Presidents At War
By opting to invade Iraq, George W. Bush was following in the footsteps of history
America is attacked. The president addresses Congress in stirring terms. Senators and representatives, with a few eccentric exceptions, vote for a declaration of war, and the overwhelming majority of the people support the war effort without stint. The president appoints sterling generals and admirals and superintends massive war production. American troops surge to victory, and peace is made.
This is the picture we have of the way America, and American presidents, go to war. It comports with what we think happened in World War I and, especially, in World War II. In this view of U.S. history, American presidents lead the nation only into wars that are forced upon them.
There's only one problem. This picture is almost entirely contrary to the facts.
Critics of George W. Bush like to say that Iraq was a war of choice--a conflict that could have been avoided. But almost all American wars have been, to a greater or lesser degree, wars of choice. It is said that Bush went to war in Iraq without sufficient forces, without a game plan for the occupation, and without an exit strategy. Even if all those charges are true, then he has plenty of company in American history.
For generations, presidents have wrestled with the difficult decision to lead the nation into war. Woodrow Wilson chose to bring the United States into World War I when he could have acquiesced to Germany's demand that we stop trading with Britain and France. Franklin Roosevelt, beginning in 1939, took daring and controversial decisions--starting with his sending massive aid to Britain and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany--knowing they raised a grave risk that Germany or Japan would attack.
Military success was rarely guaranteed. In the early 1800s,the American military was small, and usually outnumbered. So there were practical limits on the president's ability to exercise his powers. Spurred by young "war hawks"like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, James Madison asked Congress for 10,000 troops to fight the British in 1811. Then, a year later, he imposed an embargo on trade and got Congress to vote, far from unanimously, to go to war. Madison's ability to prosecute the War of 1812 was so limited he was unable to prevent the burning of the White House and the Capitol.
Pirates of the Barbary Coast. Both the president and the American people had to learn that, in wartime, patience is definitely a virtue. Typically, the field of battle was far from Washington, and until the telegraph allowed Abraham Lincoln to communicate in real time with his generals, presidents learned of the course of battle only weeks or months later. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy and the Marines to take on the Barbary pirates, who were enslaving American merchants and demanding tribute. His ships set sail for the Barbary Coast in June 1801 but didn't complete their mission until September 1805.
The rationale for a war, then as now, was not always clear-cut. In 1846, James K. Polk started the war with Mexico by claiming, with murky evidence at best, that Mexican forces had crossed the Nueces River and "shed American blood on American soil." The treaty ending that war gave us more than half of Mexico's territory, including Texas and California.
As for the Civil War, almost no one anticipated its outbreak, course, and outcome. Only a few thought it would be a long war, notably William Tecumseh Sherman. While teaching at a military college in Louisiana in 1859, he wrote, "All here talk as if a dissolution of the Union were not only a possibility but a probability of easy execution. If attempted we will have Civil War of the most horrible kind." Abraham Lincoln had no such foresight. In his second inaugural, in March 1865, he admitted, "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained."
Nor did Lincoln seem to have a clear military strategy when the war began. He walked over to the War Department every day to read the latest telegraph dispatches and went through one general after another until he settled on Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. And he did meet with resistance: Lincoln's Democratic opponents called for a compromise peace with the South, retaining slavery, or even letting the Confederacy go. In the summer of 1864 Lincoln seemed sure to be defeated for re-election. But Grant's advance through Virginia and siege of Petersburg and Sherman's capture of Atlanta and March to the Sea across Georgia convinced northern voters that the Union was on the road to victory. Lincoln was re-elected by a 55 to 45 percent margin. What were his plans for rebuilding the Union? After his assassination (five days after Robert E. Lee's surrender), no one knew.
Post-Civil War, America's appetite for military action seemed sated. The Army policed much of the South during Reconstruction until 1877 and fought against the Plains Indians. The Navy was largely scrapped; in the 1880s it was ranked 12th in the world, behind Turkey's and Sweden's. But America ceased to look inward in 1890, when the Census Bureau declared that the frontier had been closed and when Navy Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History focused American leaders' attentions abroad.
