Obama, McChrystal, Clausewitz, and Bismarck – Why Presidents and Generals seldom get along

Image via Wikipedia

Depending on who you ask, war is either too important to be left to Generals or Politicians.  In matter of fact, there is little distinction between the two save that, as General McChrystal learned yesterday, one can fire the other.  Barack Obama’s dismissal of General McChrystal from the Afghan war effort has been addressed as many things by the media: a case of injured pride, military discipline, even blatant partisanship.  It could well be any or all of these things but below all of that, the conflict between General McChrystal and President Obama comes down to a singular word: priorities.

Indeed, American Generals and Presidents have a long and proud history of not getting along well.  Peter Beinart of The Daily Beast made this point fairly brilliantly yesterday when he pointed out not just that the Obama/McChrystal dispute echoed the much more [in]famous falling out between Truman/MacArthur during the Korean War, but why and how.

Obama’s problem isn’t that McChrystal is talking smack about him. His problem is that McChrystal isn’t pursuing his foreign policy. McChrystal wants to “win” the war in Afghanistan (whatever that means) no matter what it takes. Obama believes that doing whatever it takes will cost the U.S. so much money, and so distract the administration from other concerns, that it will cripple his efforts to stabilize America’s finances and rebuild American economic power.

….

Truman didn’t just fire MacArthur because the general treated him with disrespect. He fired him because MacArthur wanted to do whatever it took to liberate the Korean peninsula, including bombing mainland China, whereas Truman came to realize that Korea must be a limited war, fought merely to preserve South Korean independence. In insisting that America’s Cold War strategy be the containment of communism, not the rollback of communism, Truman kept the pursuit of military victory from destroying American power.

Indeed, this conflict between military and political leadership stretches back through American history both before and after.  President Abraham Lincoln feuded constantly with his military leadership; after the battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg the President reportedly told General George B. McClellan (famous for his unwillingness to commit to battle with Lee) “if you don’t want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.“  A century later, President John F. Kennedy would arrive at an equally antagonistic position with his military leadership due to the hawkish sensibilities of General Curtis LeMay who, Kennedy believed, sought nothing so much as to maneuver him into open war with the Soviet Union.

Barack Obama’s conflict with McChrystal is just the latest installment in this ongoing and contentious relationship between the military and its civilian Commander in Chief. Indeed, so universal is this conflict of interests that Americans can turn to two long-dead Germans to encapsulate the issue in two brief sentences:

“Politics is the art of the possible” – Otto von Bismarck

“War is a continuation of politics by other means” – Carl von Clausewitz

The President operates in a world that is fundamentally political and is therefore defined by the exchange of possibilities.  What can be done and what it costs to do it are the components on the day to day decisions made in the Oval Office.  Politics is a game of trade-offs and the sacrifice of one set of possibilities for another.  War is one such possibility and, as Clausewitz reminds us, an inherently political one.  Wars are fought to achieve political ends be they the preservation of the Union, the containment of Communism, or the stabilization of Afghanistan.  Viewed as such, limitations upon the commitment of the nation to a given conflict are logical.  Absent a truly existential threat to the survival of the country, there can be no political justification for unlimited sacrifice in pursuit of victory.

To those fighting the war, however, nothing less seems appropriate.  The men and women fighting for their country have already committed themselves to an unlimited sacrifice and it understandably rings hollow with them when their hand is stayed by political necessity.  Nonetheless, Clausewitz chose his words carefully.  Politics is not the continuation of war by other means; wars are fought for political reasons.  History shows that when war drives politics the results are catastrophic and perhaps for that very reason the drafters of the Constitution of the United States saw fit to ensure that the military answered to a political and civilian authority.

General McChrystal forgot that and the rest, as they say, is history.