Eliot Cohen and Democratic Responsibility

by Anatol Lieven

03.16.2007

Ximena Ortiz’s critique of Eliot Cohen’s appointment to the State Department, and Ruth Wedgwood’s response, go to the heart of the question of intellectual and political accountability in a democratic system. In this debate, I must emphatically endorse Ms. Ortiz’s position with regard both to Dr. Cohen personally, and on the wider points of principle involved.

Dr. Cohen’s radical failings extend beyond the Iraq War to much of his intellectual record as a military historian and analyst in recent years. They are not open to serious question, since they are amply documented in his own published writings and recorded interviews.

The first is that Dr. Cohen was a leading advocate of the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and that in this role he reproduced what has since proved to be baseless propaganda from the Bush Administration concerning the Iraqi regime’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and links to Al-Qaeda (see for example his Op-Ed “The Reluctant Warrior”, The Wall Street Journal February 6, 2003, and his interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on January 23, 2002). He also, albeit less than some other neoconservatives, held out the promise that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would not only lead to a “far, far better life for the Iraqi people”, but might “begin a transformation of the Middle East” (“Iraq can’t Resist Us”, The Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2001).

In the process, Dr. Cohen was guilty of two major errors with the gravest long-term consequences: While he occasionally mentioned possible problems for the United States in Iraq after the overthrow of the Ba‘athi regime, at no point that I have been able to discover did he devote any serious, concentrated attention to what these problems might be, how the United States should deal with them and indeed what the whole U.S. strategy for the postwar administration of Iraq should be. Or if he did, then—in sharp contrast to his approach to other issues—he never wrote or spoke on them in detail in public. Dr. Cohen thereby shares intellectual and moral co-responsibility for the very failures of U.S. postwar strategy that he himself now denounces.

I would nonetheless be prepared to find excuses for Dr. Cohen if his advocacy of war with Iraq had followed U.S. success in the primary goals of U.S. strategy after 9/11, in the name of which the Bush Administration had rallied support from the American people and the international community: the fight to kill or capture the leadership of Al-Qaeda and its Taliban supporters.

What is unforgivable is that Dr. Cohen and others began to beat the drums for war with Iraq while these monstrous figures were still at large and while Afghanistan was obviously very far from stabilized. His first major article that I have found advocating war with Iraq appeared on November 20, 2001—and also, by the way, helped lay the background for Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech by advocating regime change in Iran (“World War IV”, The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2001). The results are now clear. The diversion of U.S. special forces, economic aid and political attention from Afghanistan to Iraq began at the start of 2002, and it did not cease even after the battle of Shahikot in March 2002 had revealed the extent to which the Taliban and Al-Qaeda remained a serious threat. Cohen faced this possibility—and explicitly dismissed it (interview with CNN, above).

Five years later, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar are still free, and the Taliban has returned as a very real threat not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan as well. When we remember the thousands of U.S. and allied soldiers who have died unnecessarily in Iraq, we should also remember that many of the American lives lost in Afghanistan could have been saved—and some of our greatest enemies killed or captured—if the United States had continued to concentrate on that country after 2001.

This failure on Dr. Cohen’s part is linked to a central failure as a military historian and analyst: his gross underestimation for many years of the contemporary importance of guerrilla, terrorist and urban warfare. It is true that his books, articles and essays do generally mention these issues, but they do so briefly and formally, in box-ticking fashion; for example, in his essay, “A Revolution in Warfare” (Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996, which in 18 pages mentions these threats in one paragraph). They are dwarfed in his work by the attention paid by him to the “Revolution in Military Affairs” and how this can supposedly ensure absolute U.S. battlefield dominance.

This indifference was extremely widespread in U.S. military and military-bureaucratic circles before 9/11 (as I found in the response to a policy brief that I published on the subject in the spring of 2001, entitled “Soldiers Before Missiles: Meeting the Challenge from the World’s Streets”, Carnegie Endowment Policy Brief no. 4, 2001). But given what should have been the searing lessons of Vietnam, Beirut, Mogadishu, the Israeli experience in South Lebanon and the Russian experience in Chechnya, that does not make it any the less intellectually culpable on Dr. Cohen’s part.

