Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s suggestion that George Bush is a reckless imperialist, a man determined to employ indiscriminate brutality for the sake of a misguided vision, stands in sharp contrast to his previous writings on the Vietnam War, and to the more measured criticism of John Lewis Gaddis.

With Iraq’s elections only days away and the enemies of stability reacting in full force, this might be the least opportune time to engage a discussion about which strategies are most likely to bring success in the war on terror.

The name itself suggests the difficulties we confront. Terror is a tactic. How does one war against a tactic? As many observers have noted: a terrorist need succeed only once to obtain an objective and those seeking to thwart him need only falter once to be confronted with failure. Those are long odds.

But several things might be proffered, even if cautiously.

The United States has not experienced another 9/11 or anything like it in the past 1,000+ days. This could all change tomorrow, but few of us would have anticipated this during the days of empty skies.
The Iraq war can be questioned retrospectively, and the management of the post-invasion occupation is hard to defend as an exercise in efficiency or effectiveness. But there can be no doubt that the ongoing violence underscores the brutal nature of our enemy and also the difficulties of winning such a war conventionally. We simply must be smarter about how we fight this deadly enemy.
Finally, the jury is still out on whether the Iraq venture will prove a long-term disaster or success. There are three possible scenarios it seems to me:

First, the country could disintegrate into civil war and destabilize the region while more and more people suffer. That scenario is a vote against the war and Bush’s strategy.
A second scenario is a status quo situation in which elections are held, random violence continues, and life in Iraq limps along. In this scenario, no clear victory can be claimed by either side. It is unlikely that this situation could go on indefinitely without sliding into chaos or evolving into scenario three.
The scenario sane people pray for would be reasonably successful elections, a tougher, stronger government and a turn, among the Iraqis, against those who are terrorizing their country. In this situation, we will begin to see intelligence that exposes the terrorists, an economy that starts to work, and the gradual withdrawal of most American troops in the near future. One hopes for a nation reasonably humane and democratic and perhaps a confederation of three states, in which each of the three major ethnic groups is granted some degree of self-governing autonomy.

Should the third scenario come to pass, Bush might yet be given credit for his aggressive approach, whatever the mistakes along the way.

The larger issues that Iraq frames have been tackled in the past year or so by two renowned historians. The first, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., wrote a small book that appeared before the election, War and the American Presidency. It is reminiscent of another tract he published during the Vietnam War, The Bitter Heritage.

Schlesinger is a walking historical monograph. The breadth and depth of his work has been impressive over the years. He has earned the title “dean” of American historians, a man who has counseled presidents and written more acclaimed histories than any living author. There is no major award he has not been granted — Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Bancroft Prizes. And there are few historians who have covered more ground. The Jackson, Roosevelt and Kennedy eras, the Vietnam War and most recently the war in Iraq have all drawn Schlesinger’s attention.

His work is also highly readable. A Thousand Days presents John F. Kennedy in hagiographic terms, but it is also a riveting look at the policies and personality behind our most famous martyred president since Lincoln. The Imperial Presidency raises legitimate questions about the powers of the executive branch. The Disuniting of America strikes conservative tones as it seeks to halt cultural fragmentation encouraged by narrow ethnic and ideological agendas. His trilogy on the rise of FDR remains one of the classic tomes in American historiography. The Bitter Heritage, which stimulated his exchange with Noam Chomsky over Vietnam, seeks to explain if not totally defend the American effort in Vietnam. It will prove instructive in our current context. His collection of essays, the Cycles of American History, is a notable work that includes a needed corrective to new left revisionism.

Schlesinger, then, is a liberal icon who, along with Galbraith, Mailer, Vidal, and Buckley, has achieved Rushmore-like status in modern American political letters. And Schlesinger shows no signs of going quietly into the good night. Well into his 80s, he has over the past couple of years published columns and essays, a 500-page memoir on just the first 33 years of his life, and has seen fit to take on the Bush administration in the New York Review of Books and in WAP.

It is his attacks on Bush that warrant consideration, both because of the larger issues they raise and the degree to which it is evident that Schlesinger, usually a proponent of the vital center, has gravitated leftward. How does one explain this shift given that respected Democrats have voiced support for the war, even if they disagreed with the way Bush managed it?

