http://www.latimes.com/news/op…..t-opinions

From the Los Angeles Times
ROSA BROOKS
A 4-star defense of the republic
Rosa Brooks

April 21, 2006

WHEN SIX recently retired generals criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq war and urged his resignation, the Bush administration reacted as if the generals had announced an impending military coup. Within days, administration loyalists were suggesting that the generals had been disloyal not merely to Rumsfeld but to American democracy itself.

The dissenting generals seemed almost surprised by the speed and savagery of the administration’s counteroffensive. Maybe they had assumed that their combat records and decades of service would protect them. Or maybe they had been lulled into a false sense of security by the administration’s floundering Iraq policies and assumed that Rumsfeld and his White House backers were just too distracted and incompetent to go after a few courteous, highly decorated critics. But the generals should have known that this administration can be ferociously competent when there’s something really important — like President Bush’s poll numbers — at stake.

On the right, the key talking point in the War Against the Generals quickly emerged: “Civilian control of the military.” It was an effective line of attack, and so clever that even many who ought to have known better were suckered. The Washington Post editorial board on Tuesday, for instance, fell for it hook, line and sinker, worrying that the retired generals were threatening “the essential democratic principle of military subordination to civilian control…. If [the generals] are successful in forcing Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, they will set an ugly precedent.”

They even had me nodding along there for a few minutes. After all, every student of recent history knows that if you dilute civilian control of the military, you end up with fascism or a Latin American-style military junta. Because constant security threats are necessary to maintain the power and credibility of a military regime, a nation that lacks civilian control of the military gets ensnared in unending, pointless wars, often against an increasingly vaguely defined threat. Gradually, the broader society becomes militarized. Dissenters are denounced as cowards or traitors, and domestic surveillance becomes common. Secret military courts and detention systems begin to supplant the civilian judicial system. Detainees get tortured, and some end up mysteriously dead after interrogation.

We definitely wouldn’t want that kind of regime to control the United States, would we?

IT WAS AT THIS POINT that I got the joke — because, dear reader, we’re already well on the way to having that kind of regime. If Rumsfeld thought he could get away with calling himself Il Generalissimo, don’t you think he’d do so in a heartbeat?

In the looking-glass world the Bush administration has brought us, it’s the civilians in the White House and the Pentagon who have been eager to embrace the values normally exemplified by military juntas, while many uniformed military personnel have struggled to insist on values that are supposed to characterize democratic civil society.

Iraq is only one of the many issues on which military personnel have stood up against foolish or immoral administration policies. In 2003, the three generals and one admiral who collectively head the JAG Corps of the various services wrote strongly worded internal memos opposing the administration’s authorization of interrogation techniques that border on or constitute torture. Navy Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, for instance, condemned the techniques as “inconsistent with our most fundamental values.” In January 2005, five retired generals filed an amicus brief in a case before the Supreme Court opposing the administration’s argument that suspects tried by military commissions are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. Many more examples could be cited.

The claim that the six dissenting generals are betraying the principle of civilian control over the military is both silly and sinister. It’s silly because polite, reasoned criticism from retired generals is just free speech, a very far cry from “forcing” the Defense secretary out. And it’s sinister because civilian control is a means of safeguarding democracy, not an end in itself. When that gets forgotten, the phrase becomes just another way to stifle dissent.

Military officers must obey all lawful commands and refrain from using “contemptuous words” about their civilian leaders. But when officers take the military oath, they also pledge to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, [and] bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”

That’s a hard oath, because bearing “true faith” to the Constitution requires military personnel to speak out, regardless of the cost, when they think our civilian leaders have gone beyond the pale. Both our democracy and the lives of the soldiers who fight in our name depend on it. If officers remain silent when our military policies go terribly wrong, there’s little the rest of us can do to set things right again.

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The question about an Art. 94 of the UCMJ (not the Uniform Code of Military procedure, but rather Justice, a set of regulations, with the force of law, to be found in USC 10, consisting of 134 articles, and covering more than just those acts which are criminal, but I digress) is null, and void.

Because when they protest, they are civlilians. If a group of generals got up and starting speaking like this while still serving, that would be a violation (it might be insubordination, it might be disobeying an order [or command, but the distinction is subtle, and not worth going into], it might be a violation of Art. 134 if it could be shown it was, “detrimental to the good order and discipline of the service).

But to get out, even if they talked about it beforehand isn’t mutiny. They have the right to political opinions, they have the right to retire, and they have the right to talk about those opinions with each other.

As for the nonsense that they are “Clinton” generals, not only were they in service from the days of Ford, but Congress approves the Generals, and from 1994 to the present those generals were approved by a republican congress.