Finally, in the years before and immediately after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Dr. Cohen used one aspect of his historical “scholarship” to drive a particular contemporary agenda: namely, his argument that on several occasions in modern history, dynamic and visionary political leaders have been correct in intervening directly in the control of military operations, overruling their professional militaries (Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, Free Press, 2002). Dr. Cohen mentions in this regard Lincoln, Clemenceau, Ben-Gurion and Churchill, though not oddly enough Hitler or Stalin.

From 2001–2003, this historical material was clearly intended by Dr. Cohen to bolster support for the Bush Administration’s drive for war with Iraq, against the cautious, eminently well-founded advice of military figures like General Eric Shinseki. Dr. Cohen dismissed as illegitimate “whingeing” the military’s attempts to influence the public debate by leaking this advice to the media—something which should be their right and duty in a democracy, or at least one where the public has a right to full information about the basis for critical government decisions (“Generals, Politicians and Iraq”, The Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2002).

In the process, Dr. Cohen is guilty of some very bad historiography. This applies especially to his suggestion that Churchill was not just a great leader whose rhetoric and example inspired British resistance to Hitler, but that he was a successful strategist. In fact, an overwhelming mass of open material has long existed to demonstrate that this was far from the case (from the naval point of view, see for example Correlli Barnett’s Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War, W.W. Norton, 1991). The great majority of Churchill’s personal military decisions, often forced through against the advice of his military commanders, ranged from the bad to the disastrous. This was true of the decision to employ fleet aircraft carriers in anti-submarine sweeps in 1939, leading to the loss of HMS Courageous; the failure to plan properly the British intervention in Norway in 1940, which was Churchill’s personal responsibility as First Lord of the Admiralty; the decision to divert British forces from North Africa to Greece early in 1941; the dispatch of a hopelessly outnumbered British naval squadron to face the Japanese in November 1941; the decision to defend Singapore rather than evacuate it in the face of the successful Japanese offensive in Malaya; and backing from 1940–42 the RAF’s obsession with bombing Germany at the expense of aerial protection for British convoys.

Churchill should have stuck to inspiring the people, gaining international allies, and managing the war effort as a whole—and left the planning and conduct of operations to the professionals. As a result of his failures, by the time of the planning of the Normandy invasion of 1944, he had in effect been sidelined by the U.S. military leadership, with the enthusiastic concurrence of the British admirals and generals. Cohen quotes one incident of Churchill encouraging a criticism of his arguments by a military subordinate; the memoirs of Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Wavell, Admiral Tovey and others are replete with examples of exactly the opposite tendency.

Manipulating historical “scholarship” in this way for the purpose of contemporary politics is of course a common sin. However, if you do engage in this kind of behavior, then you should at least be exposed to the ultimate test of every policy advocate: that of success. In Dr. Cohen’s case, he used these arguments to help defeat and silence objections by sections of the U.S. uniformed military to the planning of the Iraq War which have since been proved beyond doubt to have been entirely correct.

And by contributing in this way to a hasty, poorly-planned military operation, it must be repeated that Dr. Cohen took on himself a measure of the moral, intellectual and political responsibility for precisely those U.S. administration mistakes in Iraq which he now denounces, and which have cost so many American lives. It is disappointing—though not surprising—that Dr. Cohen himself does not realize that this record demands from him, as an honorable man, a lengthy period of quiet, private reflection on his mistakes and the reasons for them.

If no personal price at all is to be paid in terms of careers for errors on this scale, which contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans, then the long-term consequences for U.S. government and U.S. democracy could be dire. If being proved obviously, dreadfully wrong brings no long-term consequences, and being proved right brings no long-term rewards, then why in the future should any U.S. analyst, adviser, commentator or public figure ever take a public stand in favor of what he or she believes to be right and correct, if this is going to lead to short-term unpopularity and career damage?

The result will be a further accentuation of an already dangerous trend: the silence of large areas of U.S. public life on critical but controversial issues; and the dominance of the think-tank, media and bureaucratic worlds by gutless time-serving hacks. At this point, the quality of much of the advice reaching both the U.S. government and the U.S. sovereign people will in the end be no better, and certainly no more independent, than that in many dictatorships.

