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decades ago, I had the privilege of lunching five days a week with
a distinguished student of Greek tragedy who had fought in the Spanish
Civil War with the international brigades and then in the Second
World War with the Office of Strategic Services. He liked to talk
about what had transpired in Spain and about his subsequent adventures
behind enemy lines in France and Italy, and I liked to listen. One
day, however, I interrupted him to ask why he had opted for graduate
school after World War II and why he had not pursued a career in
the armed services. He laughed. "There is," he observed,
"no place for a warrior in a peacetime army."
I was reminded
of my friend's remark by a brief digression that I recently read
in a report by Seymour M. Hersh in The
New Yorker. According to Hersh, on the first night of our
airborne assault against the Taliban in Afghanistan, an unmanned
Predator reconnaissance aircraft, operated by the Central Intelligence
Agency, "identified a group of cars and trucks fleeing"
Kabul "as a convoy carrying Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader."
The Predator in question is said to have been equipped with two
powerful Hellfire missiles designed for use against tanks. Neither
the CIA nor the command-and-control suite of the Fifth Fleet in
Bahrain had authority to unleash the missiles on Osama bin Laden's
accommodating host or to call in fighter-bombers. This decision
was left to General Tommy R. Franks, the CENTCOM commander, who,
upon being informed of the situation, consulted his Judge Advocate
General and, on this lawyer's advice, opted not to attack. When
he learned of this decision, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
is said to have kicked in a door or two.
Years ago,
Seymour Hersh scored a journalistic coup when he broke the story
of the Mylai Massacre. Since that time, however, his record has
been spotty. He has reported many an event that seems never to have
transpired. His motto seems to have been the directive issued by
the editor in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop:
"If there is no news, send rumors instead." One cannot,
without further confirmation, be certain that General Franks is
guilty as charged.
The story does,
however, ring true. And if it is true, it is arguably symptomatic
of larger problems that the Bush administration is going to have
to confront if it is not to make a hash of the current war —
for my friend's remark is on the mark: Peacetime armies are not
breeding grounds for warriors. In fact, at the start of every war
of any significance, those in charge quickly learn that the prewar
officer corps that they have inherited is mostly made up of bureaucrats:
paper-pushers quite capable of handling logistics, but ill-prepared
for leadership on the field of the sword. What follows in successful
armies is a cashiering of incompetents and rapid promotion from
within the ranks. Napoleon understood the principle: in the backpack
of every private, there really has to be a marshal's baton.
Our situation
today is probably worse than the norm — for the Clinton administration,
in its eagerness to promote the integration of women into the armed
services, did everything within its power to purge the Army, Navy,
and Air Force of warriors and to promote time-servers. One cannot
imagine George Patton or anyone remotely like him tolerating sensitivity
training. The fact, if it is a fact, that General Franks consulted
his Judge Advocate General as to the propriety or our trying to
kill Mullah Omar is a sign that the man in charge of the conflict
in Afghanistan was far more interested in covering his keister than
in winning the war. In a genuine conflict, no warrior would bother
consulting a lawyer. He would do what needed doing and leave it
to the lawyers to invent a justification when the real work was
done. If Seymour Hersh's report is true, it is a very bad sign that
General Franks was not immediately relieved of his command.
A case along
similar lines can be made concerning the CIA, the FBI, and the Department
of Justice. There is no point at this late date in rehearsing once
more the scale and scope of our intelligence failures in recent
years. It suffices to say that those responsible for our security
willfully ignored a great deal of evidence and treated the World
Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the subsequent assaults on our
troops at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, on our embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, and on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen as ordinary
criminal matters to be dealt with in a court of law rather than
as part and parcel of a genuine war against the United States. When
the Sudan was willing to hand over Osama bin Laden, the Clinton
administration declined the offer for fear that the Department of
Justice could not make an adequate case against him in court. No
one appears to have noted that bin Laden and his supporters had
declared war on the United States and that they should simply be
killed.
The feckless
legalism underpinning our past failures persists. In the first few
days after the discovery of anthrax spores in the offices of American
Media, Inc. in Florida — indeed, in the first few days after
the discovery of anthrax spores at NBC in New York — the FBI
played down the suspicion, widespread among the general public,
that these attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
It was by then public knowledge that bin Laden's associates in Afghanistan
had experimented with chemical and biological weapons, and it was
known that a number of those involved in the assault on the Pentagon
and the World Trade Center on September 11th had shown an interest
in cropdusters. We were, nonetheless, solemnly told over and over
again by officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice that
there was no reason to link the anthrax attacks with Osama bin Laden
— which is to say, that they had no evidence as yet that would
stand up in court. Such pronouncements did not inspire confidence
in the competence of those entrusted with our national security.
If the Bush
administration is serious in its desire to root out the terrorists,
it will have to comb through the military and intelligence bureaucracy
that it has inherited and even look outside its ranks in search
of men who have the right temperament, in search of those intent
on victory and in no way squeamish about the means by which they
achieve it. If the Bush administration really is serious, it will
have to shunt aside a great many of the timid survivors of the Clinton
purge. First, however, our leaders will have to set our government's
lawyers to work at something useful: such as cleaning latrines.
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