Published: Dec. 29, 2006
Down on the war
Poll: More troops unhappy with Bush’s course in Iraq
By Robert Hodierne
Senior managing editor
The American military — once a staunch supporter of President Bush and the Iraq war — has grown in creasingly pessimistic about chances for victory.
For the first time, more troops disapprove of the president’s han dling of the war than approve of it. Barely one-third of service members approve of the way the president is handling the war, ac cording to the 2006 Military Times Poll.
When the military was feeling most optimistic about the war — in 2004 — 83 percent of poll re spondents thought success in Iraq was likely. This year, that number has shrunk to 50 percent.
Only 35 percent of the military members polled this year said they approve of the way President Bush is handling the war, while 42 percent said they disapproved. The president’s approval rating among the military is only slight ly higher than for the population as a whole. In 2004, when his popularity peaked, 63 percent of the military approved of Bush’s handling of the war. While ap proval of the president’s war lead ership has slumped, his overall approval remains high among the military.
Just as telling, in this year’s poll only 41 percent of the military said the U.S. should have gone to war in Iraq in the first place, down from 65 percent in 2003. That closely reflects the beliefs of the general population today — 45 percent agreed in a recent USA Today/Gallup poll.
Professor David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Mil itary Organization at the Univer sity of Maryland, was not sur prised by the changing attitude within the military.
“They’re seeing more casualties and fatalities and less progress,” Segal said.
He added, “Part of what we’re seeing is a recognition that the in telligence that led to the war was wrong.”
Whatever war plan the presi dent comes up with later this month, it likely will have the re placement of American troops with Iraqis as its ultimate goal. The military is not optimistic that will happen soon. Only about one in five service members said that large numbers of American troops can be replaced within the next two years. More than one-third think it will take more than five years. And more than half think the U.S. will have to stay in Iraq more than five years to achieve its goals.
Almost half of those responding think we need more troops in Iraq than we have there now. A surpris ing 13 percent said we should have no troops there. As for Afghanistan force levels, 39 per cent think we need more troops there. But while they want more troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly three-quarters of the re spondents think today’s military is stretched too thin to be effective.
The mail survey, conducted Nov. 13 through Dec. 22, is the fourth annual gauge of active-duty mili tary subscribers to the Military Times newspapers. The results should not be read as representa tive of the military as a whole; the survey’s respondents are on aver age older, more experienced, more likely to be officers and more ca reer-oriented than the overall mil itary population.
Among the respondents, 66 per cent have deployed at least once to Iraq or Afghanistan. In the overall active-duty force, according to the Department of Defense, that number is 72 percent.
The poll has come to be viewed by some as a barometer of the pro fessional career military. It is the only independent poll done on an annual basis. The margin of error on this year’s poll is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
While approval of Bush’s han dling of the war has plunged, ap proval for his overall performance as president remains high at 52 percent. While that is down from his high of 71 percent in 2004, it is still far above the approval rat ings of the general population, where that number has fallen into the 30s.
While Bush fared well overall, his political party didn’t. In the three previous polls, nearly 60 percent of the respondents identi fied themselves as Republicans, which is about double the popula tion as a whole. But in this year’s poll, only 46 percent of the mili tary respondents said they were Republicans. However, there was not a big gain in those identifying themselves as Democrats — a fig ure that consistently hovers around 16 percent. The big gain came among people who said they were independents.
Similarly, when asked to de scribe their political views on a scale from very conservative to very liberal, there was a slight shift from the conservative end of the spectrum to the middle or moderate range. Liberals within the military are still a rare breed, with less than 10 percent of re spondents describing themselves that way.
Seeing media bias
Segal was not surprised that the military support for the war and the president’s handling of it had slumped. He said he believes that military opinion often mir rors that of the civilian popula tion, even though it might lag in time. He added, “[The military] will always be more pro-military and pro-war than the civilians. That’s why they are in this line of work.”
