amilitant faction of the army or a mili-tant Sunni Islamic movement led by theTaliban. He also worries that ifPakistan’s jihadism problem remainsunchecked “sooner or later a Pakistan-based terror attack on India is going tolead to Armageddon.” He acknowl-edges that Pakistan’s so-called syndicate


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90 Policy Review

of terrorism — al Qaeda, the AfghanTaliban, the Pakistani Taliban, and thePunjab-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (let) —share neither a single leader nor a singlegoal. But at the same time, they oftencollaborate closely, and at root sharethe same antipathy toward Westerners,Indians, Israelis, and Jews.

Riedel traces much of the problemto Pakistan’s military. He describes thepious General Zia as the “grandfatherof global Islamic jihad.” On his watch,the isi’s strength rose from 2000 peo-ple in 1978 to 40,000 people (with a$1 billion budget) a decade later.

The intelligence agency’s links withjihadist groups have come underrenewed scrutiny following theAbbottabad raid and this year’s trial ofthe Pakistani-American Mumbaiattacks plotter David Headley inChicago. Riedel peels back layers ofhistory to underscore the depth anddurability of those ties. The jihadistcamp President Clinton fired cruisemissiles at in 1998, in a failed attemptto target bin Laden after al Qaedaattacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobiand Dar es Salaam, was built byPakistani contractors and funded bythe isi, making the agency the Saudi’s“real hosts.” The military’s ties withthe let are equally deep. Many of theterrorist group’s camps are adjacent toarmy bases. Retired officers from eliteunits such as the Special Services Grouphelp train let fighters. Often the letand the army recruit from the same vil-lages in the Punjab.

Not surprisingly, given their con-trasting views of what ails Pakistan,Lieven and Riedel offer startlingly dif-ferent prescriptions to policymakersin Washington. Lieven appears lessconcerned with the destabilizing effect

of Pakistan on the rest of the worldthan with what he sees as the destabi-lizing effect of the U.S. on Pakistanand the horrors that could ensueshould this lead to its collapse. InLieven’s reckoning, a Pakistan left toits own devices poses much less of adanger than one pressed to change.Or, as he puts it, “if Pakistan is notSouth Korea it is also not theCongo.” Accordingly, he believes that“the U.S. should not contribute to thedestruction of Pakistan no matterhow grave the provocation.” He callsfor an end to the war in Afghanistan,a resolution of the Kashmir dispute,and a correction of Washington’salleged tilt toward India.

For Riedel, nuclear-armed Pakistanis far too reckless and unstable toafford the U.S. the luxury of a hands-off approach. Within the country theproblem lies in the outsized role of thearmy and the isi in national life and itscorrosive effect on democracy.(Generals have ruled the country direct-ly for 34 of its 64 years as an indepen-dent country, and indirectly for muchof the rest.) During that time “succes-sive U.S. administrations have under-mined civil government in Pakistan,aided military dictators, and encour-aged the rise of extremist Islamic move-ments that now threaten the UnitedStates at home and abroad.” If at itscore Lieven’s book calls for a return tothe U.S.-Pakistan relationship of the1980s — when Washington workedclosely with Pakistan’s jihad-happygenerals and mostly ignored its nuclearprogram — then Riedel’s demandsexactly the opposite. In this view, thebuilding blocks of the Pakistani stateneed to be rearranged rather than rein-forced.

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A sensible Pakistan policy, as out-lined by Riedel, would make strength-ening its fragile civilian institutions theunderlying goal of all U.S. engage-ment. The U.S. needs strong intelli-gence and military-to-military tieswith its Pakistani counterparts, butunlike in the past these should notcome at the cost of stunting Pakistanidemocracy. To encourage reform,Washington needs to draw red linesagainst Islamabad’s support for terror-ism — specifically its longstanding tieswith both the let and the AfghanTaliban. Recalcitrant is i officials,including the powerful director gener-al, ought to be targeted with sanctionsshould they refuse to cooperate. Thelong term goal: to “reorient thePakistani army away from India andtoward counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency.”

Lieven is a fine writer and a talent-ed historian, and his book offers abetter guide than Riedel’s to the archi-tecture of the Pakistani countryside,say, or the many cultural contradic-tions of contemporary Pakistani life.But it’s Deadly Embrace that policy-makers must reach for first. At aphilosophical level, it recognizes thatradical Islam must be opposed, for itcannot be appeased. By distinguishingbetween ordinary Pakistanis and theinstitutions that govern them, andpointing out that democracy, howevermessy, is the only alternative to themilitary-jihadist complex that hasstunted Pakistan’s economy and tar-nished its international reputation,Riedel makes a valuable contributionto the debate in both Washington andIslamabad. The Obama administra-tion could do a lot worse than followhis advice.

