Generally wrong.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Political Booknotes

SUPREME COMMAND: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime by Eliot A. Cohen Free Press, $25.00

MILITARY HISTORY, LONG REGARDED as the province of the most retrograde spirits, is making a comeback. Now that September 11 has put the country on a permanent state of alert not seen since the days of the Cold War, the study of past military actions has acquired a new relevance. For a democracy like the United States, war, or the threat of hostilities, has always carried with it a host of thorny questions about the balance between liberty and power.

In Supreme Command, Eliot A. Cohen, professor and director of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, offers a look at the matter of civilian control of the military. Mercifully, his book enjoys a brevity that his title lacks. Cohen, who writes with concision and insight, robustly argues that, far from being incompetent dunderheads, as commonly portrayed, civilian statesmen can be brilliant commanders.

Cohen provides sketches of Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben Gurion to argue that the conventional wisdom about civilians meddling in military affairs is all wet. Had these four men not actively intervened, Cohen asserts, their countries might have lost. In making this assertion, Cohen is committing a kind of heresy, namely, deviating from the influential thesis propounded by his own mentor, Samuel Huntington, in his classic work The Soldier and the State, that the obligation of the civilian leader in wartime is to defer to the professionals--in short, to get the hell out of the way.

Cohen begins by reminding us that the demand that generals be given a free hand goes back to the Roman republic when Consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus, in 168 B.C., sneered at the senatorial armchair warriors who presumed to advise him about subduing the Macedonians: "The city itself provides enough subjects for conversation; let him confine his garrulity to these; and let him be aware that I shall be satisfied with the advice originating in camp." But as Cohen astutely points out, the idea of the military officer as a consummate professional clinically carrying out his task is nonsense. It was Clausewitz who noted that politics can never be divorced from warfare. Military actions have political implications. The Gulf War, for example, was fought by a large coalition of countries to give the United States political...