There are, for those who care, the total of serving flag officers is 875 (see this table. When one factors the up or out every four years or so the total number of flag officers (retired and serving) and the ageof retirement (usually about 55) the projection is for about 2,500, with about half being one star, and that leaves about 1,250 retired flag officers with two-stars, or more(showing that Rumsfeld isn’t as aware of how many general officers he has).

Which makes the criticisms of him a bit more damning.

TK

Abou ben Adam

Abou ben Adam (may his tribe increase!)
awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight of his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
an angel, writing in a book of of gold.
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adam bold,
And to the Prescence in the room he said:
“What writest thou?” The vision raised its head,
And, with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”
“And is mine one?”said Abou, “Nay, not so,”
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still, and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again, with a great awakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben adam’s name led all the rest.

-James Leigh Hunt
204.10.70.77

Chicago Tom spends an awful lot of words spinning the line that because the generals got their stars during the Clinton era (and I believe that part of the promotion process goes through Congress, which was republican at the time), which therefore makes them “Clintonistas” (never mind the fact that Bill was nowhere in sight when they started their careers, and the fact that their promotions took place during his administration was pure chance), that we can dismiss their demands for Rumsfeld’s resignation as the grumbling of “dinosaurs” who were too old-school to get with Rummy’s fantastic new program to reform the military into a 21st century fighting force. Of course, this alone allows him to completely invalidate their criticisms of Rumsfeld and the administration’s handling of the Iraq situation. Clintonistas, y’know.

Setting aside whether or not Chicago Tom has any professional military experience (and all I have to offer is a tour as an infantryman in Vietnam, not the commodity it used to be, as Max Cleland can attest), I might point out that our problems began in Iraq the day after we took Baghdad, when we lacked both sufficient troops and the right kind of troops (Military Police) to prevent the looting and lawlessness that broke out, which was exemplified by the ransacking of the Iraqi national museum (although the Oil Ministry was well guarded). While a compact, mobile combined force may have been sufficient to outmaneuver and defeat Iraq’s weak army (and there’s nothing novel about that idea, btw. In 1940 the Germans defeated a French army that outmanned and outgunned them using this) a much larger force was clearly necessary to consolidate and secure our gains and insure the stability of post-invasion Iraq. And the Iraqis were paying attention even back then as to what our priorities seemed to be, and their safety and security didn’t seem to be high on the list.

That’s not old-school thinking, that’s simply common sense, something replaced by wishful thinking in Rumsfelds’ war “planning”. “Boots on the ground” (probably “sandals on the ground” back in Roman times) is a timeless principle in military doctrine, because nothing holds and controls ground like an infantryman standing on it. We never “took” Iraq with our 200,000 soldiers and marines, we defeated their army but left key installations, such as massive ammo dumps, unsecured, not to mention most of Iraqs’ oil infrastructure, omissions which are hurting both Iraq and our soldiers every day.

What’s conveniently ignored by simply painting the generals’ opposition to Rumsfeld as dissent from his “reforms” is the fact that none of these generals has criticized Rumsfeld for his ideas on force structure or decentralization of command. Their criticisms aren’t being made because they’re “angry, rebellious, and confused by a completely different way of running a war”, they’re being made because the people running the war don’t know what they’re doing and are playing with real soldier’s lives with disastrous results for those soldiers and the military in general.

I’d like to hear these generals explain just what the tapes of United 93 have to do with why we’re in Iraq. Oh, is it so we won’t have to fight them here? ‘Cause I don’t really remember there being any Islamic extremism going on in Iraq before we invaded them, although there were (and apparently still are) a lot of al-Queda left in Afghanistan. And Zarqawi aside, it still isn’t the primary motivation behind the insurgency. But please enlighten me.

“It unfortunately appears that two of the retired generals (Messrs. Zinni and Newbold) do not understand the true nature of this radical ideology, Islamic extremism, and why we fight in Iraq. We suggest they listen to the tapes of United 93.”

In short, in trying to swiftboat the generals, they’re reconnecting Iraq and 9/11, again! (or still)
You can see my own commentary here, but there’s not much more there than what I’ve already said here. Oh, except to ponder when everyone slamming the generals for speaking out is going to be tripping all over themselves to condemn these guys.

And now that recently retired generals are taking an ethical and unprecedented stand against the leadership in the WH, now suddenly generals are wimpy lefties? I have a hard time understanding anyone who buys this crap but obviuosly they are very, very lazy and uninformed.

Where it gets a little scary is in the willingness of a certain hard Right crowd to push a party line above all common sense and above all American values… Do college Republicans issue jackboots yet?