How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle - Hardcover

Rose, Gideon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416590536 ISBN 13: 9781416590538

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2010

Synopsis

IN 1991 THE UNITED STATES trounced the Iraqi army in battle only to stumble blindly into postwar turmoil. Then in 2003 the United States did it again. How could this happen? How could the strongest power in modern history fight two wars against the same opponent in just over a decade, win lightning victories both times, and yet still be woefully unprepared for the aftermath?

Because Americans always forget the political aspects of war. Time and again, argues Gideon Rose in this penetrating look at American wars over the last century, our leaders have focused more on beating up the enemy than on creating a stable postwar environment. What happened in Iraq was only the most prominent example of this phenomenon, not an exception to the rule.

Woodrow Wilson fought a war to make the world safe for democracy but never asked himself what democracy actually meant and then dithered as Germany slipped into chaos. Franklin Roosevelt resolved not to repeat Wilson’s mistakes but never considered what would happen to his own elaborate postwar arrangements should America’s wartime marriage of convenience with Stalin break up after the shooting stopped. The Truman administration casually established voluntary prisoner repatriation as a key American war aim in Korea without exploring whether it would block an armistice—which it did for almost a year and a half. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations dug themselves deeper and deeper into Vietnam without any plans for how to get out, making it impossible for Nixon and Ford to escape unscathed. And the list goes on.

Drawing on vast research, including extensive interviews with participants in recent wars, Rose re-creates the choices that presidents and their advisers have confronted during the final stages of each major conflict from World War I through Iraq. He puts readers in the room with U.S. officials as they make decisions that affect millions of lives and shape the modern world—seeing what they saw, hearing what they heard, feeling what they felt.

American leaders, Rose argues, have repeatedly ignored the need for careful postwar planning. But they can and must do a better job next time around—making the creation of a stable and sustainable local political outcome the goal of all wartime plans, rather than an afterthought to be dealt with once the "real" military work is over.

About this title

About the Author:

Gideon Rose was recently named Editor of Foreign Affairs, where he served as Managing Editor for the past decade.  From 1995 to 2000, he was Olin Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, serving as Chairman of the Council’s Roundtable on Terrorism and Director of numerous Council Study Groups.  In 1994-95, he was on the staff of the National Security Council, where he served as Associate Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs.  In addition, he has been a staff member at the journals The National Interest and The Public Interest.  After studying classics at Yale, he received a Ph.D. in government from Harvard and has taught American foreign policy at Princeton and Columbia.  His previous publications, edited with James F. Hoge, Jr., include Understanding the War on Terror, America and the World: Debating the New Shape of International Politics, and How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War.  He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

THE CLAUSEWITZIAN CHALLENGE

In late March 2003, the United States and a few allies invaded Iraq. Some of the war’s architects thought things would go relatively smoothly once the enemy was beaten. As National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice put it in early April, “We fundamentally believe that when the grip of terror that Saddam Hussein’s regime has wreaked on its own people is finally broken and Iraqis have an opportunity to build a better future, that you are going to see people who want to build a better future—not blow it up.”1

Others involved in the operation were more apprehensive. Lieutenant Colonel Steven Peterson was on the military staff that planned the ground campaign. He noted afterward:

Over a month before the war began, the Phase IV planning group concluded that the campaign would produce conditions at odds with meeting strategic objectives. They realized that the joint campaign was specifically designed to break all control mechanisms of the [Iraqi] regime and that there would be a period following regime collapse in which we would face the greatest danger to our strategic objectives. This assessment described the risk of an influx of terrorists to Iraq, the rise of criminal activity, the probable actions of former regime members, and the loss of control of WMD that was believed to exist. It ... identified] a need to take some specific actions including: planning to control the borders, analyzing what key areas and infrastructure should be immediately protected, and allocating adequate resources to quickly re-establish post-war control throughout Iraq.

These concerns and recommendations were brought to the attention of senior military leaders, “but the planners failed to persuade the Commanding General and dropped these issues with little resistance.”

In retrospect, this episode seems mystifying. It is bad enough not to see trouble coming. But to see it coming and then not do anything about it might be even less forgivable. How could such crucial, and ultimately prescient, concerns have been dismissed and abandoned so cavalierly? “Because,” Peterson continued,

both the planners and the commander had been schooled to see fighting as the realm of war and thus attached lesser importance to post-war issues. No officer in the headquarters was prepared to argue for actions that would siphon resources from the war fighting effort, when the fighting had not yet begun.... Who could blame them? The business of the military is war and war is fighting. The war was not yet started, let alone finished, when these issues were being raised. Only a fool would propose hurting the war fighting effort to address post-war conditions that might or might not occur.2

Lieutenant General James Conway, the commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which helped capture Baghdad, was even more succinct. Asked whether postwar planning inevitably gets short shrift compared to planning for combat, he replied, “You know, you shoot the wolf closer to the sled.”3

The Iraq War will long be remembered as a striking example of such attitudes and their unfortunate consequences, but it is hardly the only one. In fact, the notion of war-as-combat is deeply ingrained in the thinking of both the American military and the country at large. Wars, we believe, are like street fights on a grand scale, with the central strategic challenge being how to beat up the bad guys. This view captures some basic truths: America’s enemies over the years have been very bad indeed, and winning wars has required beating them up. But such a perspective is misleading because it tells only half the story.

