Eliot A. Cohen

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Eliot A. Cohen

Eliot A. Cohen is a professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Cohen is the Director of the Strategic Studies department at SAIS and has specialized in strategic studies, the Middle East, Persian Gulf, Iraq, arms control, and NATO. He is a member of the Project for the New American Century and was called "the most influential neoconservative in academe" by energy economist Ahmad Faruqui.^[1]

1 Biography
2 Political Views
- 2.1 Iraq War
- 2.2 Mearsheimer and Walt Paper
3 Footnotes
4 Published works
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Cohen received his B.A. in government and political science at Harvard University in 1977. He went on to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982 in political science.^[2]

He was an assistant professor of government and assistant dean at Harvard University from 1982 to 1985. Following this, he taught for four years at the Naval War College in the Department of Strategy, before a brief period in 1990 serving on the policy planning staff of the Office of the United States Secretary of Defense. In 1990, Cohen began his position at SAIS. Following the 1991 Gulf War, he directed the U.S. Air Force's official four-volume survey, the Gulf War Air Power Survey, until 1993, for which he received the Air Force's Exemplary Civilian Service Award. This analysis of the effect of U.S. air power was widely referenced in regards to the Revolution in Military Affairs concept.

In 1993, Paul Wolfowitz, who would later become prominent as the Deputy Secretary of Defense in the run-up to the Iraq war, became Dean of SAIS. During his brief stint at the defense policy planning staff, Cohen had worked under Wolfowitz but this was the first time they were in extended contact. In 1997, Cohen became a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, which became known as a center for prominent neoconservatives. He has been a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, a committee of civilians and retired military officers that the U.S. Secretary of Defense may call upon for advice, since the beginning of the administration of President George W. Bush. He was put on the board after acquaintance Richard Perle put forward his name.^[3] In the run-up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, he was a member of Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group of prominent persons who pressed for an invasion.

[edit] Political Views

[edit] Iraq War

On 10 July 2005, he gained some attention after writing an article for the Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post entitled "A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War" that many felt was surprisingly critical.^{[citation needed]} The piece, an attempt to combine his three roles as an academic, conservative pundit and father was written as his son, a new second lieutenant leading an Army Ranger platoon, prepared to ship out to Iraq. It ends,

There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders' chief concern. If we fail in Iraq -- and I don't think we will -- it won't be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth -- an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight.

This piece was extensively discussed in the blogosphere^{[citation needed]}, with some leftist blogs decrying that Cohen continued to maintain that the invasion was justified, while others expressing surprise that a person with such impeccable neoconservative credentials could express such opinions. Cohen stated that he has received overwhelmingly positive responses from senior military officials in a resulting interview on C-SPAN.^{[citation needed]} He also continued his criticism of the conduct of the war stating that, "Those three guys [ Tommy Franks, George Tenet, and L. Paul Bremer] got the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That's just wrong."

[edit] Mearsheimer and Walt Paper

Main article: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

In March 2006, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Academic Dean Stephen M. Walt along with Professor John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, both political scientists, published an academic paper titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The paper criticizes the Israel lobby for influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East away from U.S. interests and towards Israel's interests. Eliot Cohen wrote in a prominent op-ed piece in The Washington Post that the academic working paper bears all the traditional hallmarks of anti-Semitism: "obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews", accusations toward Jews of "disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments", as well as selection of "everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group" and equally systematical suppression of "any exculpatory information".^[4]

[edit] Footnotes

^ COMMENTARY: Battling for the soul of the American republic, Ahmad Faruqui, Asia Times, 30 April 2003
^ Cohen's Bio on the John Hopkin's University website
^ C-SPAN Q&A transcript - "I think my name was probably put forward by Richard Perle, who at that time was chairman, but I don't know."
^ Cohen, Eliot. "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic", The Washington Post, 2006-04-05.

[edit] Published works

Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (1985)

Military Misfortunes : The Anatomy of Failure in War, Free Press, 1990, ISBN 0-02-906060-5.

With Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report, United States Government Printing, 1993, ISBN 0-16-041950-6. (Note that the full report has four parts.)

With Keaney, Revolution in Warfare?: Air Power in the Persian Gulf, Naval Institute Press, 1995, ISBN 1-55750-131-9

Knives, Tanks, and Missiles : Israel's Security Revolution, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998, ISBN 0-944029-72-8.

Editor with John Bayliss, et al. Strategy in the Contemporary World: Introduction to Strategic Studies, Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-19-878273-X.