Closely related, and even more important, is the health of the U.S. democratic system. The American people’s ability to throw out a U.S. administration by elections every four years is of course vitally important, but it is not sufficient if the only result is to replace them with a different sub-set of a basically unaccountable, irresponsible policy elite; and if in any case the defeated elements, however disastrous their record, simply retire to well-paid jobs in academia, business or lobbying, and then return to government again after a few years. We have seen this kind of system in many democracies in Latin America and elsewhere. The eventual result is to corrode the faith of the people in democracy itself.

In his poem “Mesopotamia”, Rudyard Kipling reflected savagely on the way in which members of the British elites whose monstrous incompetence and arrogance had led to the British military disaster in what is now Iraq in 1915–16 escaped paying any price for their failures. Part of it reads as follows:

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide—
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?

Ruth Wedgwood ends her response to Ximena Ortiz’s critique with a sentence that has nothing to do with an intellectual defense of Dr. Cohen, or a discussion of moral and political responsibility, but which reads very like a threat: “More than one member of the National Interest family favored the intervention in Iraq. Ms. Ortiz may wish to shoot her flaming arrows with greater care, lest they land in some unexpected places.” I’m afraid that the only appropriate democratic response to that is: Let them fall.

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and co-author, with John Hulsman, of Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World (Pantheon, 2006). He is also a contributing editor at The National Interest.

Meet Eliot Cohen, Condi's New Deputy: "As Extremist a Neocon and Warmonger as It Gets"

March 6, 2007

By GARY LEUPP

Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign. . . . First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. We can either make tactical accommodations with the regime there in return for modest (or illusory) sharing of intelligence, reduced support for some terrorist groups and the like, or do everything in our power to support a civil society that loathes the mullahs and yearns to overturn their rule. It will be wise, moral and unpopular (among some of our allies) to choose the latter course. The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden [emphasis added].

The guy who wrote that, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on November 20, 2001, was Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. As the Director of the Strategic Studies department at SAIS, he has been called "the most influential neoconservative in academe."

More recently (April 5, 2006) Prof. Cohen published a prominent op-ed in the Washington Post attacking the scholarship of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government Academic Dean Stephen M. Walt and University of Chicago Political Science Professor John J. Mearsheimer and their academic paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

The study, Cohen contended in his "Yes, It's Anti-Semitism" piece, betrayed "obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews," accusing Jews of "disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments." It collected "everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group" while ignoring "any exculpatory information." This from a man who almost immediately after 9-11 declared that "the obvious candidate" as a regime to "target" was Iraq, which had "helped al Qaeda"---and thereby unfairly and wrongly, and oblivious to exculpatory information, linked Saddam Hussein to 9-11.

(You can write stuff like that in the Wall Street Journal, and never have to say you're sorry afterwards when sober investigation shows what you'd written was total bullshit. The 9-11 hijackers and Saddam were all Arabs, so what's wrong with connecting them and exploiting ignorance and bigotry to get the war you want against Iraq?)

And now this man who thinks we're in the middle of World War IV (against the Muslim world), and who's written a book entitled The Supreme Command arguing that presidents need to control their sometimes reluctant generals, has been appointed by Condoleezza Rice as the new Counselor of the State Department. The meaning of the move isn't yet clear, given some recent indications that the U.S. might be willing to talk with Iran. But given the military buildup in the Persian Gulf; the appointment of Admiral William Fallon to head Central Command; the intensifying disinformation campaign about Iran conducted by the Bush administration and its embedded reporters and reports of significant opposition within the military towards an attack on Iran; the appointment at least signals the continuing vitality of the neocon movement within the U.S. government whose current urgent project is the Iran attack.

According to the official definition, "The Counselor of the Department is a principal officer who serves the Secretary as a special advisor and consultant on major problems of foreign policy and who provides guidance to the appropriate bureaus with respect to such matters. The Counselor conducts special international negotiations and consultations, and also undertakes special assignments from time to time, as directed by the Secretary." The post was vacant from 2001 to 2005. Cohen was preceded by Philip Zelikow, another academic, who is not considered a neocon but a "realist" occupied with trade matters. On the other hand Salon's Glen Greenwald calls Cohen "as extremist a neoconservative and warmonger as it gets."