Rough Riders. A young New York politician and author named Theodore Roosevelt was one who looked beyond America's borders. At 38, he wangled an appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy. President William McKinley, a Civil War veteran and canny politician, had no eagerness for war. Roosevelt did. When the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor in February 1898, there was an outcry for war with Spain, which had been brutally suppressing a colonial rebellion in Cuba. Ten days later, when Navy Secretary John Long left the office after lunch, Assistant Secretary Roosevelt did an end run: He wrote out orders positioning the American fleet for battle with Spanish forces in Cuba and its Pacific colony of the Philippines. Long was unnerved but didn't reverse the orders. So the Navy was ready to go on the attack in April, when McKinley sent a war message to Congress and war was declared. The Spanish fleet was defeated in Manila harbor on May 1; Cuba was blockaded, and America won land and sea battles July 3 at Santiago Harbor and San Juan Hill (where Roosevelt led his Rough Riders in a well-publicized charge). Puerto Rico was invaded on July 25. A peace protocol was signed on August 13.
In retrospect, the military course of this war seems the most predictable of all of America's major wars--the Spanish fleet was decrepit, the American fleet was well positioned to fight, and the major problem was logistical, getting the Army down to Tampa and then to Cuba. Yet the war led to unpredicted and controversial military deployments. A major insurrection in the Philippines wasn't finally put down until 1902. A treaty giving the United States supervisory control over Cuba resulted in U.S. military occupation. And the country was not unanimously pro-war. Scholars, business moguls, and Democrats in the 1900 presidential campaign denounced American "imperialism."
The first three presidents to serve entirely in the 20th century--Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson--proclaimed that the United States had special responsibilities in the Western Hemisphere, and they dispatched troops accordingly. They saw the United States as a world power--with the world's largest economy, the largest population of any major power but Russia, and, by 1908, one of its largest navies. Which inevitably raised the question: When World War I broke out in Europe, in 1914, would the United States stand by or take part?
Wilson's instinct was to hold back. He sent his unofficial envoy, Col. Edward House, to Europe with proposals for peace. In a country reluctant to engage in a European caldron, Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 as "the man who has kept us out of war." But in January 1917 the Germans announced that their submarines would conduct unrestricted warfare against neutral, i.e., U.S., ships, and in February Wilson made public a telegram intercepted by British intelligence from the German foreign minister promising Mexico that it would get Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas if it entered the war against the United States. "It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war," Wilson told Congress in April. But the stakes were great. "The world," Wilson intoned, "must be made safe for democracy."
Congress, with only minor dissent, agreed. The Senate voted 82 to 6 for war, the House 373 to 50. Still, large blocs of voters opposed the war--Progressives from the heavily German- and Scandinavian-American Upper Midwest, Socialists in New York and other big cities. Wilson responded with the sharpest suppression of free speech since the Civil War, and many critics of American involvement soon found themselves in jail. The railroads and shipping industry were also quickly nationalized--a degree of government control greater than in any later American war.
Unready, unset, go. The United States entered what was then called the Great War with military forces plainly insufficient for the struggle. It had virtually no air force. The Navy was far from combat readiness. An army of more than 1 million men was yet to be raised. It took time to assemble and transport the American expeditionary force, which did not come into play militarily until spring 1918, a year after the declaration of war. But under the leadership of Gen. John Pershing, U.S. troops performed well in key battles. By the fall of 1918, German forces were collapsing. An armistice was negotiated to take effect on 11:11 a.m. on November 11, the day we still celebrate as Veterans Day.
