Eliot Cohen

Cohen's appointment came as surprise to many observers because it came on the heels of a number of Rice's diplomatic overtures in hotspots like North Korea and Iran, a strategy anathema to hawks like Cohen. "Condi may feel she needs to have a neocon right next to her to protect her flanks," surmised Chris Nelson, editor of the Washington insider newsletter the Nelson Report. "And, if she's really planning to put her foot down on the Israelis, which [Washington] will have to do if it wants to get a real process with the Palestinians under way as part of a bigger regional deal with the Saudis and Iranians, then a guy like Cohen up there on the [State Department's] seventh floor who is in on it and can claim influence on the outcome can help" (see Jim Lobe, " Rice Picks Promoter of Iraq War as Counselor," March 6, 2007).

Cohen, too, appears to have been surprised by his appointment, telling the Post, "I have known her for a long time, but we did not have a close relationship." According the Post, Cohen said that he had "received a call from her office that Rice wanted to discuss policy, but once he arrived at her office, she got straight to the point and said she was interested in hiring him" (Washington Post, March 2, 2007).

Cohen, who has been associated with the circle of hardline policymakers surrounding Vice President Dick Cheney, gained media attention in the years leading up to the Iraq War when many influential administration figures, including President George W. Bush, appeared in public holding Cohen's 2002 book Supreme Command. The book argued that historically civilian leaders often have had a far better strategic sense than military leaders. James Mann, in his 2004 book Rise of the Vulcans, commented on Bush's supposed reading material: "Few recognized the symbolism and subtext of carrying Cohen's book, the determination not to let U.S. military leaders play the powerful political role Powell had exerted at the time of America's first war with Iraq. Cheney and [Paul] Wolfowitz certainly understood" (Rise of the Vulcans, p. 197).

Discussing the relevance of Cohen's book to the Iraq War, MacKubin Owens, a scholar at the conservative Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs, wrote: "As Cohen pointed out in his indispensable book Supreme Command, the normal theory of civil-military relations has rarely held. Indeed, storied democratic war leaders such as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln impinged upon the military's turf as a matter of course, influencing not only operations but also tactics. The reason that civilian leaders cannot simply leave the military to its own devices during war is that war is an iterative process involving the interplay of active wills. What appears to be the case at the outset of the war may change as the war continues, modifying the relationship between political goals and military means. The fact remains that wars are not fought for their own purposes but to achieve policy goals set by the political leadership of the state. And so it is with President Bush and Iraq. He has outlined his plan and chosen the generals he believes can implement it."

By 2005, however, Cohen seemed to lose his former confidence in the ability of civilian leaders to lead a war effort. In a 2005 Washington Post op-ed titled "A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War," Cohen argued that although the decision to invade Iraq was correct, "What I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task." He added: "The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do" (cited in Washington Post, March 2, 2007).

At SAIS, an inside-the-Beltway institute that has served as a base for a number of prominent neoconservatives like Wolfowitz (who was dean at SAIS before being tapped to serve in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon) and Gary Schmitt (of the Project for the New American Century), Cohen headed the Center for Strategic Studies, a program founded in 2003 with a generous grant from Philip Merrill, a former minor media mogul who once headed the U.S. Ex-Im Bank and served as an adviser to the hawkish Center for Security Policy (CSP).

In 2001, Cohen was one of a host of hardliners given seats on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB), which at the time was chaired by Richard Perle, a key supporter of the Iraq War based at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). (Others who entered the DPB at the time included James Woolsey, Newt Gingrich, and Richard Allen.) Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Cohen was part of core group of neoconservatives who championed the notion that Iraq should be a primary target in the war on terror—despite the lack of connection between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists. A founding member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), Cohen contributed his name to PNAC's notorious September 20, 2001 letter to the president, which argued that even if Saddam Hussein was not connected to the terrorist attacks, "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."

Cohen also developed the idea that the war on terror was really World War IV, which he proposed in a Wall Street Journal editorial a few weeks after 9/11. Other prominent neoconservative figures, including former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, DPB member (and former CIA director) James Woolsey, and CSP's Frank Gaffney, quickly began using the term in their writings (see Lobe, Right Web Analysis, March 6, 2007 ). In his op-ed, Cohen discussed several potential names for the war that he argued began "well before Sept. 11." After discussing and dismissing the "9/11 War" and the "Afghan War," Cohen proposed: "A less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV. The Cold War was World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies, or conventional front lines on a map. The analogy with the Cold War does, however, suggest some key features of that conflict: that it is, in fact, global; that it will involve a mixture of violent and nonviolent efforts; that it will require mobilization of skill, expertise, and resources, if not of vast numbers of soldiers; that it may go on for a long time; and that it has ideological roots."