Given the Bush administration’s purposeful drive toward domination of the world, Adams would not have been at all surprised by the wicked things Americans did at Abu Ghraib. (War and the American Presidency, p. XIII)

Schlesinger adds:

When we initiate war unilaterally, we set the republic up as the world judge, jury and executioner. The direct consequence is that never before in American history has the United States been so feared or hated by the rest of the world. (WAP, p. XIII)

Bush has:

…resurrected presidential power, and the imperial presidency has been born again, with its usual cavalier attitude toward due process and individual freedom. There are the excesses of the Patriot Act; the administration’s contention that a presidential pronouncement of enemy combatant can justify suspension of habeas corpus; the Guantanamo prisoners consigned for years to a legal limbo without access to lawyers or families; the many months of indifference to Red Cross reports of cruelties to detainees in Iraq. The resurrection of the imperial presidency has had such negative consequences for civil liberties as to create an improbable coalition between liberals and libertarian conservatives against presidential imperialism redux. (p. XIV)

Indeed, Schlesinger goes so far as to suggest that democracy itself could be endangered.

But has democracy a future anyway? The world got along without democracy until two centuries ago, and there is little evidence that constitutional democracy is likely to triumph in the century ahead…At the start of the twenty-first century democracy finds itself challenged by religious fanatics. God is their God, and heaven’s their destination. The search for a democracy alternative is urgent. (p. XV)

This is just the introduction to the book, but one pauses to ask: isn’t the promotion of democracy as a counter idea precisely the strategy that Bush has embraced? Isn’t the nature of the enemy, which Schlesinger defines here, precisely why our tactics must break free of the traditional mold? Bush surely knows that how he wages this war will not only determine his place in history, it could, more important, determine whether Schlesinger’s dire prognostications are realized.

It is not my intention here to analyze each of the charges Schlesinger levels. I do not have enough knowledge about individual situations and cases to determine precisely when and if our government has overstepped its legal authority or violated international codes governing war-time activity, though it is the conviction of many experts that granting terrorists Geneva Code privileges belies common sense and the intent of the covenants. I do not even intend to defend the decision to bring down Saddam, the wisdom of which can only be determined by the unfolding of history. Nevertheless, Schlesinger’s description of Bush’s policy is, to put it nicely, one-sided. Take this summary:

The essence of our new strategy is military: to strike a potential enemy, unilaterally if necessary, before he has a chance to strike us. War, traditionally a matter of last resort, becomes a matter of presidential choice. (WAP, p. 21)

Schlesinger calls this a “revolutionary” change, a matter which other historians dispute. But even more remarkable is that Schlesinger contradicts himself on the most fundamental concern addressed in his book. He argues that Bush’s policy reverses a decades-old policy of “deterrence and containment” and thus views it with great alarm. Yet, he writes a few pages later:

“The administration’s credibility gap in Iraq finishes the Bush Doctrine of preventive war”….It is doubtful that President Bush could once again rally a “coalition of the willing in a preventive war against Iran or North Korea….The Bush Doctrine is already obsolete.” (pp. 38-41)

These conclusions render the thrust of Schlesinger’s argument academic, don’t they? In any case, Schlesinger ignores what Bush has argued all along — that Iraq was an exception, not the rule. Bush felt that more than a decade of diplomatic game-playing with Iraq had left a festering sore on the international body politick. Saddam had violated the cessation of hostilities agreement he signed in 1991 and in doing so had resumed a state of war with the United States and its allies. His animosity toward the United States, his love affair with weapons of mass destruction and his support of terror networks were all well known; Bush decided to take action.

The wisdom of this decision will be debated a long time, but when it comes to Schlesinger and liberals determined to skewer this president their outrage, as always, is selective. In Schlesinger’s case, his book on Vietnam, The Bitter Heritage, is worth revisiting.

“The Vietnam story is a tragedy without villains,” wrote Schlesinger in the mid 1960s. “No thoughtful American can withhold sympathy as President Johnson ponders the gloomy choices which lie ahead. (p. 32)

Or consider the book’s opening passage:

Why we are in Vietnam is today a question of mainly historical interest. We are there, for better or worse, and we must deal with the situation that exists. Our national security may not have compelled us to draw a line across Southeast Asia where we did, but, having drawn it, we cannot lightly abandon it. Our stake in South Vietnam may have been self-created, but it has none the less become real. Our precipitate withdrawal now would have ominous reverberations throughout Asia. (p. 1)

Change the words Iraq for Vietnam and the Middle East for Southeast Asia and one can see parallels. Schlesinger raises tough questions about the military’s handling of Vietnam, but he is soft on Kennedy and Johnson. Consider these lines from A Thousand Days.