The poll asked, “How do you think each of these groups view the military?” Respondents over whelmingly said civilians have a favorable impression of the mili tary (86 percent). They even thought politicians look favorably on the military (57 percent). But they are convinced the media hate them — only 39 percent of mili tary respondents said they think the media have a favorable view of the troops.
The poll also asked if the senior military leadership, President Bush, civilian military leadership and Congress have their best in terests at heart.
Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of those surveyed said the senior military leadership has the best interests of the troops at heart. And though they don’t think much of the way he’s handling the war, 48 percent said the same about President Bush. But they take a dim view of civilian military lead ership — only 32 percent said they think it has their best inter ests at heart. And only 23 percent think Congress is looking out for them.
Despite concerns early in the war about equipment shortages, 58 percent said they believe they are supplied with the best possi ble weapons and equipment.
While President Bush always portrays the war in Iraq as part of the larger war on terrorism, many in the military are not convinced. The respondents were split evenly — 47 percent both ways — on whether the Iraq war is part of the war on terrorism. The rest had no opinion.
On many questions in the poll, some respondents said they didn’t have an opinion or declined to an swer. That number was typically in the 10 percent range.
But on questions about the president and on war strategy, that number reached 20 percent and higher. Segal said he was surprised the percentage refus ing to offer an opinion wasn’t larger.
“There is a strong strain in mili tary culture not to criticize the commander in chief,” he said.
One contentious area of military life in the past year has been the role religion should play. Some troops have complained that they feel pressure to attend religious services. Others have complained that chaplains and superior offi cers have tried to convert them. Half of the poll respondents said that at least once a month, they attend official military gather ings, other than meals and chapel services, that began with a prayer. But 80 percent said they feel free to practice and express their religion within the military.
http://www.militarycity.com/polls/2006_main.php
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Message To West Point
Message To West Point (from http://www.tompaine.com/print/message_to_west_point.php)
Bill Moyers
November 29, 2006
This is an excerpt from the Sol Feinstone Lecture on The Meaning of Freedom delivered by Bill Moyers at the United States Military Academy on November 15, 2006.
Many of you will be heading for Iraq. I have never been a soldier myself, never been tested under fire, never faced hard choices between duty and feeling, or duty and conscience, under deadly circumstances. I will never know if I have the courage to be shot at, or to shoot back, or the discipline to do my duty knowing the people who dispatched me to kill—or be killed—had no idea of the moral abyss into which they were plunging me.
I have tried to learn about war from those who know it best: veterans, the real experts. But they have been such reluctant reporters of the experience. My father-in-law, Joe Davidson, was 37 years old with two young daughters when war came in 1941; he enlisted and served in the Pacific but I never succeeded in getting him to describe what it was like to be in harm’s way. My uncle came home from the Pacific after his ship had been sunk, taking many friends down with it, and he would look away and change the subject when I asked him about it. One of my dearest friends, who died this year at 90, returned from combat in Europe as if he had taken a vow of silence about the dark and terrifying things that came home with him, uninvited.
Curious about this, some years ago I produced for PBS a documentary called “D-Day to the Rhine.” With a camera crew I accompanied several veterans of World War II who for the first time were returning together to the path of combat that carried them from the landing at Normandy in 1944 into the heart of Germany. Members of their families were along this time—wives, grown sons and daughters—and they told me that until now, on this trip—45 years after D-Day—their husbands and fathers rarely talked about their combat experiences. They had come home, locked their memories in their mind’s attic, and hung a “no trespassing” sign on it. Even as they retraced their steps almost half a century later, I would find these aging GIs, standing alone and silent on the very spot where a buddy had been killed, or they themselves had killed, or where they had been taken prisoner, a German soldier standing over them with a Mauser pointed right between their eyes, saying: “For you, the war is over.” As they tried to tell the story, the words choked in their throats. The stench, the vomit, the blood, the fear: What outsider—journalist or kin—could imagine the demons still at war in their heads?
