You have spoken about the disturbingly small degree of freedom that the US political leadership has in this realm, as well as the tensions of international conflicts and anti-US hostility that they face. How can the Bush administration mediate between these tensions, and how successful has the it been in developing a new way of thinking about issues posed by countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq?

I am not sure that there is going to be any overarching set of principles or a catchword like “containment” that will adequately capture the kind of foreign policy that the United States is going to need. Unfortunately, the world is complex and messy. What we really would have to look for in our leaders is, first, a certain kind of good judgment. But they also need a wide-ranging curiosity about how the world works and how different cultures are coping with modernity in its many different forms. That need has been obscured by this term “globalization,” a term that is partly useful, but really refers to the nature of modernity, which is a tremendously powerful but also tremendously disruptive force. One way to view the ills of the world right now are the difficulties that people have in coming to terms with modernity and making it work.

This administration has been in an unusual situation. President Bush did not expect to be a wartime leader, and instead he is finding that his presidency is very much going to be determined by war and wartime leadership. There is actually, to a greater degree than either Republicans or Democrats would like to admit, a certain element of continuity between this administration’s foreign policy and that of the previous administration. That is truer of US foreign policy than people are generally willing to admit. If you want a strong, uncompromising argument that Saddam Hussein has to be overthrown and that his weapons of mass destruction programs are menace, the speech to go to is not one of Bush’s, but one given by his predecessor, US President Bill Clinton, when he launched operation Desert Fox on December 16, 1998. The difference is that this administration has actually acted on it. But in many ways, this administration faces problems similar to those faced by the previous administration, with somewhat more freedom of action.

You have written a great deal recently about the nature of supreme command and the civil-military relationship, which you characterize in one of your articles as an “unequal dialogue.” How do the pressures faced by this relationship make the unequal dialogue a necessary part of the civil-military relationship?

The basic argument of my book, Supreme Command, is that, on the one hand, there is what I call the “normal theory” that people tend to spout in public, where the job of politicians is to set objectives, provide resources, choose a top commander, set very broad guidelines, and then get out of the way. This is a simplified version of the argument, following Karl von Clausewitz, that war is about politics—that seemingly tactical or low-level decisions are in fact highly political or could have large political consequences. At the beginning of the latest Iraq war, for example, the decision to begin with an air strike was going to have some political consequences. It was also political in a different way, in that it involved assessments of risk, and the willingness to absorb risk, which ultimately became political decisions too.

The other kind of argument is that military professionalism is very different from professionalism in other fields. First, there is a kind of military monopoly. The United States has one Air Force, one Navy, and one Army (although one could count the Marines as a second army), and there is not the kind of competition that occurs in the marketplace. Second, a lot of the expertise of commanders can be very specific. In the most recent Gulf War, there were Air Force generals talking about land warfare, Army generals talking about air warfare, admirals talking about both, and quite frequently they were not all that expert in the fields they were talking about. Military expertise can be rather narrowly defined. Furthermore, military expertise is different at different levels of command, so someone with combat experience at the fairly low levels of a battalion commander in the army may be unprepared for the role of theater commander. As a result, it is much harder to tell in advance whether or not this commander is really up to his task.

In your writings you allude to a distinction between the public and the private realms where this relationship between military commanders and political leaders plays out. Where exactly should this dialogue be situated in terms of public and private, and why?

The first thing to say is that this kind of dialogue can be tremendously stressful for both sides, but particularly for the military; when I speak to military audiences about it, it is with heartfelt sympathy. I think that military audiences have been rather receptive to the book because it helps explain some of the discomfort that they are going through and helps them cope with it.

Primarily, however, the dialogue has to be done privately. That is the only way that there can be candor, and it is the only way that civilians can be confident that they can have tough, difficult, but honest conversations and not pay a political penalty for it. That is one reason why I personally have been tremendously troubled by a pattern of politicians using general officers as props, if you will, in presidential campaigns. Very recently retired generals have been plunging into the political arena and making partisan points, which is profoundly unhealthy. The truth is that most retired general officers whom I know deeply disapprove of that. They are also aware that they have a special status with the US population, and they are very wary of abusing that status.

How did the Bush administration in the Iraq conflict fare in terms of this civil-military relationship?

On the whole, the Bush administration did pretty well. They went into it with a difficult civil-military relationship at the Pentagon, although it did improve considerably after September 11. But there was some real tension, particularly between the Secretary of Defense and some parts of the Army, played out in a number of newspaper stories that featured people grumbling about a variety of things, particularly about the way the war was being fought. I think this tension was also expressed in the statements of some of the retired general officers who were acting as television commentators and talking to their colleagues still in the service, saying in public what some of their contacts were saying in private. That was very unhealthy, and it did not do anybody any good.