I don’t know how the "conversation" is going to go through November about what makes anyone qualified to be Commander-in-Chief. Some emphasize military experience. Maybe if George W. Bush had had combat experience, he would have sided with his generals more than the civilians who were sold on their fantasy of easily "liberating" Iraq. Then again there are lessons from before this decade that judgment is even more important than experience.
With the end of the Cold War, there were several revelations about how close the US and the USSR had come to large scale nuclear war. Ronald Reagan receives credit from conservatives for scaring the Russians away from trying to keep up with us militarily and into perestroika instead. What neocons don’t say is that Reagan’s bellicose speeches made the Russians so trigger happy that they almost launched a missile strike against the US more than once due to false indications of what they thought was our missile strike against them, similar to the shooting down of KAL 007 in 1983. It was only good judgment on the part of Russian officers who refused to follow set procedures that averted greater catastrophe. It’s unclear how much Reagan learned from incidents such as the Soviet response to a NATO exercise, Able Archer 83, but he did tone down the Evil Empire talk in his second term. It took either luck or a miracle for all of us but that one airliner to survive, something I wish were pointed out more often to advocates of an aggressive foreign policy.
Better documented is how close to nuclear war we came in 1962. It was revealed in 1992 that in addition to the new missiles the Soviets were shipping to Cuba then, the ones that triggered the crisis, the Soviets already had placed tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba, 162 warheads that were fully operational in artillery rockets and aboard IL-28 aircraft, under the command of a Soviet general in Cuba. This was not known to the US at the time. The Soviets had planned to announce all their nuclear weapons in Cuba as deterrence to invasion in November 1962, the month after the crisis. As the movie Dr. Strangelove pointed out in 1964, there is no deterrence from secret nuclear weapons. Sometimes Hollywood is right, even about the problem of when to announce that a deterrent is in place.
In their ignorance of this the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had a strong recommendation that the only sensible action by the US in response to the not yet operational missiles we had seen was to invade Cuba. Otherwise they saw nuclear war over either Cuba or Berlin to be very likely. They wanted to intimidate the Soviets much as Reagan is given credit for doing later, much as the US had hoped to do in Vietnam.
Had President Kennedy simply gone with the judgment of these men with all their experience, there would have been a shock when our boys invading Cuba to keep the rest of us safe were devastated by tactical nuclear weapons. Then what? I’m glad I didn’t find out. I wasn’t ready to die in some attack on the Air Force base next to where I lived.
As Robert McNamara stated in the above link, "We’re damn lucky to be here." You can read his comments for yourself, but it’s fair to say he saw the most important factor in Kennedy making the right decisions as there being no rush to judgment, not at 3AM nor any other time. Nor did Kennedy feel the need to decide something without questioning his advisers. He even required those 15 advisors to come to a unanimous recommendation or take enough time to be sure unanimity was impossible. What is all this current campaign posturing as if the President as Commander-in-Chief has only his or her own military experience to draw from?
Senator Obama and Senator Clinton both have done damage to each other on this issue. Throughout this campaign I have thought it very unfair to say Iraq is Hillary’s war. She wasn’t hell-bent for war the way George Bush and neocon civilians in his Defense Department were. I doubt her conduct of the war from this point forward would be any different from Senator Obama’s.
It is also very unfair for Senator Clinton to say the threshold for being qualified to be Commander-in-Chief lies somewhere between her life experiences and Senator Obama’s. How so? In the light of this story from 1962 or any other story, how so? Senator Obama’s life experiences regarding his talent for judgment are a lot more than a single speech in 2002, and lately, I’ve liked his judgment a lot more than Senator Clinton’s kitchen sink.
The candidates will manage this issue as they choose, but I wish they would come back to the real world at some point, like the historical Cuban missile crisis instead of some Hollywood phone with Kiefer Sutherland on the other end. I especially wish Senator Clinton would quit making a neocon argument, as if only the most aggressive foreign policy is the best foreign policy, as if the Commander-in-Chief better know every possible detail about how to be aggressive. Judgment matters a great deal, no matter how many years of military experience a candidate has, even 50 years, even none.
Advisers matter a great deal, too. I don’t know much more about Iraq than what I’ve watched on Frontline, but it seems that advisers recklessly intent on war in Iraq pushed George Bush into making that his only option, subject to whatever contrived excuse for war worked best. I’d like to hear how the candidates would manage their advisers, such as JFK did in 1962, more than the fiction that a President decides anything single-handedly at 3AM. If Senator Clinton means to say that she plans to make decisions by herself at 3AM, this would mean to me she isn’t qualified to be Commander-in-Chief.