What I remember most vividly from that trip is the opening scene of the film: Jose Lopez— the father of two, who had lied about his age to get into the Army (he was too old), went ashore at Normandy, fought his way across France and Belgium with a water-cooled machine gun, rose to the rank of sergeant, and received the Congressional Medal of Honor after single-handedly killing 100 German troops in the Battle of the Bulge—Jose Lopez, back on Omaha Beach at age 79, quietly saying to me: “I was really very, very afraid. That I want to scream. I want to cry and we see other people was laying wounded and screaming and everything and it’s nothing you could do. We could see them groaning in the water and we keep walking”—and then, moving away from the camera, dropping to his knees, his hands clasped, his eyes wet, as it all came back, memories so excruciating there were no words for them.
The Poetry Of War
Over the year I turned to the poets for help in understanding the realities of war; it is from the poets we outsiders most often learn what you soldiers experience. I admired your former superintendent, General William Lennox, who held a doctorate in literature and taught poetry classes here because, he said, “poetry is a great vehicle to teach cadets as much as anyone can what combat is like.” So it is. From the opening lines of the Iliad:
Rage, Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ Son Achilles…hurling down to the House of Death so many souls, great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion for the dogs and birds….
to Wilfred Owen’s pained cry from the trenches of France:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend…
to W. D. Ehrhart’s staccato recitation of the
Barely tolerable conglomeration of mud, heat, sweat, dirt, rain, pain, fear…we march grinding under the weight of heavy packs, feet dialed to the ground…we wonder…
Poets with their empathy and evocation open to bystanders what lies buried in the soldier’s soul. Those of you soon to be leading others in combat may wish to take a metaphorical detour to the Hindenburg Line of World War I, where the officer and poet Wilfred Owen, a man of extraordinary courage who was killed a week before the Armistice, wrote: “I came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can.”
People in power should be required to take classes in the poetry of war. As a presidential assistant during the early escalation of the war in Vietnam, I remember how the President blanched when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said it would take one million fighting men and 10 years really to win in Vietnam, but even then the talk of war was about policy, strategy, numbers and budgets, not severed limbs and eviscerated bodies.
That experience, and the experience 40 years later of watching another White House go to war, also relying on inadequate intelligence, exaggerated claims and premature judgments, keeping Congress in the dark while wooing a gullible press, cheered on by partisans, pundits, and editorial writers safely divorced from realities on the ground, ended any tolerance I might have had for those who advocate war from the loftiness of the pulpit, the safety of a laptop, the comfort of a think tank, or the glamour of a television studio. Watching one day on C-Span as one member of Congress after another took to the floor to praise our troops in Iraq, I was reminded that I could only name three members of Congress who have a son or daughter in the military. How often we hear the most vigorous argument for war from those who count on others of valor to fight it. As General William Tecumseh Sherman said after the Civil War: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
Remembering Emily Perez
Rupert Murdoch comes to mind—only because he was in the news last week talking about Iraq. In the months leading up to the invasion Murdoch turned the dogs of war loose in the corridors of his media empire, and they howled for blood, although not their own. Murdoch himself said, just weeks before the invasion, that: “The greatest thing to come of this to the world economy, if you could put it that way [as you can, if you are a media mogul], would be $20 a barrel for oil.” Once the war is behind us, Rupert Murdoch said: “The whole world will benefit from cheaper oil which will be a bigger stimulus than anything else.”
Today Murdoch says he has no regrets, that he still believes it was right “to go in there,” and that “from a historical perspective” the U.S. death toll in Iraq was “minute.”
“Minute.”
The word richoted in my head when I heard it. I had just been reading about Emily Perez. Your Emily Perez: Second Lieutenant Perez, the first woman of color to become a command sergeant major in the history of the Academy, and the first woman graduate to die in Iraq. I had been in Washington when word of her death made the news, and because she had lived there before coming to West Point, the Washington press told us a lot about her. People remembered her as “a little superwoman”—straight A’s, choir member, charismatic, optimistic, a friend to so many; she had joined the medical service because she wanted to help people. The obituary in the Washington Post said she had been a ball of fire at the Peace Baptist Church, where she helped start an HIV-AIDS ministry after some of her own family members contracted the virus. Now accounts of her funeral here at West Point were reporting that some of you wept as you contemplated the loss of so vibrant an officer.