ComplicatedLoyalty

By James Bowman

Eric Felten . Loyalty: The VexingVirtue. Simon & Schuster. 310Pages. $25.00

L oyalty, like courage ,chastity, and other qualitiesassociated with honor, is a

pre-Enlightenment virtue, and, for thatreason, there are many people todayfor whom it is no virtue at all. TheEnlightenment was itself impossibleuntil mere loyalty had been degraded,at least among the intellectual elites, toa species of primitivism by the newprestige of universal moral principles.People, that is, had to come to thepoint of realizing that there were highergoods than that of loyalty to the honorgroup — or to the family, clan, tribe,nation, or religious affiliation that hadalways in the past produced the mostsalient honor groups. In many parts ofthe world, as we learned after 9/11,people have not realized that unto thisday. But the question of our time isthis: Do these “higher loyalties” toabstract truth and morality and justiceand equality simply abolish the other,more primitive sorts of loyalty to one’sown people, or is there still a place for


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James Bowman, author of Honor, AHistory and Media Madness (bothpublished by Encounter), is a residentscholar at the Ethics and PublicPolicy Center.

92 Policy Review

them in our enlightened and egalitarianworld?

Both honor and loyalty are opposedto the moral consensus of theEnlightenment not only because theyroutinely cut against and challengethose universal values on behalf of per-sonal ties — ties which all but the moststern moralists among us are still toolikely to find it easy to value aboveabstract principle — but also becausethey are not themselves susceptible togeneralization or universalization. Youcan’t meaningfully talk about loyaltywithout specifying what you mean tobe loyal (or disloyal) to. Every loyaltyhas its origins in the human and theparticular: this rather than that; arather than b; and (often) love ratherthan duty. A loyalty that is universaliz-able would be a contradiction in terms.If you’re loyal to everybody, you’reloyal to nobody. From the enlightenedpoint of view, therefore, every loyaltyharbors within itself a potential disloy-alty and especially a disloyalty to thosegeneral principles on which we of theage of Enlightenment rely to justify ourdisloyalties. Chief among these is ofcourse the abstract concept of “thetruth.”

I wish that the new book by theWall Street Journal columnist EricFelten, titled Loyalty: The VexingVirtue, though it is packed to its hand-some covers — especially the front onedecorated with an image of a dog’shead — with cogent examples, ancientand modern, of this eternal tug-of-loy-alties, had also taken the trouble tonotice that the English word “truth”itself originally meant loyalty. Doing sowould perhaps have helped Felten tomake the virtue just a little less vexingto himself and others. As trewth,

trauthe, or troth (the last still survivingas an archaism with “plight”), loyaltyor fidelity was the normal meaning ofthe word throughout the Middle Ages,and it only began to be an unambigu-ous equivalent of the Latin veritas inthe later 16th century. Trauthe is thenormal Anglo-Saxon word for loyalty,dating back to well before the NormanConquest, while the later French wordsloyal and loyaulté were rarities in thelanguage before they began to takeover the duties of trauthe in the 16thcentury. That we have so completelyforgotten the original meaning of theword, and even made it antithetical toloyalty, is one indication that the ideaof a higher loyalty to “truth,” once anoxymoron, is now built into the lan-guage.

Some such historical note explainswhy loyalty is so vexing to those of uswho, like Felten, have been taught fromearliest childhood that truth is or oughtto be a higher loyalty than the organicand naturally formed loyalties to indi-viduals and groups that are a normalpart of life and especially of growingup. What mother today teaches herchild, as General Douglas MacArthur’smother taught him, that the rule of lifewas: “Never lie; never tattle”? Thatseemingly contradictory advice almostended the general’s military careerbefore it began when he was the victimof savage hazing at West Point andrefused to name his persecutors. It wasnot the least of Stalin’s crimes againsthuman nature when he tried to makeheroes out of children who informedon their parents. And it was no smalltribute to that nature that even thestory of Comrade Pavlik, 13-year-oldPavel Morozov, who supposedly turnedhis father in to the gpu in 1932 as a

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resister to collectivization, was (asscholars now believe) a complete fabri-cation.