Arguing that the invasion of Afghanistan was merely "one front" in this war, Cohen set out an ambitious agenda based on some hyperbolic assertions, including the false claim that Saddam Hussein supported al-Qaida. Among Cohen's proposals: Pushing "free and moderate governance in the Muslim world," with a special focus on Iran, arguing that the "overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government ... would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of [Osama] bin Laden"; targeting all regimes that sponsor terrorists, with Iraq being "an obvious candidate, having not only helped al-Qaida, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction"; and finally, mobilizing the U.S. public "in earnest" for the long war.

In late 2006, with the Iraq War turning sour and "realists" making a comeback in the form of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN), Cohen expressed growing frustration with the Bush administration and the way the war was being conducted. In early 2007 Secretary of State Rice echoed the ISG's call for a "diplomatic offensive" regarding Iran and North Korea. In late 2006 Cohen wrote in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, just after the ISG's final report was released: " This is a group composed, for the most part, of retired eminent public officials, most with limited or no expertise in the waging or study of war. It consists of individuals carefully selected with an eye to diverse partisan and other irrelevant personal characteristics. These worthies, with not one chairman but two (for balance, of course), turned to several score experts known to disagree vehemently with one another about the best course of action to be pursued in Iraq."

Cohen concluded: "The creation of the Iraq Study Group reflects the vain hope that well-meaning, senior, former public officials can find ideas that have not already occurred to people inside government; that those new ideas can redeem incompetent execution and insufficient resources; that salvation can come from a Washington establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since the 1960s; that a public commission can do the work of oversight that Congress has shirked for five years in the misguided belief that it would thus support an administration struggling to do its best in a difficult situation. This is no way to run a war, and most definitely, no way to win it. "

In 2001 Cohen co-edited (with Andrew Bacevich, author of the 2005 The New American Militarism and a critic of neoconservative influence on U.S. policymaking) War Over Kosovo, a compendium of writings about the Balkan conflict. In a review of the book for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle writes that Bacevich and Cohen point to the Kosovo conflict as marking the emergence of a fundamentally new "American way of war." According to Biddle, the authors see the United States as particularly suited to " crusades to end fascism or save democracy; they are not suited, according to Cohen and Bacevich, to the dirty work of imperial policing to secure second- or third-tier interests." Thus, to get public support for entering conflicts in places like Kosovo, the Clinton administration decided it would be necessary to do it "on the cheap," like through air campaigns that result in few American casualties. Biddle concludes his review, which appeared as the administration began building the case for invading Iraq: "Today President Bush casts a new war in similar terms yet draws back from asking Americans to make any major sacrifices to wage it. If U.S. aims prove achievable without pain, then the Bush administration will deserve the highest praise from a grateful nation and will be able to justly claim mastery of a new way of war that all should acclaim. If not, however, then one can be forgiven for wondering whether the style of warfare waged in Kosovo has not outlived its usefulness."

Cohen has been affiliated with a number of neoconservative-aligned think tanks and advocacy outfits, including AEI, where he serves on the Council of Academic Advisers, and the now-defunct hawkish advocacy groups Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and PNAC.

Government Service

Private Sector

Education

Glenn Kessler, "Rice Names Critic of Iraq Policy to Counselor's Post," Washington Post, March 2, 2007.

Ahmad Faruqui, "A Triumphant Call to Arms: The Apocalyptic Agenda of the Neo-Conservatives," TomPaine.com, November 30, 2002.

Jim Lobe, "Rice Picks Promoter of Iraq War as Counselor," Right Web Analysis, March 6, 2007.

James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking, 2004).

Eliot Cohen, "World War IV," Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2001.

Eliot Cohen, "No Way to Win a War," Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2006.

MacKubin Owens, "George W. Bush's War," Ashbrook Center Editorial, January 2007.

Stephen Biddle, "The New Way of War?" Foreign Affairs, May/June 2002.

American Enterprise Institute, Council of Academic Advisers, http://www.aei.org/about/filter.,contentID.20038142214500076/default.asp.

For media inquiries, email rightweb@publiceye.org or call (617) 666-5300.