The man wants the "overthrow" of the Iranian regime. He wants the president to (Churchill-like) force his hesitant generals to do the right thing and attack Iran. (His Supreme Command book is especially significant in light of reports that high-ranking officers have threatened resignations if the U.S. launches an assault on Iran, and that the president has actually read the book.)

So here's a man to watch, as Bush/Cheney policy towards Iran evolves. Others are Elliott Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy), and Abram Shulsky (head of the Pentagon's "Iran Directorate"), both students of Leo Strauss and comfortable proponants of using "noble lies" to manipulate public opinion to generate support for more imperialist wars. They may be desperate men at this point, when they read, for example, the recent Washington Post/ABC poll that shows 63% of Americans do not trust the Bush administration "to honestly and accurately report intelligence about possible threats from other countries."

They may well fear that if they can't "take the current when it serves"---by their use of noble lies, their ongoing paid, corrupt, discrete if obvious presence in the mainstream press--they will lose their ventures. Their usefully ignorant, manipulable cruel cowboy has less than two years left in the saddle, and great deeds cry out to be done!

The neocon agenda is plain enough. If only the dissident generals can be silenced! If only the assailants of the Israel Lobby can be quieted by bullying accusations of anti-Semitism! If only the war-weary American people can be made to understand that it's "moral and wise" to attack Iran! Because it's planning genocide! Because it's planning what Hitler couldn't do---wipe out the Jews! Then we can defeat the Evil which is Iran! And Syria! And the Shiite population of southern Lebanon!

The antiwar movement's agenda should be equally plain. Expose this agenda, its sensationalism and illogic, and the key figures working overtime towards its fulfillment. Question all reports by "unnamed government sources" and reporters like the New York Times' Michael R. Gordan (once---as a coauthor with Judith Miller---a vehicle for the dissemination of lies about Iraq) that charge Iran with supporting attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. (47% of Americans polled think the Bush administration has "solid information" the Iranian government is doing so, while 44% disagree. That latter figure needs to grow.) Challenge politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who, bending over backwards to please the Lobby, criticize the Iraq War while competing with Bush to embrace a hawkish stance towards Iran. Having never really challenged the essentialist anti-Muslim straight-of-hand that linked 9-11 to Iraq, they embrace the notion that Muslim Iran constitutes an "existential threat" to Israel (if not to the U.S.) and tell applauding AIPAC audiences that they agree "no option should be off the table" in dealing with Iran.

The neocons determined to reconfigure the "Greater Middle East" through the use of "shock and awe" military force may be down as a result of public revulsion at the results of their initial criminal ventures. But they aren't out, as Cohen's appointment dramatically shows. That's a big problem for the future of this country and the planet.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

Neoconservative Eliot Cohen's new position at the State Department Signals Iran Regime Change

Monday March 5, 2007 07:38 EST

Neoconservative Eliot Cohen's new position at the State Department

On Friday, Condoleezza Rice announced that Eliot Cohen has been chosen to be the new Counselor of the State Department. It is not hyperbole to say that Cohen is as extremist a neoconservative and warmonger as it gets. Even The New York Sun's Eli Lake -- in an article claiming that Cohen's replacement of Philip Zelikow signals a more militaristic approach for the administration -- points out that Cohen " intellectually is neoconservative" and that "he was an early supporter of the military intervention in Iraq and came out against recommendations from the Iraq Study Group in December to launch negotiations with Iraq's neighbors," i.e., Iran and Syria -- especially Iran.

But Cohen's record is far more extremist than just that. In a November, 2001 Wall St. Journal Op-Ed, Cohen criticized the attempts up to that point to name "The new War" -- all the names chosen were far too limiting and unglorious. Rejecting all the possibilities, Cohen insisted that "a less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV." Even back then, look at what was on Cohen's mind:

Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign. . . . First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. . . . The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.

Cohen's second priority -- after Iran -- was changing the government of Iraq, and he showcased what would be the false war-justifying propaganda before Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz began the process of feeding it to the President:

The U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction.

