Three years into the war in Iraq, it’s generals vs. civilians in both Israel’s defense ministry and America’s Pentagon.

In Jerusalem, generals and former generals used to seeing the defense ministry as a stepping stone into political life from the IDF General Staff are expressing concern about the ability of Labor Party chief Amir Peretz to perform as Defense Minister – or are damning him with faint praise. In Washington, former generals upset with the way things have turned out in Iraq are trying to encircle Defense Secretary Rumsfeld with calls for his resignation.

While criticism of Mr. Peretz’s credentials comes from across the spectrum, there is a special irony in the fact that so much of it emanates from retired brass now associated with the center-left. In their case, it is not the particulars of Mr. Peretz’s prospective policies that matter, but the fact that he, rather than one of them, gets the second most powerful political position in the country.

Criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld is also coming from across the spectrum (including from neoconservatives looking for someone on whom they might pin Iraq). But arguments against him by retired generals have captured the most attention.

No one questions whether Mr. Rumsfeld moved into the SecDef office with sufficient preparation; he is being faulted now for his style (doesn’t listen to others; stubbornly holds to his course), his implementation of military reform, and for the outcomes in Iraq.

Mr. Peretz is another matter; the truth is that he will have a former general, probably Efraim Sneh, as deputy minister, running the ministry, leaving Mr. Peretz free to pursue his economic, social, and foreign policy objectives.

These two sets of controversies are each unique, but they do tell us a lot about the political cultures of their respective nations.

Israel’s March election was unique because it gave full expression to the breakdown of the hold of traditional parties on their traditional constituencies. This was exacerbated by the tumultuous and unexpected events that framed the campaign: the victory by Hamas in the Palestinian vote and the massive stroke suffered by Prime Minister Sharon.

During Israel’s first decades, little note would have been taken of a civilian defense minister. David Ben Gurion, Levi Eshkol, and Pinhas Lavon all served in the office.

But when in 1967 Prime Minister Eshkol appointed Moshe Dayan to the defense post on the eve of the Six Days War, the tide had turned in favor of defense ministers with solid military backgrounds. Dayan was followed by, among others, former generals Weizmann, Sharon, Rabin, Ben-Eliezer, Mordechai, and Mofaz. The only civilians in the post during the past several decades were Shimon Peres and Moshe Arens, both of whom enjoyed special relationships with the defense establishment. Mr. Peres had been posted to the ministry in the 1950s and was involved in both the development of the air force and Israel’s nuclear option; Mr. Arens helped engineer and was a principal advocate for the aborted Lavi fighter jet.

In fact, during the past few decades, and especially when the center-left Labor Party held power, the political side has been dominated by the retired brass from the professional side – military, intelligence, etc. Likud governments were led by Yitzhak Shamir, a former Mossad station chief whose political authority stemmed from his leadership of the pre-state Lehi underground force, and Benjamin Netanyahu, a former commando, whose fortunes rested on his political skills and articulate use of the platform given him when he was Mr. Shamir’s ambassador to the United Nations. Ariel Sharon, of course, took a Labor-type route, emerging from the army with great name recognition and building a political career on that foundation. (When another former top Likud leader, Ezer Weizman, began to show some independence from the party line, he snapped that he had not been educated in the forerunner of Likud, the Herut Party, but in the Israel Defense Force.)

On a purely political level, Labor overcompensated with generals in order to blunt attacks from the right that it was soft on national security (think John Kerry “reporting for duty”). By the approach of the recent election, before Mr. Peretz wrested control of the leadership, one wag commented that Labor’s leadership looks “like a coup, not a party.”

The truth is more subtle: Having helped form and nurture the pre-state institutions, including especially the army, Labor began to draw on army brass as its own reservoir of national leadership from pre-1948 voluntary movements began to dry up.

Look at current defense ministers in major countries and you won’t find a Sam Nunn in the bunch. and don’t forget India’s former defense chief, George Fernandez, who rose to his defense post from his start as the leader of India’s railroad worker’s union.

The Rumsfeld situation is entirely different. The public and private murmurings against him concern the size of the force committed to Iraq, as well as his attempt to generally reconceive the shape of the American force. Civilian control of the defense department is a given. In the one recent instance in which a retired general received a high political position, Colin Powell became President Bush’s first, and by the standards of that administration, rather dovish secretary of state. Having risen only to the lowly rank of artillery corporal, I am in no position to judge the tactical arguments about Iraq. I do know firsthand that unexpected things happen in wartime – call it chaos theory or consider, if you will, the military etymology of “snafu.”

What is clear to me is that the assault on Mr. Rumsfeld targets an ideological position. Neoconservatives are under the same kind of assault for their war that hit liberal anti-communists when their war, in Vietnam, turned sour.

There is no rule against retired military officers assuming their full role as citizens. What intrigues me is that were the murmurings (and public outcries) coming from the hawkish right against a more cautious defense secretary, the left blogosphere would be filled with talk of “military coups.”

Imagine a defense secretary serving in a dovish administration, at a time of great controversy over a perceived national security crisis. Gatherings of ex-generals calling on the secretary to resign would filter into the culture in an entirely different way.

How interesting that, four decades after the book (and then the film) “Seven Days in May” sent a shiver down the collective liberal spine, in today’s liberal imagination it is the generals who are cautious and pragmatic, and the Wilsonian politicians in office who tread dangerously as they aspire to remake the world.

Mr.Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.