“Minute?” I don’t think so. Historical perspective or no. So when I arrived today I asked the Academy’s historian, Steve Grove, to take me where Emily Perez is buried, in Section 36 of your cemetery, below Storm King Mountain, overlooking the Hudson River. Standing there, on sacred American soil hallowed all the more by the likes of Lieutenant Perez so recently returned, I thought that to describe their loss as “minute”—even from a historical perspective—is to underscore the great divide that has opened in America between those who advocate war while avoiding it and those who have the courage to fight it without ever knowing what it’s all about.
We were warned of this by our founders. They had put themselves in jeopardy by signing the Declaration of Independence; if they had lost, that parchment could have been their death warrant, for they were traitors to the Crown and likely to be hanged. In the fight for freedom they had put themselves on the line—not just their fortunes and sacred honor but their very persons, their lives. After the war, forming a government and understanding both the nature of war and human nature, they determined to make it hard to go to war except to defend freedom; war for reasons save preserving the lives and liberty of your citizens should be made difficult to achieve, they argued. Here is John Jay’s passage in Federalist No. 4:
It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.
And here, a few years later, is James Madison, perhaps the most deliberative mind of that generation in assaying the dangers of an unfettered executive prone to war:
In war, a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.
I want to be clear on this: Vietnam did not make me a dove. Nor has Iraq; I am no pacifist. But they have made me study the Constitution more rigorously, both as journalist and citizen. Again, James Madison:
In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.
Twice in 40 years we have now gone to war paying only lip service to those warnings; the first war we lost, the second is a bloody debacle, and both rank among the great blunders in our history. It is impossible for soldiers to sustain in the field what cannot be justified in the Constitution; asking them to do so puts America at war with itself. So when the Vice President of the United States says it doesn’t matter what the people think, he and the President intend to prosecute the war anyway, he is committing heresy against the fundamental tenets of the American political order.
An Army Born In Revolution
This is a tough subject to address when so many of you may be heading for Iraq. I would prefer to speak of sweeter things. But I also know that 20 or 30 years from now any one of you may be the Chief of Staff or the National Security Adviser or even the President—after all, two of your boys, Grant and Eisenhower, did make it from West Point to the White House. And that being the case, it’s more important than ever that citizens and soldiers—and citizen-soldiers—honestly discuss and frankly consider the kind of country you are serving and the kind of organization to which you are dedicating your lives. You are, after all, the heirs of an army born in the American Revolution, whose radicalism we consistently underestimate.
No one understood this radicalism—no one in uniform did more to help us define freedom in a profoundly American way—than the man whose monument here at West Point I also asked to visit today—Thaddeus Kosciuszko. I first became intrigued by him over 40 years ago when I arrived in Washington. Lafayette Park, on Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the White House, hosts several statues of military heroes who came to fight for our independence in the American Revolution. For seven years, either looking down on these figures from my office at the Peace Corps, or walking across Lafayette Park to my office in the White House, I was reminded of these men who came voluntarily to fight for American independence from the monarchy. The most compelling, for me, was the depiction of Kosciuszko. On one side of the statue he is directing a soldier back to the battlefield, and on the other side, wearing an American uniform, he is freeing a bound soldier, representing America’s revolutionaries.
Kosciuszko had been born in Lithuania-Poland, where he was trained as an engineer and artillery officer. Arriving in the 13 colonies in 1776, he broke down in tears when he read the Declaration of Independence. The next year, he helped engineer the Battle of Saratoga, organizing the river and land fortifications that put Americans in the stronger position. George Washington then commissioned him to build the original fortifications for West Point. Since his monument dominates the point here at the Academy, this part of the story you must know well.