As anyone with children knows,their natural bent is much moretowards loyalty to people rather thanto abstract truth, let alone to a totali-tarian state. Even as adults, even in atolerant and democratic country, mostof us are likely to find that such primi-tive and (dare we say?) natural loyaltiesas that of children to parents and par-ents to children somehow refuse to stayin their subordinate positions and rou-tinely challenge our attachments togeneral principles, even those that oth-erwise seem so obvious and unbreak-able. Felten is very thorough in hisexamination of those conflicted loyal-ties that he finds so vexing, but just ashard cases make bad law, so does aconcentration on the darker side of loy-alty, which such treatment inevitablyentails, run the risk of obscuring whatis good and what ought to be uncon-troversial about loyalty but often isn’t.

For instance, the tension betweenour officially approved morality andthe strong pull of unofficial attach-ments to individuals and groups wecare about is responsible for a lot of theguilt that these days is such an impor-tant part of our public debate. Loyaltyto country, which we call patriotism, isin bad odor on the left because it sooften involves us in what idealists see asan assertion of national (or racial)superiority to our fellow creatures inother countries and an arrogant asser-tion of our power to dominate or sub-jugate them. Even when we areattacked as we were on 9/11, loyalty-skeptics have a free hand to requirethat our response should be moderatedby international law and international

organizations and alliances and basedon general principles of law and justicerather than blind patriotism. No onemust be allowed to suppose that wehave placed loyalty to the United Statesahead of loyalty to principle.

Yet, carried to its logical conclusion,putting principle ahead of countrywould make it impossible to defendourselves. Though President George W.Bush was widely criticized for payinginsufficient attention to such principlein going to war in Iraq, even he spentan inordinate amount of time and ener-gy attempting to formulate a principledrationale for the invasion and subse-quent occupation rather than simplyasserting an American right to inter-vene. Likewise, President Obama,whose foreign policy once took as itsstarting point a more “humble”American approach to the rest of theworld, now justifies his intervention ina Libyan civil war as necessary to pre-vent civilian casualties. In practice,arrogating to ourselves the right todefend general principles looks nearlyindistinguishable from the arrogance ofasserting American power wherever weplease.

Felten’s range of reference, fromAristotle to Frank Sinatra, is impres-sive, but at times it seems slightly facileas the quotations and examples pile upwithout leading us anywhere, except toa restatement of what has already beensaid. They all relate to each other andto the point being made at the moment— which is nearly always some versionof how loyalty is vexing and morallyproblematical in various ways — but itis often hard to see how they pointbeyond themselves to any larger con-clusion about how we come to havesuch a dubious or devalued sense of


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94 Policy Review

loyalty or about the cultural conse-quences of living with one. If this excel-lent and tremendously learned bookhas a fault, it is that there is no overar-ching intellectual framework, especiallya historical one, as a way of organizingits numerous examples.

If it is not an impertinence in areviewer, I would like to suggest one. Itinvolves the growth of the media cul-ture and the stake of the media in thedevaluation of loyalty. For the mediacould no more live without the oxygenof disloyalty than they could withoutthe promise of exposing thosehypocrisies that lesser loyalties so ofteninvolve people in. The triumph of themedia and the media culture isnowhere more evident than in theunfashionability of the virtue of loyalty.There are many reasons for this, ofcourse, but none is more importantthan the fact that the media depend fortheir profitability and, indeed, theirvery existence on disloyalty. The“whistleblower” is the paradoxicalhero of the media’s honor group —paradoxical because honor is extendedby no other group to the betrayer ofconfidences. The “rat” or stool pigeonis typically despised as much by thosehe rats to as he is by those he rats on.But the media love him because theycannot do without him.

In a fascinating article in the onlinejournal Spiked, the British sociologistFrank Furedi recently wrote of how“leaking, or the disclosure of confiden-tial information, used to be perceivedas an act of disloyalty, irresponsibilityor betrayal. However, since the late1970s, it is secrecy, confidentiality, andprivacy that have been increasinglystigmatized. So what was once castigat-ed as an act of betrayal — leaking — is

now recast as the heroic deed of abrave whistleblower.” This is what hasled to the media’s lionization of theWikileaks founder, Julian Assange,which also

reveals the growing influence of

conspiratorial thinking on journal-

ism. Numerous journalists have

internalized the idea that what is

really important today is not the

story, but the story behind the

story. The decline of the authority

of knowledge has led to a situation

where journalists now see leaks as

the source of the “real truth.”

Many journalists are now more

comfortable explaining an event by

reducing it to a covert plot rather

than providing a rigorous analysis

of the social and political causes of

a chain of events.