Cohen was most worried that Afghanistan would be the only real Churchillian war we would fight, rather than getting on with World War IV in all its glory: "if after the Afghan campaign ends, the government lapses into a covert war of intelligence-gathering, arrests, and the odd explosion in a terrorist training camp, it will be a sign that it would rather avoid calling things by their true name."

Over the next several years, Cohen became one of the most militant advocates of expanded regional war in the Middle East. A 2003 Asia Times article by Ahmad Faruqui called him "the most influential neoconservative in academe":

Cohen refers to the war against terrorism by a chilling name: World War IV (citing the Cold War as the third world war). . . . Cohen claims that America is on the good side in this war, just like it has been in all prior world wars, and the enemy is militant Islam, not some abstract concept of "terrorism".

Cohen argues that the US should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces in the Muslim world, beginning with the overthrow of the theocratic state in Iran and its replacement by a "moderate or secular" government. After September 11 he was one of the first neoconservatives to call for an attack on Iraq, even though there was no credible evidence linking Iraq with the attacks on the US or al-Qaeda.

It likely goes without saying by now that the reason Iraq was so quickly at the forefront of Cohen's mind in the aftermath of 9/11 was because invading Iraq and changing its government was long one of Cohen's dreams, and the 9/11 attacks became the pretext dressed up as the "justification" for Cohen's dream to come true.

This continues to be the most astounding, significant, and alarming trend -- as the recognition grows even in Beltway elite media circles that the people who designed and sold the Iraq war to the American public are completely untrustworthy and discredited figures, they are exactly the ones who continue to exert the most influence, by far, on the President, and their influence seems only to be growing. Here is a question which Tim Russert asked Lindsay Graham this weekend -- a question that is three years overdue but nonetheless welcome -- after Graham kept insisting that Americans give the Great Surge Plan " a chance" to succeed:

MR. RUSSERT: But many Americans will say that those who supported the war are saying, "Trust us, see this through," the same people who said, "There are weapons of mass destruction. General Shinseki's wrong, we don't need hundreds of thousands of troops. We will be greeted as liberators."

SEN. GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: "The cost of the war," according to Lawrence Lindsey, "won't be more than $200 billion."

SEN. GRAHAM: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: "There won't be any sectarian violence." All those judgments were wrong. Why should the American people continue to believe in those same people who had so many misjudgments leading up [to] and executing the war?

The premise of Russert's question is exactly right, and it is one of the most crucial propositions to emphasize -- "Why should the American people continue to believe in those same people who had so many misjudgments leading up to and executing the war?" They should not, of course. And we know exactly who "those same people" are. Eliot Cohen is not just one of them, but he is one of their leaders. He has been wrong about everything. If he had his way, we would have far more wars than we have already.

The Cohen appointment is clearly another instance where neoconservatives place a watchdog in potential trouble spots in the government to ensure that diplomats do not stray by trying to facilitate rapproachments between the U.S. and the countries on the neoconservative War hit list. In that regard, behold the head-patting reaction to the Cohen appointment from one of the country's most radical Iran obsessives:

Michael Ledeen, a former government official and conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cohen's appointment was good news.

"You want your leaders to hear disagreements," he said. "You don't want monotonous conformity."

Unlike the more political neoconservatives, who are very careful about what they say and go to great lengths to conceal their ultimate goals, Cohen has been an academic and thus more explicit about the theoretical underpinnings of his worldview. In a 1998 essay in (fittingly enough) The New Republic, Cohen called for the U.S. to build up and modernize its military capabilities faster and more aggressively, and to "justify" that plan, he laid out his neoconservative vision of the role of the United States in the world:

Another way to put it is that the United States needs an imperial strategy. Defense planners could never admit it openly, of course, and most would feel uncomfortable with the idea, but that is, in fact, what the United States at the end of the twentieth century is--a global empire.

Talk of "cooperative security" masks the reality that in any serious military confrontation, the central question is whom the United States asks to cooperate. . . . One cannot separate the so-called "soft power" of the United States--the global dominance of its culture, beginning with its language--from its military strength.

Rock fans around the world listen in English; so do fighter pilots. The same information technologies that make the Internet a decidedly American phenomenon provide the nervous systems of American military power. Free trade rests on common consent, to be sure, but would it exist absent America's military dominance?

