I’m sure that wasn’t the intention, but Bob Woodward’s The War Within paints a scene of George W. Bush’s wartime White House I find very recognizable as a Civil War scholar.
Lincoln’s big mistake was to be too deferential to his generals in the opening years of the war. Lincoln had commanded a company of volunteers during the Black Hawk War, never saw action and finished his service as a private. The generals in his Union Army –not including the men who won their stars thanks to their political connections—were professional soldiers, many of them schooled at West Point or VMI. Deference to their professional opinion came easily.
Better equipped, better fed and better armed than their enemies, however, the Union Army (at least in the Virginia Theater) took one beating after another as each illustrious commander, in his turn, was humiliated by the irrepressible Confederates. Bull Run was the ruination of Irwin McDowell. George McClellan got his comeuppance from a much smaller Rebel army outside the gates of Richmond in the Seven Days’ battles and failed to pursue a defeated enemy after Antietam. General John Pope was disgraced at second Bull Run.
Ambrose E. Burnside reorganized the army and then broke it to pieces charging up Marye’s Hill at Fredericksburg. Fighting Joe Hooker marched into the enemy’s country at Chancellorsville with victory in his grasp and stood stunned, like a deer in candlelight, as Stonewall Jackson flanked him and then routed him. The summer ended with a big Union victory at Gettysburg that was squandered when General George Gordon Meade smashed an entire corps of Robert E. Lee’s army and then failed to pursue it closely enough to finish off the Rebels.
Lincoln sometimes wondered if his generals were fighting for a win, or just for a tie, where the states came back together –with slavery. Undoubtedly some of the generals felt just that way. Some of his generals were heartsick at the slaughter of the battlefield. Improvements in arms and ammunition, especially the range and accuracy of the Minie ball rifle round meant that any big battle was going to produce a bloodbath. At Shiloh (1862) more soldiers died during the two days of fighting than in all the wars and Indian wars America had fought from 1775 onward.
It opened the eyes of Major General Ulysses S. Grant. Until Shiloh, he thought the Confederates would collapse after a few losses. Now he knew that only long and bitter fighting involving the dismantling of the south’s military and industrial war-making capabilities, the destruction of enemy’s will to resist –and the loss of tens of thousands of Union soldiers in the process-- would have to happen if the war was to be won. This became a school of thought in the army, attracting such men as Phil Sheridan, George Thomas and, of course, William Tecumseh Sherman.
Lincoln had been looking for a general who wanted to seize the initiative and never let it go. Grant’s plan that all Union forces attack at pretty much the same time in 1864 had been Lincoln’s thinking for a long time…though his generals didn’t buy into it. Now the Union had a coordinated strategy for the entire war. Every Confederate army was to be attacked, allowing none of them to send troops in aid to another.
In 2007 matters looked just as grim at the White House. Bush’s generals were espousing the astounding notion that by drawing down forces in Iraq the war would be won more quickly because the Iraqi government would be forces to train up an army for its self-defense that much sooner. This was astoundingly illogical to Bush, who saw it as a way to turn Baghdad 2007 into Saigon 1975.
Bush cast about for new leadership, and came up with his own U.S. Grant in the form of General David Petraeus. Petraeus wanted five more brigades –about 30,000 men including 4,000 Marines to implement a plan whereby the U.S. would stay in the neighborhoods it fought for, rather than fight and go home to Camp Liberty. Petraeus went after Al Qaeda in Iraq and enlisted the help of our former Sunni adversaries in Anbar Province. He let the Shiite militias know he meant business, convincing Muqtada Al Sadr to call off his Mahdi Army and to personally exile himself to Iran.
Bush gave Petraeus the cover he needed to do all this, shielding him from the jealousy and intrigues of fellow officers in the Pentagon –much in the same way that Lincoln upheld Grant through the horribly bloody summer of 1864. Lincoln’s instincts proved to be accurate. Grant’s plan eventually dismantled the Confederacy. Bush’s instinct to go outside the box to find Petraeus and trust in the Surge has been rewarded with a war that is virtually won.
History may yet be kind to George W. Bush.
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