War Advice
by Donald Devine
Issue 133 - June 10, 2009

Imagine the shock when a politician who has spent his entire life befriending people and telling them what they want to hear in order to win their votes enters the White House as president and finds that his primary job is deal with foreign leaders who are too cynical to be wooed and are mostly hostile to his nation’s interests.

Taking pity on such innocents, America’s finest foreign policy mind has written a survival manual titled Advice to War Presidents. Professor Angelo Codevilla has not only taught statecraft to a generation of students at Boston University and the Hoover Institution but also served from 1977 to 1985 as a senior member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and has been a presidential advisor. He is a translator of Machiavelli’s The Prince and has learned well from that fox, both his wisdom and his limitations. Codevilla sums up American policy during the period since 1914 as winning wars and losing the peace: the Great War provoking World War II, the latter sputtering into the Cold War with losses in Korea and Vietnam, and now the continuing sagas of Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and the rest.

The first person the new president met with and consulted was his director of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is the president’s first test - and most fail it. For the CIA is first and foremost the dispenser of American elite conventional wisdom on foreign policy. From its inception it was based upon a false premise, that military intelligence missed the signals about Pearl Harbor and a more generalist civilian replacement was required. But Army intelligence did intercept the signals and did get them to top officials who did not act on it. CIA’s top assignment was the Soviet Union - yet the agency not only wrongly claimed until the USSR collapsed economically that it was producing more efficiently and would surpass the U.S., but its spy chief for a crucial decade of that Cold War actually worked for the enemy.

The CIA’s USSR spy Aldrich Ames not only manipulated presidents into making unwise decisions and undermined all U.S. spying efforts, even choosing every agent in Russia, who all actually worked for the Soviets. The sad truth is that the U.S. would have been much better off if the CIA were abolished during the Cold War, whose end it also missed, arguing the U.S. should oppose the reformers. After the fall, it missed the 1993 World Trade bombing, missed Osama bin Laden before the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, and missed 9/11 three years later, never explaining why al-Qaeda’s top operatives were not Islamists nor Arabs, or who was running whom. Trying to simplify matters for the president, it claimed a dying or perhaps deceased leader in a remote cave was managing anti-U.S. terrorism in fifty countries, which Codevilla says is preposterous.

The professor concludes that all-purpose intelligence is “nonsense” because to be useful intelligence must be intelligence about something. It must have a specific target so that collection can be assessed against some specific goal. Random information from foreign agents (who mainly volunteer themselves, which is why they so often work for the other side) or from unfocused mass communications cannot be distilled without a specific idea of what one is after. Rather than a central agency, including through the new intelligence directorate, gathering general information whose main purpose is seen as “educating” (i.e. leading) the president towards its own policy preferences (and leaking to the media when not followed), Codevilla argues for putting military intelligence back on top based upon a real war strategy which operates through a chain of command that filters for and protects the president.

Codevilla’s advice on homeland security is just as radical. Indeed, he argues that top-down security by its very nature cannot be effective in a free society. To work it would have to be as ruthless and isolated from public scrutiny as the USSR’s KGB and America will not allow this. Even where extreme measures have been applied as for airport security, they do not work. The author cites a mass of studies that prove these invasive methods are easily penetrated and have failed to deter every test piercing them with weapons and explosives. No one can read this section of the book and conclude this approach could ever work in the U.S. These procedures, he concludes, only result in acclimating people into meekly following instructions, making them less effective as the first line in thwarting terrorists.

It is frightening to be reminded that when the passengers of United Flight 93 overcame the terrorists to avoid a crash into the Capitol, they were guilty of disobeying U.S. policy. He paraphrases Machiavelli that “only the people, not the police, can ensure security.” But the whole thrust of U.S. homeland security policy is to further arm the police and turn them from trusted community protectors into SWAT commandos - against whom innocent civilians are warned even by the government to expect to be abused by them. Present policy is to credentialize experts to handle emergencies – further isolating and pacifying the people when all studies show that ordinary folks provide the overwhelming amount of emergency assistance. Even in terrorist matters, citizens more often identify suspicious individuals and situations - but policy is to ignore “amateur interference” and their “racial profiling.”

Why have intelligence, security and peace been handled so poorly this past century? Codevilla traces it to a common revulsion to war that led all right-thinking leaders - primarily from an ivy elite background– to invent euphemisms to avoid its ugly reality. After a century of traditional, limited “national interest” U.S. foreign policy, a more optimistic belief arouse in the late 19th Century that with the triumph of democracy, people would force their leaders to seek “impartial justice” in world affairs, no longer tolerating a self-interested nationalist policy. This new progressive movement adopted three variations to achieve this goal, ideologies that have dominated foreign policy thinking to this very day.

The first and still the dominant ideology, liberal internationalism, was devised by Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of state Elihu Root and President Woodrow Wilson as the way to avoid war between nations by relying on international treaties and institutions rather than on U.S. national power. The second, labeled neoconservative and associated with Norman Podhorez and Robert Kagan, differed in that it was thought necessary first to have foreigners adopt American values, especially democracy. But once all were convinced – perhaps first by U.S. military force – then international treaties among democratic nations could solve remaining differences. The final group, calling itself realist by Hans Morganthau and Henry Kissinger, accepted the concept of national interest but believed that all nations have their primary self interest in seeking moderation to avoid the evils of war – agreeing with the other two that national honor and traditions were passé. Reasonable leaders, democratic or not, backed by U.S. funds and trade could work out a peaceful world order negotiating amicably between themselves.