Even Cohen recognized what a profound departure from America's founding principles it is to call for America to dominate the world as The Great Imperial Power:

The United States is today by far the most powerful state on the planet. If it chooses to remain so, citizen and soldier alike must brace themselves for the occasional imperial fiasco. More important, they will have to accept the uncomfortable notion that they are wielding military power in a way that is historically unusual for a country that has long viewed empires with proper republican suspicion. America's strategic vision will thus have to peer inward, as well as out, if we are to play our new role in the world successfully.

These are the radical principles laid out unabashedly by the Bush State Department's new Counselor, which are the same principles still driving the administration. We are in the middle of World War IV. We have numerous countries against whom we must wage war. The highest strategic priority is to change the government of Iran, with whom we can never negotiate. And the ultimate goal is to rule the world with our military force as the Supreme Imperial Power.

That is the neoconservative vision at its core. And the untold damage it has wreaked on our country has not diminished their influence in any way in this administration. They are still in control, particularly in the area they care about most -- the Middle East. And they have dealt with their greatest fear -- war-avoidance with Iran prior to regime change -- by installing one of their very own extremists to scrutinize and check the State Department.

This is really the debate America needs most, but is also the one we are furthest away from being able to conduct -- is the goal of the U.S. really to maintain and expand imperial world domination? The dangers to our country from that pursuit are grave and obvious. They are precisely the ones about which, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Dwight Eisenhower most urgently warned, and Jefferson similarly emphasized continuously that the most important obligation a country has is to avoid war except when the nation's security is directly attacked.

But that, more than anything, accounts for the current predicament of America. We have ceased adhering in these matters to the principles of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower, and have instead become a nation of Dick Cheneys, Victor Davis Hansons, Richard Perles, and Eliot Cohens.

These are -- to use Russert's phrase -- "those same people" who caused the Iraq disaster and have their sights set on further damage still. They do not want to avoid war at all, but instead believe that it's glorious and elegant and empowering. They want to ensure a state of Permenant War, complete with all of the internal constrictions of liberty which wars inevitably entail, because they view the United States not as a republic, but as an empire which -- in order to fulfill all sorts of agendas -- can, should and must rule the world with superior military force. There is a temptation to dismiss "those same people" as irrelevant extremists, but as Cohen's Friday-announced appointment reflects, they are anything but irrelevant.

UPDATE: Over at This Modern World, Jonathan Schwarz cites an anecdote from Gen. Wesley Clark which reflects both the radicalism and (one must never forget) the sheer ineptitude that has driven this administration's Cohenesque War project from the start.

-- Glenn Greenwald

The Talented Mr. Cohen

Related
Rice Picks Neo-Con Champion of Iraq War as Counselor
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by Ximena Ortiz

03.02.2007

“You’ve done one heck of a job, Eliot”, is clearly the ascendant sentiment within the Bush Administration regarding Eliot A. Cohen, tapped, according to The Washington Post today, by Secretary Rice to become one of her top advisors. Cohen, after all, is long due for administration commendation—in the Brown-Tenet tradition—after having so tirelessly, and on such very noteworthy basis—agitated for the war in Iraq before that inferno began to so voraciously consume U.S. lives, treasure and geopolitical strength.

There is much that distinguishes Cohen. After the U.S. military had scarcely tipped its toe into Afghanistan, some of a less dogged temperament may have advocated assessing the progression of that war over a period of time. Not Cohen. In a November 20, 2001 Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, Cohen looked unflinchingly past the horizon—and the brink—advocating not only the Iraq War but also regime change in Iran.

And given Cohen’s tireless advocacy of the Iraq War, some observers may have been tempted to conclude that he would either continue his past support of the war in the face of escalating consequences, or concede an error in backing the war in the first place. Again, not Cohen. This scholar of note demonstrates far greater intellectual dexterity, arriving at an altogether different posture. In a July 10, 2005 Op-Ed in The Washington Post, Cohen poses questions to himself regarding the Iraq War and deigns to provide the reader with his insights.

