Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft

It is sad to say that in the past century, the majority of the time America has been at war with something. "Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft" is a discussion of the presidency and war, and how the majority of the modern presidents have presided over a war of some sort. Using Woodrow Wilson and World War I as starting points, author Angelo M. Codevilla goes through history drawing the lines and discussing the success and follies of the country. "Advice to War Presidents" is educational, interesting, and highly recommended.

I will not even pretend to be a military or diplomatic professional; after all, the book was not really only for [future] war presidents, or Professor Codevilla would have only sold a few to some egocentric wannabes. I am in the well-read amateur/highly interested citizen category, to which i think the book is pitched. Usually, I think the best way to write a book review is to find the author's premise, and then assess whether s/he accomplished what s/he set out to do. On p. xii we read "Losing wars while winning battles is hard and rare. Yet American presidents and their advisers have managed to do just that for nearly a century. This requires explanation. This book is about dissecting ruinous counsel about war and peace. In the course of clearing rubbish, I hope to uncover sound principles and distill them into advice for future war presidents." On that scale, I would assert that the author completely succeeded in "dissecting" and "clearing," and uncovers and distills principles only slightly less successfully, probably because the future is so, well, unpredictable. Note that Codevilla generally wrote about US foreign policy sorrows and joys for about the past century. Woodrow Wilson is one of his main bogeymen, and for good reason, getting us into all sorts of trouble for his quixotic quests, which were really being led by his wife and advisers at the end of his regime. But I wish Codevilla had more firmly pinned the tail on the elephant, William McKinley, for it was during his regime that the United States made a sharp U-turn from the wise, prudent 'no entanglements' uber-policy of Washington and successors. McKinley rushed us into the too-easy Spanish American War, largely because the Catholics in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines needed to be Christianized/Protestantized, and we have been building ships, bases and a quasi-empire ever since. I thoroughly agree with him that a truly realistic, as opposed to a materialist/realist foreign policy, would have a much more profound, sympathetic appreciation for the place of religion in international dynamics. Exactly because western Europe and the two coasts of the US have become largely secularized, means that we have a huge blind spot, a tin ear, in that regard, and have to study extra hard to comprehend the 3/4 of the world that is religious. Underlying the Professor's 'advice' is a Machiavellian and Hobbsian philosophical foundation, unpleasant in interpersonal relations, but world politics ain't beanbag. I enjoyed Codevilla's terse and sometimes pungent prose, and highly recommend this book.

Another eye opening book from Angelo Codevilla. His views on foreign policy are likely to be so different from what you normally hear on the Sunday morning shows that reading this book is a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, I can only give this book 4 stars because Professor Codevilla fails in his discussion of the "Surge" in Iraq. He essentially characterizes it as a continuation of the unrealistic occupation he has criticized since 2003. However, the Surge is actually a great example of exactly the sort of realism Codevilla advocates (as opposed to the sterile Scowcroftian variety). Al Qaeda in Iraq represented the Islamist movement in the Arab world, a force Codevilla has elsewhere recognized as a real response by the Islamic world to their corrupt secular regimes. As the mosque represents the only surviving element of civil society, and the Islamic world takes its religion seriously, the Islamist movement is readily comprehensible as a political force. In Iraq, rather than wishing things were other than they were, we allied ourselves with the enemies of our enemies, who were more than willing to work with us to kill them. Unlike Codevilla's pretended epistemological uncertainty, in the real world, the ex-Baatthist and tribal levies in the Sons of Iraq (while perhaps not who we would want serving on our local school board) were clearly the enemies of our enemies, and more than willing to kill them. Our enemy, Al Qaeda in Iraq, by word and deed had made clear that they would fight to the death and commit any outrage to gain control of Iraq. Their atrocities had the effect of causing many in the Islamist movement to reconsider their approach. About this, everyone on the ground, Iraqi and American, was in agreement. At a certain point, you can't continue to discount the eyewitnesses. Leaving aside the question of to what extent Saddam's regime had encouraged the Islamists to make war against America, by the time of the Surge, Saddam was long dead, and the Sons of Iraq were no more willing to fight for his cause than the Germans were for Hitler in 1948. The Islamists were our real enemies because, by the time of the Surge, they and only they had committed themselves by word and deed to the destruction of the West in general and America in particular. Who can argue with this? It is one thing to say the Islamist movement was infected and directed by the Arab and Pakistani intelligence services - it is another to suggest that the movement is without independent existence. Similarly, his discussion of the Sadrists and Mahdi Army is inadequate, because these forces are clearly Iranian proxies. The Islamic Republic is the child of the Islamist movement, although Shia rather than Sunni, and successfully in control of the Iranian nation state. While the unwillingness to accept that we were at war with Iran can and should be criticized, what is the point of criticizing an alliance with those in Iraq who wanted to fight them? Similarly