aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Eliot Cohen on Q&A

Johns Hopkins University Strategic Studies Program Director Eliot Cohen is on Q&A right now discussing his Washington Post OpEd, A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War. (The program will be repeated at 6 a.m. tomorrow or you can watch it on the web.)

Brian Lamb is walking him piece by piece through his article, asking him to elaborate on each. I am picking this answer somewhat at random, before finishing the program, which is very, very good:

It seems pretty clear to me that we messed up quite badly in the first year, the 18 months in Iraq.

But beyond the normal range of errors that one expects in war. And one of the responses I’ve gotten, they’ve said, well, people always make mistakes in war, which is true. But you have to have some sort of reasonable standards for what’s a reasonable amount of error and mistakes.

As I talk about in the article, one of the things I have found particularly offensive is just the—you know, initially at any rate, a complete denial that we had made any mistakes or that there were things happening that we hadn’t foreseen, or there was even denial that we faced an insurgency.

There was for way, way too long this absurd notion that, well, there’s only 5,000 bad guys out there that are bitter enders and they’re just the remnants of the regime. It’s clearly something else.

And the thing that—I mean, I’m angered as a father who is about to send his son off to war, but the—if you will, the pundit in me, or the commentator in public affairs is also angry about that because it got in the way of making good judgment.

So I think—I’m not looking for a mea culpa, but I’m looking for something, say, much more detailed I think than we got out of the president at Fort Bragg. A much more detailed accounting of where this is going to be, I think we have to be quite honest about how long this is likely to go on. This is going to be a very long process, how costly it might be.

And I think I would also—and this comes into the category of seriousness, I would like to see a call for some sort of sacrifice. Not a draft. A draft is not workable. But I wish I saw more senior administration officials out there trying to persuade young people to enlist.

I wish we had a tax increase to help pay for this. Even if, you know, you could construct and economic theory that says you don’t need a tax increase to pay for this, some sort of sense that when you go to war you’re asking people to give.

His experience, as a father reflecting only because his son is going off to war, underscores the legitimacy of the point being made by Operation Yellow Elephant.