In that Op-Ed, Cohen professes “Alarm at our continuing failure to promote at wartime speed the colonels and generals who have a talent for fighting it, while also failing to sweep aside those who do not.” He goes on to note his “Incredulity at seeing decorations pinned on the chests and promotions on the shoulders of senior leaders—both civilians and military—who had the helm when things went badly wrong.”

Cohen gets it altogether right on this important point. The administration has seen fit to decorate those with demonstrated incompetence with medals, promotions—even prestigious appointments. Cohen does not see fit to chronicle in that Op-Ed the details and mechanics of that incompetence but his willingness to point it out has won him praise in many corners for candor. (More on this below.)

And Cohen is quite correct that policymakers—and one can even extend the argument to policymakers to be—should be held to account. In this spirit, it seems appropriate to briefly peruse Cohen’s own competence of judgment and foresight.

Flashback to Cohen’s November 2001 Wall Street Journal Op-Ed. In it, he counsels: “the U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped Al-Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction.” Even the Bush-decorated George Tenet—who Cohen presumably makes indirect reference to in his 2005, self-generated Q&A session—stopped short of suggesting Iraq’s hand in the attacks on America.

But perhaps even more remarkable were Cohen’s observations regarding Afghanistan. The “U.S. must mobilize in earnest. The Afghan achievement is remarkable—within two months to have radically altered the balance of power there, to have effectively destroyed the Taliban state and smashed part of the Al Qaeda—is testimony to what the American military and intelligence communities can do when turned on to a problem.” Mission Accomplished, anyone? Indeed, to not only account for a war’s success in just two short months but to also counsel the taking on of another front in that time frame requires a predisposition that is nothing short of remarkable.

And of resounding significance today, given Cohen’s recent appointment, is the position he outlined on Iran in that same Op-Ed piece. Although he advocates the strengthening of civil society in Iran, he upholds regime change as the ultimate goal: “The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.”

Equally as noteworthy as his policy counsel has been the tenor of his punditry. While State Department officials have said they selected Cohen out of a desire for a more open debate, Cohen does not restrain himself by such conventional objectives. In responding to a much-commented opinion paper published last year on the impact of the Israeli lobby on U.S. policy by scholars Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer (who is on the advisory council of The National Interest), Cohen did not restrict himself to voicing his rejection of the argument and detailing his thinking for doing so. Again, not Cohen. Instead, he took his criticism in a far more unique direction, accusing both scholars of anti-Semitism.

Regrettably, The Washington Post article today announcing Rice’s selection of Cohen as her incoming counselor—in replacement of Philip D. Zelikow—failed to take a retrospective of Cohen’s past policy recommendations and predictions. Cohen is described, in the headline, as a “Critic of Iraq Policy”, and there is no mention of his past advocacy of the war. Indeed, the article quotes from Cohen’s 2005 Q&A Op-Ed—in which Cohen is more than willing to name the names of the “incompetent”, and point to “cockamamie schemes”, but is altogether more circumspect on what precisely was done wrong and what would have improved matters.

It might have been useful for the Post article to have juxtaposed Cohen’s criticism of the administration’s handling of Iraq with his unqualified argument for the war’s unmistakable necessity, such as his testimony before a House committee in the run-up to the war, in October 2002: “the choice before the United States is a stark one, either to acquiesce in a situation which permits the regime of Saddam Hussein to restore his economy, acquire weapons of mass destruction and pose a lethal threat to his neighbors and to us, or to take action to overthrow him. In my view, the latter course, with all of its risks, is the correct one. Indeed, the dangers of failing to act in the near future are unacceptable.” In billing such a long-time advocate of the Iraq War as a “critic”, The Washington Post has demonstrated a newfound flair for satire—on its news pages.

In Cohen’s 2005 Washington Post Op-Ed, he remarks: “The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do." Cohen’s appointment can be taken with similar feeling, a strange convergence of lack of surprise, and dismay. While the reader may detect in the preceding words some hints of sarcasm, Cohen’s appointment is a serious matter. In that aforementioned Wall Street Journal Op-Ed of 2001, Cohen heralds the dawn of WWIV, the Cold War being WWIII. With the rise of more like Cohen in the administration, he may be proven uncharacteristically prescient.


Ximena Ortiz is editor of National Interest online.