The problem with all three according to Codevilla is that this is not how most people think, especially Americans. They do not think international institutions or leaders can avoid seeking their own interests and responsibilities. Indeed, the United Nations is held in low regard which its recent scandals merely sustain. Rather, the world’s peoples give their support to their countries, to their ethnic nations and tribes or to their religions or to all three together – the very institutions and passions progressives most fear. Likewise, they have no interest in making others democratic - in many cases, not even themselves – or they are controlled by authoritarian leaders who have other ideas. Finally, the fact their hearts lie with their compatriots means they will support national or group interests over neutral moderation when things get tough. Most foreign people do not want to become Americans and certainly do not want to be bullied into becoming so. Americans, by and large, do not like bullying either.

Recognizing this, today even liberal internationalists use the language of “national interest.” Only the three distort the term by defining it as protecting either liberal goodness, or democracy, or world order. Codevilla is unique even among traditional national interest proponents in actually defining national interest and doing so simply. U.S. national interest is what the American people value most highly relative to the rest of the world – they want peace. This is not a neutral peace but one where Americans expect to be free to do as they please without interference as long as they do not harm others, as required of their country by “Nature and Nature’s God” in their Founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

Defending U.S. national interest properly, then, is to guarantee its peace. That does not mean that when foreign powers threaten America’s peace, the U.S. cannot chose to go to war. Only it means – unlike for the other three theories – a bright line is drawn between peace and war and that war is serious, serious enough to demand victory so that peace can be reestablished and the people allowed to resume their lives. Threats closer to the homeland, including to its oceans, are more likely to violate national interest and require action. National interest requires no crusades for word goodness, democracy or world order, only for peace. But once war is declared, peace is so important “what it takes, is what it takes” to quickly restore the status quo ante.

The three progressive views of foreign policy fail because they are too easy to get into war and too difficult to get out of it. Having a goal other than peace requires eternal policing to force resistant populations to follow the ideal, whether goodness, democracy or order. Being forced toward these ideals peoples resist and as Korea, Vietnam and Iraq have proved even weak people can put up great resistance and force long occupations. These ideals cannot be bought with money as these examples also prove. Indeed, as Machiavelli again warned, “Money…will not defend you …Good soldiers are more than sufficient to find gold.” Power can simply seize money and money normally only has a limited effect upon a resolute people. Only a decisive defeat in war can dissuade a determined enemy, although money can assist power if force is credible as a backup. Conversely, if power is dissipated and a war is too prolonged, the “stronger’ power will lose at home.

Machiavelli instructs “never do a little harm.” But that is precisely what progressive dogma teaches, requiring its experts room to maneuver between war and peace to build their better world. The maneuvering has produced neither peace nor war nor security. Codevilla has a straightforward solution. Give foreign policy back to the people. The president cannot rely on the experts. They have proven themselves incompetent. He can rely on the people and their values. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted when America was without a standing army and Europe fully armed, the U.S. was the better protected - by the vigilance of its peoples. They want peace and will only go to war if the provocation is “intolerable” – and they are the best to judge when tolerance ends. Indeed, it is doubtful a fully informed people would accept even most of those examples where Codevilla does think intervention might be appropriate. The job of the president should be to assure all the facts are given so that the people make the best judgment, not the one he would prefer. Part of this is the true costs for victory including lives, funds and loss of freedoms, and the benefits, and how long the war would last including occupation.

Not bringing the people fully into the decision, especially concerning occupation, was the undoing of George W. Bush leading to the election of his number one critic, Barack Obama. But President Obama will soon learn the same lesson, if not in Iraq certainly in Afghanistan, where he has raised Bush’s ante in the commitment of troops and time but has kept the same strategy of winning the hearts and minds of the population without a true plan for victory. A “soft power” strategy such as he has adopted can work as John Paul II proved in Poland but it requires deeper moral resources than seem possible to the president. How can he say “Be not afraid” with nearly as profound an authority? Such a strategy especially requires straight-talking where President Obama seems to prefer obfuscation. In any event, it is now Obama’s war and unless he quickly turns to Mr. Codevilla (and he has so much more to offer than is possible to report here), he will soon go the way of his predecessor.

Machiavelli taught the basic human passion was fear so that people will allow unelected and elected princes to rule over them by whatever cunning and deviousness are necessary to make them feel secure. Only strong belief in a transcendent truth could possibly overcome this fear but since he believed that no such thing exists, power must rule. Progressivism substituted a secular hope unanchored in transcendental truth to replace both Christianity and Machiavelli’s secular manipulation and hopelessness. But progressivism offers no basis upon which to accept its hope and simply ignores the realities of fear, greed and hate in foreign affairs, hoping that by ignoring or apologizing for them they will go away. World history since 1914 suggests this is a guarantee there never will be peace.

Machiavelli himself sets the broader framework for America’s true test on foreign policy. Can a civilization devoted (even if a bit hypocritically) to peace endure? “Unarmed prophets always fail,” was his prediction, as Codevilla notes, “part of his powerful, unarmed campaign against Jesus, who unarmed and crucified, is the origin of Europe’s civilization” and our own. Machiavelli “bet that the kind of civilization inherent in his message would do to Christianity what Christianity had done to the Roman Empire and to the Barbarians.” At bottom, nebulous progressive hopefulness does not reach deeply enough into human nature. Either there are transcendent truths to overcome the peoples’ fear so they can rule or the princes will rule them by force and guile.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.