I learn a lot from Sun Tzu and I believe he has some important things to say to us today, across all the centuries from his own time.  But  his notions about the relationship between political and military leadership in war just do not fit the current situation in Iraq.  Clausewitz, I think, is more helpful on this point.

    Sun Tzu says (sorry, don’t have my text here with me at home just now for exact quotes) that once war has begun, the generals must be given absolute command authority to get the dirty work done quickly.  Political leaders should stay clear and let the military men do their jobs.  This sounds rather like the line that Bush is taking these days, telling us that he cannot countenance pulling troops out, or even begin to think about pulling troops out, because he is simply following the advice of his military commanders.   (This is, of course, a canard since he has already relieved those military commanders who disagreed with him…).  But what will military commanders say when they are confronted with the most recent attacks in Kirkuk?

A suicide bomber in the volatile northern city of Kirkuk on Monday
crashed his truck into a compound that includes offices of a major
Kurdish political party, killing 85 people. Many victims were women and
children, shopping in the busy market next to the political offices,
who were engulfed by a large fireball.

Hours later, the Iraqi authorities said, men wearing Iraqi military
uniforms stormed into a village in Diyala Province and killed 29 men,
women and children. An Iraqi security official, Col. Ragheb Radhi
al-Umiri, said the gunmen surrounded the victims and fired into the
crowd. The attack occurred in a remote village north of Baquba, he
said, and the bodies of some victims were “desecrated” before the
attackers fled.

 Horrible stuff.  But these attacks pose a larger strategic issue:

The Kirkuk attack was the latest to stoke fears that intensified
American military operations in Baghdad may have led insurgents to move
their operations to locations that can more easily be attacked.

 On the face of it, if you view this as a military problem the answer seems clear: maintain US troop levels in Baghdad but bring in more forces to counter the shifting form of the enemy.  More troops.  And that is what US commanders are hinting at.  It’s understandable because their job is to consider the problem from strictly – or, narrowly – a military point of view.  The only problem is, and this is a massive problem, virtually all modern wars, this one included, are never simply military problems; they are embedded in the suffused by political dynamics.

      That is a point I have always associated with Clausewitz.  I know, the usual line – "war is politics by other means" – is hackneyed and open to a variety of interpretations.  But the general message of his analysis, the desire to avoid "extreme war," at least implicitly reminds us of the political context and limitations to war.  Generals cannot be left alone to carry out the war, not at the strategic level at least, because they are bound to make political mistakes in their pursuit of military solutions.  Their battlefield autonomy needs to be bounded by very specific circumstances of battle. 

        At this point the larger question of whether the US should keep troops in Iraq cannot be driven by the simple military logic of "defeating the enemy."  "Victory" or "defeat" are now obviously matters of political outcomes, and those can be made more difficult by military actions, as evidenced by the difficulties of opium eradication in Afghanistan (Remember Afghanistan?  The war the US opted out of in order to invade Iraq.  A war that has now heated up again, much to our disadvantage…)

      So, on the question of how much autonomy military commanders should have to determine the broad strategic dynamics of war, and how much responsibility civilian political leaders must bear, I go with Clausewitz over Sun Tzu.

     Now, if we could only get Bush to understand this notion of responsibility….