The amount of media attention givento the rival left and right conspiracytheories of the “truthers” and the“birthers,” absurd though both ofthem are, is one measure of the struc-tural importance of secret information— and therefore of the disloyaltyrequired to reveal it — in a politicalculture shaped by media assumptions.Not only does this way of looking atthe world dominate the media’s think-ing, it also creates an inexhaustibledemand for more betrayals of confi-dence and a corresponding decline inthe social valuation placed on loyalty.Politicians and bureaucrats are not theonly ones who have worked out howto manipulate the media by preying onthis assumption that the truth is some-thing that is hidden and only to berevealed by skillful sleuthing on thepart of journalists — which in turndepends on the acts of disloyalty by

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which they routinely acquire theirinformation.

Felten would seem to be employinghis considerable talents in a losingcause if his aim is, as it often seems tobe, to rehabilitate the virtue of loyaltyfor an age which tends to see it as sus-pect if not downright corrupt in itself.Eminently sensible and fair-minded, healways gives full weight to theEnlightened arguments against loyaltyeven as he nudges us back towards anappreciation of a virtue too oftenneglected. Sometimes, indeed, he bendsover too far backward to loyalty’s crit-ics, as when he writes that Hitler’s andStalin’s appeals to loyalty are such that“one hesitates to call it a virtue at all.”But loyalty to both Hitler and Stalinwas predicated upon previous acts ofdisloyalty. They demanded a place forthe state ideology above those quotidi-an and organic loyalties to family andfriends and their country’s traditionalinstitutions, which had to be abolishedbefore they could come to power. Thejudges at Nuremberg thought Nazi warcriminals had a higher loyalty than loy-alty to the party, but the party itself hadjustified itself in similar terms vis-à-visthose ordinary human decencies itrequired its members to forsake.

For there is no villainy so double-dyed that it cannot be claimed on itsbehalf to have been committed in thename of some “higher loyalty” than theone it has violated. The media havecontributed much to the paradigm ofthe pull of the (discreditable) personalagainst the (creditable) principled,which Felten, in common with most ofus, tends to regard as characteristic ofmoral dilemmas, but this is at leastpartly because we assume the priorityof principle over personal ties of loyal-

ty. The Kantian categorical imperative,of course, demands no less, but thisprinciple — which insists that we notact on that maxim which we cannotwill to be universal — is often of limit-ed use to us in our dealings with thereal world. It would inculpate anyonewho fights a war, for example, no mat-ter how good the cause, although noone, apart from the pacifist fringe,would have us simply disarm.Emmanuel Levinas, in the reductio adabsurdum of Enlightenment thought,may tell us that our duty to strangerscan be no less than our duty to lovedones, but no one, possibly not evenLevinas, would behave as if this weretrue if called upon to rescue eitherstrangers or loved ones from a burningbuilding.

Felten has an interesting chapterabout this kind of dilemma called “TheEver Ready Accomplices” in which hehas a number of stories to tell of fire-men, policemen, doctors, and so forthwith duties to a community who, nev-ertheless, attend to their own familiesfirst. “Family loyalty falls under theheading of particularism,” he tells us,“which for many modern ethicists is adirty word.” He himself appears tohave some doubts as to whether theseethicists are right to depreciate familyloyalty, but he is always pretty even-handed in presenting us with the prosand cons of family loyalty, citing boththe family who defied doctor-decreedtriage to get their elderly relative out ofa New Orleans hospital duringHurricane Katrina and the formerDelaware politician who asked for hisfamily’s help in covering up the murderof his mistress or David Kaczynski,who turned in his brother Theodore,the Unabomber, to police.


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96 Policy Review

“I think we can agree that David didthe right thing, even though it was abetrayal of family loyalty,” he writes.Perhaps we can, but perhaps we alsoneed to hang on to at least the shadowof the stigma that David Kaczynskihimself seems to have felt for his disloy-alty when he tried to turn his brother inanonymously — and also to rememberthat Theodore was himself, like mostterrorists, something of a theorist of

disloyalty and full of talk about those“higher truths” that supposedly justi-fied his hateful deeds. I think we canalso agree that, although he gives everyconsideration to these and other argu-ments of loyalty’s Enlightened enemies,Felten eventually comes out at the rightplace when he concludes that “withoutsome reasonable expectation of loyaltywhere loyalty is due, there can be notrust, no friendship, no love.”

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Policy Review - August & September 2011, No. 168

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