One reason Washington miscalculated Castro, of course, was series of failures in our own intelligence. We regarded him as an hysteric….We thought that his troops might defect. We supposed that, although warned by advance air strikes, he would do nothing to neutralize the Cuban underground…And there were tactical errors. We chose an invasion site without a way of escape, and we did not in any case tell the Brigade of the guerilla option. (p. 293)

Schlesinger goes on for several pages like this and in doing so helps us understand how men and women making difficult choices in tough times might fail to properly anticipate even obvious scenarios. As they say, no military plan survives the first encounter with the enemy. But nowhere does Schlesinger indict Kennedy. This generosity extended to Vietnam and did not go unnoted by critics such as Irving Howe:

One major omission has to do with the role of American liberalism in the Vietnam fiasco. Mr. Schlesinger implied that if President Kennedy had lived, things would have turned out better — a notion both impossible to refute and difficult to accept. There has been continuity of a kind in American foreign policy over the past twenty years, a continuity for which both conservative and liberal Presidents and Congressmen bear responsibility. Theodore Draper in his heavily documented article on Vietnam in the January Commentary makes it quite clear that President Kennedy, if with greater sophistication and hesitation, shared in the assumptions that led to the present full-scale military involvement. At the least, Mr. Schlesinger should have treated this matter with a fraction of the severity he reserves for other Presidents. (The New York Review of Books, Feb. 13, 1967)

There is no lack of severity where Bush is concerned. In the first two chapters of WAP, Schlesinger slices and dices the Bush administration for all its failures and assumptions.

Looking back over the forty years of the Cold War, we can be everlastingly grateful that the loonies on both sides were powerless. By 2003, however, they run the Pentagon, and preventive war — the Bush Doctrine — is now official policy. (p. 23)

On page 25, Schlesinger notes:

His (Bush’s) conviction apparently is that the unique position of the United States as the planet’s supreme military, economic and cultural power creates an unprecedented opportunity for America to impose its values on other countries and thereby save them from themselves.blockquote>

We quote another president from another time:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge — and more.

Schlesinger would surely reject any comparison between JFK and Bush. But this statement in JFK’s inaugural address, taken at face value, is not so different from Bush’s recent inaugural. And what did JFK do, by the way, as he assumed and managed the presidency: again, he launched an invasion of Cuba, risked nuclear war in Berlin and Cuba to defend this nation and its interests; plotted the assassination of not one but two foreign heads of state (Castro and Diem); and got us into Vietnam.

I raise these points not to denigrate JFK, whose presidency I view with mixed feelings, but to draw a comparison. JFK made imperfect choices in an imperfect world. The same is true of Bush who, for all his talk of making the world safe for democracy, has engaged in fairly traditional statecraft since the invasion of Iraq. We see no attempts to invade Iran and Syria, though there are those who think it would be useful (I happen to disagree). We see ongoing negotiations with North Korea, attempts to rebuild alliances with European allies, and a respectful deference to governments such as Indonesia, where our military, trying to help desperately ill and hungry tsunami victims, has agreed to withdraw at that Muslim nation’s request.

Later in WAP, Schlesinger makes great hay over the 2000 election, going so far as to advocate the abolition of the electoral college. Like many left/liberal critics of the president, he was at the time of writing WAP apparently still reliving that close election. Would it have bothered him, had John Kerry carried Ohio, that his choice for president would have captured the White House despite losing the popular vote by 3 million? I doubt a single Democrat would have complained, but let us pretend that Schlesinger is motivated by a higher calling. After all, in calling for the college’s abolition, he is at odds even with JFK, who opposed such reforms as a Senator.

Schlesinger’s severity toward Bush is on display as well in his NYRB article, The Making of a Mess. Who got us into this mess? Bush. And history will hold him accountable.

