JOHN E. MACK
The responsible warriorMANY NATIONAL leaders understand that it is not difficult to rally the populace and stifle criticism while a war is going on. A leader has only to emphasize a threat to national security and the need to "support the troops." Even doubt and searching analysis may be called unpatriotic while the conflict rages.
This works, however, only as long as the war seems to be "going well." Much of the criticism now directed at the conduct of the war in Iraq is not new, but the sober voices that predicted the present crisis of leadership were drowned out during the flush of apparent success. I believe there are principles of strong leadership that transcend partisanship. But I fear that if we fail to comprehend what these are, mass violence in this or future conflicts will become increasingly out of control and the world will descend further into the abyss. T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") and Winston Churchill drew the current boundaries of modern day Jordan and Iraq. Lawrence was an unusual wartime leader, one who took full, even exaggerated, personal responsibility for every aspect of the conflict in which he participated, the revolt of the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. "My personal duty was command," Lawrence wrote in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," his epic account of the Arab Revolt, "and the commander, like the master architect, was responsible for all." There were, of course, men above him like General Edmund Allenby and the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. But the revolt was Lawrence's "show"; he was responsible not only for its strategy, organization, and coordination, but, by his own determination, for the lives and well-being of virtually every participant. Behind this extreme and somewhat precocious sense of responsibility -- Lawrence had just turned 28 when he began the organization of the tribes in Arabia and Jordan -- was a loathing of what he called "murder war," and he struggled desperately to limit the loss of life. Only as a last resort, he wrote, "we should be compelled to the desperate course of blood and the maxims of `murder war' . . . To man rationale, wars of nationality were as much a cheat as religious wars." People hold differing views about the nature of effective military leadership. But surely it means more than getting people to go along, for that can be accomplished by manipulation through fear and emotional entrancement. Physical courage, a willingness to take personal responsibility, even if this means risking oneself what is being asked of others, and an insistence upon knowing what is really happening and speaking truthfully about it, even when the information is disturbing, are surely essential ingredients of strong leadership. Continued... |
