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TO CATCH A COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

CAMO DOESN'T MAKE THE MAN | March 8th 2008

President George Bush in Saudi Arabia by Susan Biddle, November, 22 1990 (NARA) pingnews.com/Flickr

Is military experience necessary to be a good commander-in-chief? Are any of America's presidential candidates fit to lead the armed forces? Stephen Hugh-Jones considers the evidence left by the leaders of the 20th century ... 

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

So what politician is equipped to be commander-in-chief? It's a curious qualification to concentrate on in the run-up to a presidential election whose winner's first problem will be an economic recession. Yet since Hillary Clinton claims to be thus qualified, let's look at the question. Singularly few national leaders of the past century could have proved such a claim before they got the job.

Does actual experience commanding troops serve as evidence? Maybe: witness Francisco Franco, the general who launched a civil war in Spain. He won it with help from the dictators of Germany and Italy, and when in power took the wisest command decision of his life in not joining that pair in the second world war. Charles de Gaulle too has a claim. He was a very thoughtful army officer who fought well, if briefly, in the French rout of 1940. He showed the same command qualities as president from 1959 when, in defiance of much military opinion, he pulled France and its troops out of an unwinnable war in Algeria in 1962. And then again in 1966 when, wisely or not, he took French forces out of NATO's military structure.

Dwight Eisenhower had commanded the Allied invasion of France in 1944, and was nominal head of NATO forces in 1950-52 before becoming America's president. In the White House he faced two crises: the East German uprising against Russian rule in 1953, and the far more serious and bloodier armed revolt of the Hungarians in 1957. Both times he decided, probably rightly and certainly wisely, that America should sit on its hands.

Beyond the Western world, many generals have seized power or, in Israel, been elected to it. Their record as commanders-in-chief has been patchy. In China's long civil war, General Chiang Kai-shek had solid military experience, Mao not much of it, for all the guff his admirers have prattled. But it was Mao who won. Pakistan's Ayub Khan let his army drift into war with India in 1965, rather than launch a well-planned one, and got nowhere. His successor, Yahya Khan, another general, did worse still, losing East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to an Indian-backed uprising in 1971.

Argentina's military junta were bold enough but deeply lacking in judgment when they attacked Britain's Falkland Islands in 1982; they had failed to notice the steel of Margaret Thatcher, a woman who had never donned a uniform--indeed, she wasn't in theory commander-in-chief at all, a job that Britain reserves to its monarch. It was ex-generals who had to push their hesitant prime minister, Levi Eshkol, a former trade-unionist, into Israel's one unqualifiedly successful conflict, the Six-Day War of 1967. But it was also Menahem Begin, in earlier days a decisive, if low-level, commander of troops, who launched Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. That proved a military success but a propaganda disaster. And commanders-in-chief have to think beyond the battlefield.

In contrast, none of the top men in the second world war had significant military experience. Hitler, with no more than a first world war corporal's rank behind him, played his commander-in-chief cards almost impeccably, at times over-ruling his generals, from 1933 until his lunatic decision to attack Russia in 1941. Mussolini, another ex-corporal, was a different story. His Fascists' unmilitary "march on Rome" in 1922 was a success. Thereafter, he launched Italy's forces into an ultimately victorious but pointless attack on Abyssinia in the 1930s, and then into humiliating defeat first in Greece and later in North Africa in the second world war. In these two cases, he had to have his irons pulled out of the fire by Hitler.

Stalin was no soldier, indeed had done his best to decapitate the Red Army in his late-1930s purges. But--after some initial weakness--he proved no slouch as a war leader. Churchill had seen colonial wars in his young days. And his abundant self-esteem deluded him, and some others, into looking back warmly to his time as Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty (ie, navy minister) before and early into the first world war--a war that proved no triumph for the Royal Navy; it had hardly begun before a German submarine sank three British cruisers in one day. Churchill also became the chief advocate of the absurd Gallipoli assault on Turkey in 1915, costly in ships, lives and prestige alike.

In the second world war, Churchill had several equally daft ideas for geographical diversions, most, mercifully, fought off by his military advisers. After 1940 his greatest achievement, arguably, was political: securing and keeping the confidence and alliance of Franklin Roosevelt. Yet whatever his errors of strategic judgment, he did usually listen when the experts treated them as such. Whatever else, he was not short of decision, the other essential of high command.

Roosevelt himself had no military background whatsoever. He deserves some blame for the disaster of Pearl Harbour: America, with Britain's aid, was trying to limit Japan's oil supplies in a way that plainly risked a military response. But thereafter Roosevelt did his command job well.

Yet it was Harry Truman, the "Missouri haberdasher"--an artillery captain in the first world war--who took the boldest American decisions around mid-century: dropping the atomic bomb in 1945; defeating Stalin's blockade of West Berlin in 1948; and responding swiftly to North Korea's invasion of the south in 1950. Throughout, he was firmly in control of his generals, sacking the over-eager General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 and restraining those who wanted America's nuclear weapons used before the Soviet Union had enough to hit back with. This was a true commander in-chief--with no serious earlier command experience, in war or peace, to demonstrate it.

Eisenhower apart, no post-war American president had earlier been near high military rank. Their command record is mixed. Kennedy acted decisively in the Cuban missile crisis of 1963. Johnson and Nixon alike can be blamed for not foreseeing that the Vietnam war could drag on for so long, and for too long letting it do so. Yet both were wise in not letting their airmen flatten Hanoi to end it. Reagan's war service had been spent making films; yet his presidency brought the arguably crucial decision to outspend the Soviet Union in armaments until Soviet determination collapsed. George Bush senior had a fine world war two record, albeit as a navy pilot, not in high command. As president, he launched a war decisively against Iraq, but bungled its ending. Bush junior, with no military record worth the name, did very much the same.

These days, of course, peace is the issue: in Western countries it is almost always a civil crisis that tests a would-be commander-in-chief's reaction to a future military one. There, I am no more impressed by Hillary Clinton's self-advertised (and self-exaggerated) "lifetime of experience" than by what she equally advertises, Barack Obama's alleged lack of one.

She has a politician's essential readiness to fudge and trim, and her Senate voting record, it's said, shows skill in offending as few interest groups as possible. Those are qualities you could do without in a geopolitical crisis. You might well think that--until this year--the biggest crisis of her life was one called Monica Lewinsky. Yet, given her husband's ever-wandering eye, you might well be wrong; and she handled that crisis, and presumably lesser ones like it, pretty well.

In other fields, though, for all of Clinton's eight years inside the White House, I wonder how much more experience with crisis (and hence of need for judgment and decision) she faced in her short stint as a federal senator than Obama has in his longer, if less limelit, political career. Her best case, arguably, can be made from her response to shocks in this year's primaries themselves.

On the face of things, however, one might doubt whether either of them is qualified for command-in-chief. Indeed, do years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam even qualify John McCain? Plenty of people get slung into atrocious prisons, many tortured--and some resist it--without being thought fit to head the mightiest and most complex armed forces in world history.

But the face of things can be a bad guide. I suspect that any one of these three candidates could do this part of the job, and do it well: you surely do not get to the top in America or any other land without being, or at least being ready to act, tough as old boots (unless you've simply inherited another man's shoes). Throw them in at the deep end and my guess is you'll be struck by their ability to swim.

(Stephen Hugh-Jones is a former writer and editor for The Economist, where he wrote the Johnson column from 1992-99. He lives now in West Sussex.)