Historians of the Iraq War will have plenty to work with. Unlike the Vietnam War, which crept up on us and was slow in producing literature, the Iraq War was well trumpeted in advance and has been the subject of volumes of instant history, covering many aspects of the swift victory and the bloody aftermath. (TNRB, Sept. 23, 2004)

In short, Democrats might be forgiven miscues in Vietnam because the war “crept up on us.” Remember, there are no “villains” where Vietnam is concerned, at least not until Nixon and Kissinger arrived on the scene. Bush gets no empathy, even though he was reacting to the worst attack in American history and relied on universal intelligence that concluded Saddam and his regime had weapons of mass destruction. Given that journalists have reported the glee in Iraq after 9/11, we can only ponder the reaction from Schlesinger had Iraq, unmolested by Bush, managed to get weapons, surreptitiously or otherwise, into the hands of our enemies.

This is not to suggest that Bush has gotten it all right. He and his administration have been criticized, fairly in my view, for not adequately preparing for the post-liberation phase of the war in Iraq. It was not only an error it may yet prove a fatal mistake. Still, John Lewis Gaddis, in his book, Surprise, Security and the American Experience, offers some needed perspective. To begin with, he argues, unilateralism, preemption and hegemony are deeply rooted in American political tradition.

So when George W. Bush warned….that Americans must “be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives,” he was echoing an old tradition rather than establishing a new one. Adams, Jackson, Polk, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson would have all understood it perfectly well. (p. 22)

Franklin Roosevelt, Gaddis suggests, was an exception. He sought to work within an international consensus, which led both to his successes in World War II and also his failures when seeking to negotiate the post-war peace with Stalin. But FDR had a well-defined enemy, a ready-made alliance already under attack and at war, and a clear end-game. He was not fighting a ghost-like network of terrorists, but nation states that had left us and our allies no choice but to fight the war to a definitive conclusion.

As Gaddis explains:

It was not just the Twin Towers that collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001: so too did some of our most fundamental assumptions about international, national and personal security. (p. 81)

Gaddis gives Bush credit for launching an ambitious counterattack against the pro-terrorist network. Despite pessimistic predictions of experts, our forces overcame the Taliban and oversaw historic elections in Afghanistan. The Iraqi invasion, contrary to fears, did not ignite the entire Arab world, though it provoked terrorist enemies within and outside Iraq.

Gaddis agrees with those who fault the Bush Administration’s post-liberation planning, suggesting that borders and cities were not properly secured and rhetoric failed to match the moment. Moreover, Gaddis asks if the Bush blueprint is the right one: what if our enemies are not the product of failed democracy but of deeper cultural or ideological issues? Would “democracy” deliver us security?

Almost two years since first engaging Saddam’s forces, the situation in Iraq remains highly volatile. Just in the past month, the Governor of Baghdad and a deputy chief of police have been assassinated, Iraqi troops have been sabotaged and terrorist-planted bombs have killed scores of innocent civilians. This suggests two things: first, a failure of imagination (and even basic survival skills) on the part of the pro-American forces, and second a local population (including moles within the new government?) that appears to be protecting or tipping off the terrorists.

Given all of this, Gaddis asks the key question:

How, then, do we keep hope alive when the costs and risk of doing so have suddenly become greater? The first thing I’d say is that we have to be ready to fight for it. (p. 116)

But we must also learn from mistakes and fight a smarter war:

The essence of responsibility, however, is remembering what the ancients taught us about the sin of pride. Which is to say that we badly need mirrors. Which is to say that we need always to see ourselves as others see us. Which is to say that you can’t sustain hegemony without consent. (p. 117)

And here we witness the difference between constructive criticism and partisan sniping of the sort that Schlesinger, alas, has embraced the past couple of years. Gaddis believes with Bush that America has no choice but to face down the brutality of terrorism. Schlesinger, on the other hand, suggests by his tone that Bush is a reckless imperialist, a man determined to employ indiscriminate brutality for the sake of a misguided vision; he is essentially accusing the president of terrorism.

Schlesinger and Gaddis are not alone in questioning some of the assumptions that underlie Bush’s Wilson-like rhetoric and his policies in Iraq. Even supporters of the war have voiced concerns about some of the troubling mistakes of judgment and policy. But many Americans give Bush credit for grasping an essential reality that escapes his most severe detractors: there will be no appeasing those who murder women and children not only without remorse but with a glee that chills our bones. This must steel us for hard days ahead.