It was after the Great Depression and the election of Franklin Roosevelt, in 1932, that American policy entered its most isolationist phase. Roosevelt torpedoed the London financial conference in 1933, acquiesced in the passage of a Neutrality Act in 1935, and reduced military spending from the already low levels of the 1920s. But he also paid heed to what was happening in Europe. Roosevelt could understand German, and listening to Hitler's radio broadcasts, he developed at some point in the 1930s--by the time of the Munich agreement in September 1938 at the latest, his admiring biographer Conrad Black argues--the idea that the United States could not live with Nazi Germany.
Most Americans did not share that conviction; neither did some of Roosevelt's own appointees. That hardly deterred Roosevelt, however. Using his powers as chief executive, he increased military spending from hundreds of millions of dollars in 1938 to $6 billion in 1941. He instituted a military draft in an election year. He bypassed the Neutrality Act by providing destroyers to Britain in 1940. He declared the North Atlantic up to Iceland American territorial waters. He sped aid to the Soviet Union when Hitler's Germany attacked. And he cut off oil shipments to Japan. Tokyo responded by attacking Pearl Harbor on Dec.7, 1941. Four days later, Hitler declared war on the United States.
Roosevelt could say that World War II was not a war of choice. Yet the choices he made before Pearl Harbor certainly helped to provoke an attack, and they were choices that his political opponents bitterly condemned.
"Absolute victory."Despite Roosevelt's preparations, the United States entered this war, as it had most wars, without sufficient forces or even a coherent, workable military strategy. Nor was there a clear idea of what the endpoint would be--beyond Roosevelt's assurance in his speech to Congress on December 8 that "the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory."
At that moment, it was far from clear how victory would be achieved. The Pacific Fleet was gravely injured (though the aircraft carriers, luckily, were safe at sea); the Philippines were indefensible (as Roosevelt admitted in a fireside chat in February 1942); the weak British and Dutch forces seemed unlikely to stop Japan from sweeping through East Asia and what now is Indonesia and establishing bases from which they could threaten, as they did, India and Australia; Hitler's Army was at the gates of Moscow and was sweeping into the oil fields of the Caucasus, while Nazi forces were poised to sweep across Egypt and occupy the oil fields of the Middle East.
The picture seemed dismal for the United States and its Allies. The U.S. military was still being expanded, and in initial battles, especially in North Africa, its forces proved poorly trained and commanded. War production had been vastly expanded since 1940, but Roosevelt's goals seemed wholly unrealistic to many, and the newspapers were full of stories of bottlenecks and snafus. Not until June 1942, at the Battle of Midway, did the United States win a significant military victory, and that was closely fought.
Roosevelt did a masterful job, however, better than any other president, far better than Lincoln, of selecting the right commanders for the right tasks early on--Gen. John Marshall for organizing the Army, Adm. Ernest King for directing the Navy, Gen. Douglas MacArthur for the Pacific Theater, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower for the European Theater, and Gen. Matthew Arnold for the Army Air Force. He also did a masterful job, though the work often seemed chaotic, of organizing war production and producing tanks, airplanes, and ships in numbers far greater than almost anyone thought possible.
But plans changed, operations took longer than expected, troops early on performed below expectations, and materiel and equipment were not always plentiful or optimally functional. In the European Theater, the great brunt of casualties was borne by the Soviet Union, and it was possible in 1941 and 1942 that it would collapse. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill feared until nearly the end that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler as he had in August 1939. In the Pacific Theater, the fierce resistance of Japanese troops and the kamikaze attacks of 1944-45 made forward progress exceedingly costly in casualties.
As late as the summer of 1945, some military leaders hesitated to recommend invasion of Japan's home islands because they expected the cost to be 1 million American lives. And even after the atomic bombs exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Japan's emperor had to persuade the military to surrender.
Neither Roosevelt nor Truman in 1945 had plans for what turned out to be the Cold War. The United States was now the world's prime military power. But Truman swiftly demobilized the forces, as public opinion demanded, and the draft was dropped. By 1949, the Soviets had their own atomic bomb--which raised the specter of mutual assured destruction if both sides were to employ the weapons they brandished.