Wars actually have two equally important aspects. One is negative, or coercive; this is the part about fighting, about beating up the bad guys. The other is positive, or constructive, and is all about politics. And this is the part that, as in Iraq, is usually overlooked or misunderstood.

The coercive aspect of war involves fending off the enemy’s blows while delivering your own, eventually convincing your opponent to give up and just do what you want. This is why Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian military theorist, defined war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” The constructive aspect involves figuring out what it is that you actually want and how to get it. This is why Clausewitz also defined war as “an act of policy ... simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means.”4

Keeping this dual nature of war fully in mind at all times is difficult. It means recognizing that every act in war has to be judged by two distinct sets of criteria—political and military—and perhaps even by two distinct institutional sources of authority. This is messy, and nobody likes a mess. So there is a great temptation for governments to clean up matters by creating a clear division of responsibility. Civilians should deal with political matters, in this view, and military leaders should deal with military matters, and control should be handed off from the politicians and diplomats to the generals at the start of a conflict and then back to the politicians and diplomats at the end. As U.S. Central Command (Centcom) commander Tommy Franks put it to the deputy secretary of defense on the eve of the Iraq War, “You pay attention to the day after, I’ll pay attention to the day of.”5

Unfortunately, the clear-division-of-labor approach is inherently flawed, because political issues can permeate every aspect of war. The flaws can sometimes be obscured during the early and middle stages of a conflict, as each side tries to defeat the other on the battlefield. But at some point, every war enters what might be called its endgame, and then any political questions that may have been ignored come rushing back with a vengeance. “The main lines along which military events progress,” Clausewitz observed, “are political lines that continue throughout the war into the subsequent peace.... To bring a war, or one of its campaigns, to a successful close requires a thorough grasp of national policy. On that level strategy and policy coalesce: the commander-in-chief is simultaneously a statesman.”6

With the war’s general outcome starting to become clear, the endgame is best thought of as a discussion over what the details of the final settlement will be and what will happen after the shooting stops. The problem is that this discussion, whether implicit or explicit, takes place under extremely trying circumstances. At least some officials on both sides may now be considering sheathing their swords, but they are doing so against the backdrop of the fighting itself: the triumphs and disasters experienced, the blood and treasure spent, the hopes and passions raised. By this point, moreover, leaders and publics have usually gotten so caught up in beating the enemy that they find it hard to switch gears and think clearly about constructing a stable and desirable political settlement. So they rarely handle endgame challenges well and usually find themselves at the mercy of events rather than in control of them.

Americans have fared on average no better than others in these situations, and sometimes worse. The country’s leaders have rarely if ever closed out military conflicts smoothly and effectively. Trapped in the fog of war, they have repeatedly stumbled across the finish line without a clear sense of what would come next or how to advance American interests amid all the chaos. They have always been surprised by what is happening and have had to improvise furiously as they pick their way through an unfamiliar and unfriendly landscape.

For all endgames’ drama and historical importance, however, they have received far less attention than other phases of war. A few books look at the ends of individual wars, and there is a small academic literature on what political scientists call war termination.7 But in general, endgames have been as neglected by scholars as they have been by policymakers. This book is intended to help fix that problem. It tells the stories of the ends of American wars over the last century, exploring how the country’s political and military leaders have handled the Clausewitzian challenge of making force serve politics in each major conflict from World War I to Iraq.

From one angle, therefore, this is a book about American history. Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, as well as extensive original interviews with participants in the more recent conflicts, I have tried to re-create the endgame choices that presidents and their advisers confronted during each war. The goal is to put readers inside the room with U.S. officials as they make decisions that affect millions of lives and shape the modern world—seeing what they saw, hearing what they heard, feeling what they felt.

From another angle, though, this is a book about how to think about war, foreign policy, and international relations more generally. Marx once noted, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please,” and in this, at least, he was exactly right. The agency that American leaders have displayed—their freedom of action to choose one course over another—has been constrained by various kinds of structures, aspects of their environment that nudged them toward some courses rather than others. To explain endgame decisionmaking properly, therefore, you have to focus not on agency or structure alone, but on how they interact.

As for which kinds of constraints on policymakers matter most, this is a matter of intense debate inside the academy. Followers of “realist” theories argue that a country’s foreign policy is concerned above all with the pursuit of its security and material interests. Look to power politics...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1416590536
• ISBN 13: 9781416590538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432