But what many don’t realize about Kosciuszko is the depth of his commitment to republican ideals and human equality. One historian called him “a mystical visionary of human rights.” Thomas Jefferson wrote that Kosciuszko was “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.” That phrase of Jefferson’s is often quoted, but if you read the actual letter, Jefferson goes on to say: “And of that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few and the rich alone.”
There is the clue to the meaning of freedom as Thaddeus Kosciuszko saw it.
After the American Revolution, he returned to his homeland, what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1791 the Poles adopted their celebrated May Constitution—Europe’s first codified national constitution (and the second oldest in the world, after our own.) The May Constitution established political equality between the middle class and the nobility and also partially abolished serfdom by giving civil rights to the peasants, including the right to state protection from landlord abuses. The autocrats and nobles of Russia feared such reforms, and in 1794, when the Russians sought to prevent their spread by partitioning the Commonwealth, Kosciuszko led an insurrection. His untrained peasant forces were armed mostly with single-blade sickles, but they won several early battles in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, until they were finally overwhelmed. Badly injured, Kosciuszko was taken prisoner and held for two years in St. Petersburg, and that was the end of the Polish Commonwealth, which had stood, by the way, as one of Europe’s leading centers of religious liberty.
Upon his release from prison, Kosciuszko came back to the United States and began a lasting friendship with Jefferson, who called him his “most intimate and beloved friend.” In 1798, he wrote a will leaving his American estate to Jefferson, urging him to use it to purchase the freedom and education of his [Jefferson’s] own slaves, or, as Jefferson interpreted it, of “as many of the children as bondage in this country as it should be adequate to.” For this émigré, as for so many who would come later, the meaning of freedom included a passion for universal justice. In his Act of Insurrection at the outset of the 1794 uprising, Kosciuszko wrote of the people’s “sacred rights to liberty, personal security and property.” Note the term property here. For Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” Kosciuszko substituted Locke’s notion of property rights. But it’s not what you think: The goal was not simply to protect “private property” from public interference (as it is taught today), but rather to secure productive property for all as a right to citizenship. It’s easy to forget the difference when huge agglomerations of personal wealth are defended as a sacred right of liberty, as they are today with the gap between the rich and poor in America greater than it’s been in almost one hundred years. Kosciuszko—General Kosciuszko, from tip to toe a military man—was talking about investing the people with productive resources. Yes, freedom had to be won on the battlefield, but if freedom did not lead to political, social and economic opportunity for all citizens, freedom’s meaning could not be truly realized.
Think about it: A Polish general from the old world, infusing the new nation with what would become the marrow of the American Dream. Small wonder that Kosciuszko was often called a “hero of two worlds” or that just 25 years ago, in 1981, when Polish farmers, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, won the right to form an independent union, sending shockwaves across the Communist empire, Kosciuszko’s name was heard in the victory speeches—his egalitarian soul present at yet another revolution for human freedom and equal rights.
After Jefferson won the presidency in l800, Kosciuszko wrote him a touching letter advising him to be true to his principles: “do not forget in your post be always a virtuous Republican with justice and probity, without pomp and ambition—in a word be Jefferson and my friend.” Two years later, Jefferson signed into being this professional officers school, on the site first laid out as a fortress by his friend, the general from Poland.
A Paradox Of Liberty
Every turn in American history confronts us with paradox, and this one is no exception. Here was Jefferson, known for his vigorous and eloquent opposition to professional armies, presiding over the establishment of West Point. It’s a paradox that suits you cadets to a T, because you yourselves represent a paradox of liberty. You are free men and women who of your own free choice have joined an institution dedicated to protecting a free nation, but in the process you have voluntarily agreed to give up, for a specific time, a part of your own liberty. An army is not a debating society and neither in the field or in headquarters does it ask for a show of hands on whether orders should be obeyed. That is undoubtedly a necessary idea, but for you it complicates the already tricky question of “the meaning of freedom.”