Cold conflict. Truman set the United States on the course it followed, with some deviations, for the 40-plus years of the Cold War. As the Soviets moved to undermine governments in Eastern Europe and replace them with Communist regimes, Truman in March 1947 urged Congress to aid Greece and Turkey to prevent Communist takeover. In the process, he set out an ambitious goal: "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
Under the Truman Doctrine, the draft was reinstated and the armed forces built back up, but in choosing whether to wage war Truman and his successors were constrained by the threat of nuclear war between the two superpowers. Even so, when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel in June 1950, Harry Truman felt obliged to defend South Korea. American forces proved insufficient after the Chinese unexpectedly invaded in November 1950, and the United States and its Allies were thrown back into a southern perimeter around Pusan. General MacArthur responded with an audacious amphibious landing at Inchon. He wanted to go farther, to bomb and attack the Chinese beyond Korea's northern boundary. Truman, fearful of a nuclear confrontation, said no--and when MacArthur persisted, fired him in April 1951. "There is no substitute for victory," MacArthur proclaimed in a speech at West Point. Truman's popularity plunged to a record low.
Only after a new president, Dwight Eisenhower, clandestinely threatened nuclear retaliation did the Communists agree to a compromise peace--a tie at best, not a victory for the United States.
Eisenhower sought to discourage further Soviet aggression by maintaining U.S. forces in Europe and Asia, by constructing alliances in the underdeveloped world, and by threatening massive retaliation with nuclear weapons even up to what his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, called "the brink of war." The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev threatened to isolate U.S. forces in conventionally indefensible Berlin in 1957, 1960, and 1961 and installed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962; Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy faced down the threats to Berlin, and Kennedy after tense negotiations persuaded the Soviets to withdraw the missiles, by secretly withdrawing missiles from Turkey and guaranteeing there would be no further attempts to overthrow the Castro regime. Khrushchev's successors never again made such threats, but they did encourage coups and guerrilla movements in the Third World, with varying success.
And nowhere more so than in Vietnam. Viet Cong insurgents had been operating in South Vietnam, aided by Communist North Vietnam, since the country was divided in 1954. The United States, in line with the Truman Doctrine, sent economic and military aid to South Vietnam. The critical moment of escalation came in August 1963, when Kennedy approved a coup against the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem; in November, Diem was killed. This effectively gave the responsibility for South Vietnam to the United States. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, eventually sent 540,000 U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. But Gen. William Westmoreland's strategy of using intense firepower in the jungles and mountains resulted in heavy American casualties while failing to break the hold of the Viet Cong in densely populated areas. Johnson's refusal to threaten nuclear weapons and his unwillingness to attack North Vietnam, for fear of the kind of Chinese intervention that had nearly defeated the United States in Korea, meant the Communists had no reason to agree to a Korea-style peace. American opinion turned against the war, forcing Johnson to retire. Richard Nixon reduced troop levels, and Gen. Creighton Abrams adopted a strategy of protecting populated areas and building up South Vietnamese forces. A North Vietnamese invasion was repelled in 1972 and a peace agreement signed in December. But in 1975 the North Vietnamese attacked again in force, and a newly elected Democratic Congress denied the aid sought by Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, for the South Vietnamese. Saigon fell in April 1975--a galling defeat for America and a disaster for millions of South Vietnamese.
The outcome in Vietnam would inhibit American presidents and the American military for years to come. Jimmy Carter responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with an embargo on Soviet grain sales. When Iranian revolutionaries seized diplomats--an act of war under the laws of diplomacy--he responded with protracted negotiations and an eight-helicopter rescue mission that failed. Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980; the hostages were released on Inauguration Day, immediately after the Gipper was sworn in. Reagan's vast defense buildup in the 1980s, and his endorsement of strategic missile defense, were one factor in convincing Soviet leaders that they could no longer match America.
