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"Rice Names Critic Of Iraq Policy to Counselor's Post" -- hey, I thought, maybe positive change is on the way. Well, no, I didn't actually think that was likely. Instead I thought, let's click the article and see all the ways in which this turns out to be a scam. Well:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has tapped Eliot A. Cohen, a prominent writer on national security strategy and an outspoken critic of the administration's postwar occupation of Iraq, as her counselor, State Department officials said yesterday.

Of course, what Bush and Bush's supporters like about Cohen is that his book, Supreme Command, is read by them as offering justification for the White House's habit of overruling military experts and substituting instead the judgment of idiots. That's probably a bit unfair to Cohen himself, who seems to have had in mind overruling the generals when your national political leadership isn't dominated by fools, but still. Cohen is a pioneering incompetence dodger of the right, enjoys making spurious accusations of anti-semitism, and generally speaking should fit right in with the rest of Team Bush.

Comments

I assume that if Rice had hired Richard Perle, Kessler's lede would still be "outspoken critic ..." Of course Cohen will fit right in. He's aggressively argued that the current national political leadership, not some hypothetical group not dominated by fools, overrule senior military.

Posted by KH | March 2, 2007 10:10 AM

That's probably a bit unfair to Cohen himself, who seems to have had in mind overruling the generals when your national political leadership isn't dominated by fools, but still.

He had in mind the current political leadership of the US overruling the current military leadership, so I dont think you are being unfair. The book is just the full-length version of the relatively common (at one point) invitation for Bush and friends to think of themselves as Churchill.

Posted by otto | March 2, 2007 10:14 AM

Re: "The book is just the full-length version of the relatively common (at one point) invitation for Bush and friends to think of themselves as Churchill."

I think the Churchill worship might be a bit overdone.

Wasn't he largely responsible for the catastrophic idea during WWI to attack Turkey, resulting in Gallipoli?
Also, a lot of his WWII ideas weren't too bright either, such as invading Italy, wanting to wait forever before invading Normandy, etc. Also, he was dead-set on holding on to the overseas colonies after WWII.

To his credit, on the other hand, he did help persuade the US to not try a cross-channel invasion when they were clearly not ready for it. He also has to be credited for insisting on standing up to Germany after Dunkirk.

Altogether, it seems like a mixed bag to me. Certain US leaders (Roosevelt, Marshall, McCarthur) performed at least as well, in my opinion.

Posted by Jim W | March 2, 2007 10:34 AM

It's them right wing think tank thinkers way of embracing William Blake, "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise."

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | March 2, 2007 10:34 AM

I wonder if people who worship Churchill worship broken clocks.

Posted by Reality Man | March 2, 2007 10:41 AM

Part of the Churchill worship is a desire to deny FDR any credit for WWII leadership.

Plus, there's the will thing, which has become a conservative obsession. Churchill exhibited oodles of will. If we could just muster enough will, and get the damn flouride out of the water, everything would be OK. It's not unlike a pretensious freshman after his first exposure to Nietzshe.

Posted by AJ | March 2, 2007 10:55 AM

The funny thing is freshmen never seem to realize a lot of the time Nietzsche was talking about meditation instead of whacking people over the head with mallets.

Posted by Reality Man | March 2, 2007 10:59 AM

Some of the freshmen do, eventually, the rest become conservatives.

Posted by AJ | March 2, 2007 11:02 AM

Re Churchill and Gallipoli, the failure wasn't at the strategic but the operational level. When the Brits landed they initially had the Ottoman troops in a disorderly retreat. Leadership in the field, conditioned by the stalemate on the Western Front, decided to stop and dig in rather than developing the pursuit. As a result, the Ottomans had time to regroup and dig in, leading to months of bloody trench warfare and the failure of the invasion.

As for Cohen, I've read the book, and I've always thought the Bush admin's take on it was a misreading that lost the nuance in his argument, which is broadly that war is a grand strategic matter encompassing more than just military operations (the province of generals), and therefore major military decisions should be made by the politicians responsible for shaping and carrying out grand strategy, with the generals serving as experts in their fields. The missed nuance being, of course, that the political leadership whould take the counsel of military leaders seriously, instead of ignoring military advice and overruling reasonable, fact-based objections (e.g. "we need a lot more manpower"). Cohen's decision to take a post with the admin, and the tacit approval that decision lends to its reading of his work, is pushing me toward a much more critical stance towards him.

Posted by n | March 2, 2007 1:51 PM

Cohen's Johns Hopkins pic has him wearing a floppy bowtie. What is it about effete little cowards and bowties? In their tinhorn souls they must really think it bestows upon them a certain gravitas. Also, a dweeby feckless mustache- that shows he's really a towering intellect. You could literally dredge up some skid row wino- clean him up- give him some responsible State Dept. post and he'd be 1,000 times the man and patriot Eliot "Hip-hip hooray for Israel" Cohen is.

Posted by Trevor | March 2, 2007 6:04 PM