I said earlier that our founders did not want the power of war to reside in a single man. Many were also dubious about having any kind of regular, or as they called it, “standing” army at all. Standing armies were hired supporters of absolute monarchs and imperial tyrants. The men drafting the Constitution were steeped in classical and historical learning. They recalled how Caesar in ancient times and Oliver Cromwell in more recent times had used the conquering armies they had led to make themselves dictators. They knew how the Roman legions had made and unmade emperors, and how Ottoman rulers of the Turkish Empire had supported their tyrannies on the shoulders of formidable elite warriors. Wherever they looked in history, they saw an alliance between enemies of freedom in palaces and in officer corps drawn from the ranks of nobility, bound by a warrior code that stressed honor and bravery—but also dedication to the sovereign and the sovereign’s god, and distrust amounting to contempt for the ordinary run of the sovereign’s subjects.
The colonial experience with British regulars, first as allies in the French and Indian Wars, and then as enemies, did not increase American respect for the old system of military leadership. Officers were chosen and promoted on the basis of aristocratic connections, commissions were bought, and ineptitude was too often tolerated. The lower ranks were often rootless alumni of jails and workhouses, lured or coerced into service by the paltry pay and chance of adventure—brutally hard types, kept in line by brutally harsh discipline.
Not exactly your model for the army of a republic of free citizens.
What the framers came up with was another novelty. The first battles of the Revolution were fought mainly by volunteer militia from the states, such as Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys, the most famous militia then. They were gung-ho for revolution and flushed with a fighting spirit. But in the end they were no substitute for the better-trained regiments of the Continental line and the French regulars sent over by France’s king after the alliance of 1778. The view nonetheless persisted that in times of peace, only a small permanent army would be needed to repel invasions—unlikely except from Canada—and deal with the frontier Indians. When and if a real crisis came, it was believed, volunteers would flock to the colors like the armed men of Greek mythology who sprang from dragon’s teeth planted in the ground by a divinely approved hero. The real safety of the nation in any hour of crisis would rest with men who spent most of their working lives behind the plow or in the workshop. And this was long before the huge conscript armies of the 19th and 20th centuries made that a commonplace fact.
And who would be in the top command of both that regular force and of volunteer forces when actually called into federal service? None other than the top elected civil official of the government, the President. Think about that for a moment. The professional army fought hard and long to create a system of selecting and keeping officers on the basis of proven competence, not popularity. But the highest commander of all served strictly at the pleasure of the people and had to submit his contract for renewal every four years.
And what of the need for trained and expert leadership at all the levels of command which quickly became apparent as the tools and tactics of warfare grew more sophisticated in a modernizing world? That’s where West Point came in, filling a need that could no longer be ignored. But what a special military academy it was! We tend to forget that the West Point curriculum was heavily tilted toward engineering; in fact, it was one of the nation’s first engineering colleges and it was publicly supported and free. That’s what made it attractive to young men like Hiram Ulysses Grant, familiarly known as “Sam,” who wasn’t anxious to be a soldier but wanted to get somewhere more promising than his father’s Ohio farm. Hundreds like Grant came to West Point and left to use their civil engineering skills in a country badly needing them, some in civil life after serving out an enlistment, but many right there in uniform. It was the army that explored, mapped and surveyed the wagon and railroad routes to the west, starting with the Corps of Exploration under Lewis and Clark sent out by the protean Mr. Jefferson. It was the army that had a hand in clearing rivers of snags and brush and building dams that allowed steamboats to avoid rapids. It was the army that put up lighthouses in the harbors and whose exhaustive geologic and topographic surveys were important contributions to publicly supported scientific research—AND to economic development—in the young republic.
All of this would surely have pleased General Kosciuszko, who believed in a society that leaves no one out. Indeed, add all these facts together and what you come up with is a portrait of something new under the sun—a peacetime army working directly with and for the civil society in improving the nation so as to guarantee the greater opportunities for individual success inherent in the promise of democracy. And a wartime army in which temporary citizen-solders were and still are led by long-term professional citizen-soldiers who were molded out of the same clay as those they command. And all of them led from the top by the one political figure chosen by the entire national electorate. This arrangement—this bargain between the men with the guns and the citizens who provide the guns—is the heritage passed on to you by the revolutionaries who fought and won America’s independence and then swore fidelity to a civil compact that survives today, despite tumultuous moments and perilous passages.