Reluctant warrior. The success of Reagan's policies may now be fully measured. Ironically, he of all Cold War presidents was the most reluctant to use nuclear weapons; he was horrified at the destruction that would be caused by mutual assured destruction and initiated a strategic missile defense program, derided by his critics as "Star Wars," to make such mass annihilation impossible. During his presidency his defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, and his national security adviser, Gen. Colin Powell, enunciated doctrines that, had they been applied retroactively, would have prevented almost every American president from going to war. America, they said, should do so only when it had overwhelming force, consensus support from the American people, and an endpoint or exit strategy clearly in hand.
Reagan actually used military force sparingly. In 1983, he withdrew forces from Lebanon, after 241 marines were killed by a massive truck bomb. But when a military coup in tiny Grenada took the life of the prime minister, a Marxist who nonetheless wanted to forge friendly ties with the United States, Reagan dispatched troops without hesitation.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989 freed presidents from the fear that military intervention would lead to nuclear war between the superpowers. But they still went to war only reluctantly. Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait in 1990 presented George H.W. Bush with an occasion for war that met the standards set by Weinberger and Powell. The United States, still with a Cold War-size military and with plenty of allies, could deploy a sufficient military force (Bush asked his generals how many men they needed and doubled it), it had an easily realizable military strategy, and there was an obvious endpoint, the liberation of Kuwait. Even so, nearly half the U.S. Senate and a large minority in the House opposed military action. Ultimately, Bush rejected advice to continue on into Iraq, though that led to the massacre of many Kurds and Shiites, who had been encouraged to believe that they could count on American assistance.
Bill Clinton similarly seemed to follow the Weinberger-Powell prescription. When Army Rangers were killed in Somalia, Clinton quickly withdrew U.S. forces. He resisted intervention in Bosnia until it became clear that American forces would be called on to help Europeans withdraw, and force was used sparingly. The war in Kosovo was conducted entirely by air, to produce zero U.S. casualties. Actions against al Qaeda were limited to a few long-range airstrikes.
The way it was. The shock of September 11 set George W. Bush on a course closer to that which American presidents have followed in the past. He chose, with near unanimous support, to go to war in Afghanistan, even though it was not obvious that we had sufficient forces or a military strategy to ensure victory. The amazing capacities of the American military--with special forces on the ground directing precision bombing by B-2s flown in from Missouri--speedily ousted the Taliban regime. But Afghanistan is still a disorderly place, with a central government by no means wholly in control. Bush also chose to go to war in Iraq, this time against considerable opposition, with forces entirely capable of success in major military operations but not, or so critics have plausibly charged, sufficient to impose order in the months and years after. Nor is there a clear endpoint or exit strategy: Bush insists that American forces will leave when Iraqi forces can maintain order, but determining just when that might be will be a matter of fine and debatable judgment.
Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq has been attacked as a departure from the American tradition of war. But it is more of a return to the dominant tradition of our history. The United States has never been an isolationist nation; Americans and American military forces have been roaming the globe since the Revolutionary War. Until the 20th century, the oceans seemed to protect the American homeland from attack, but not always. The White House and the Capitol were burned in 1814, and James K. Polk went to war in 1846 after charging that American forces had been attacked on American soil. In any case, the oceans protect us no more and have not for many years.
Wars are chancy things. The friction of war, as the Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz wrote, is inevitable and its effects unpredictable. The responsibility for sending men to their deaths has weighed heavily on our commanders in chief. Photographs of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt show how the weight of making such awesome decisions aged these vigorous leaders, just as it has visibly aged George W. Bush over the past five years.
Our system of government gives millions of voters and members of the armed services and thousands of public officials in the legislative and executive branches a role in fighting America's wars. But the most difficult decisions, and the greatest burden of responsibility, have rested on America's presidents, who, relying on imperfect information, must make, and have often made, life-and-death decisions without being able to know for certain what effects they will have.
This story appears in the January 30, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.