West Point's Importance
Once again we encounter a paradox: Not all our wars were on the side of freedom. The first that seriously engaged the alumni of West Point was the Mexican War, which was not a war to protect our freedoms but to grab land—facts are facts—and was not only bitterly criticized by part of the civilian population, but even looked on with skepticism by some graduates like Grant himself. Still, he not only fought well in it, but it was for him, as well as for most of the generals on both sides in the impending Civil War, an unequalled training school and rehearsal stage.
When the Civil War itself came, it offered an illustration of how the meaning of freedom isn’t always easy to pin down. From the point of view of the North, the hundreds of Southern West Pointers who resigned to fight for the Confederacy—Robert E. Lee included—were turning against the people’s government that had educated and supported them. They were traitors. But from the Southern point of view, they were fighting for the freedom of their local governments to leave the Union when, as they saw it, it threatened their way of life. Their way of life tragically included the right to hold other men in slavery.
The Civil War, nonetheless, confirmed the importance of West Point training. European military observers were amazed at the skill with which the better generals on both sides, meaning for the most part West Pointers and not political appointees, maneuvered huge armies of men over vast areas of difficult terrain, used modern technologies like the railroad and the telegraph to coordinate movements and accumulate supplies, and made the best use of newly developed weapons. The North had more of these advantages, and when the final victory came, adulation and admiration were showered on Grant and Sherman, who had come to a realistic and unromantic understanding of modern war, precisely because they had not been steeped in the mythologies of a warrior caste. Their triumph was seen as vindication of how well the army of a democracy could work. Just as Lincoln, the self-educated rail-splitter, had provided a civilian leadership that also proved him the equal of any potentate on the globe.
After 1865 the army shrank as its chief engagement was now in wiping out the last vestiges of Indian resistance to their dispossession and subjugation: One people’s advance became another’s annihilation and one of the most shameful episodes of our history. In 1898 the army was briefly used for the first effort in exporting democracy—an idea that does not travel well in military transports—when it warred with Spain to help the Cubans complete a war for independence that had been in progress for three years. The Cubans found their liberation somewhat illusory, however, when the United States made the island a virtual protectorate and allowed it to be ruled by a corrupt dictator.
Americans also lifted the yoke of Spain from the Filipinos, only to learn that they did not want to exchange it for one stamped ‘Made in the USA.’ It took a three-year war, during which the army killed several thousand so-called “insurgents” before their leader was captured and the Filipinos were cured of the illusion that independence meant…well, independence. I bring up these reminders not to defame the troops. Their actions were supported by a majority of the American people even in a progressive phase of our political history (though there was some principled and stiff opposition.) Nonetheless, we have to remind ourselves that the armed forces can’t be expected to be morally much better than the people who send them into action, and that when honorable behavior comes into conflict with racism, honor is usually the loser unless people such as yourself fight to maintain it.
Our brief participation in the First World War temporarily expanded the army, helped by a draft that had also proven necessary in the Civil War. But rapid demobilization was followed by a long period of ever-shrinking military budgets, especially for the land forces.
Not until World War II did the Army again take part in such a long, bloody, and fateful conflict as the Civil War had been, and like the Civil War it opened an entirely new period in American history. The incredibly gigantic mobilization of the entire nation, the victory it produced, and the ensuing 60 years of wars, quasi-wars, mini-wars, secret wars, and a virtually permanent crisis created a superpower and forever changed the nation’s relationship to its armed forces, confronting us with problems we have to address, no matter how unsettling it may be to do so in the midst of yet another war.
The Bargain
The Armed Services are no longer stepchildren in budgetary terms. Appropriations for defense and defense-related activities (like veterans’ care, pensions, and debt service) remind us that the costs of war continue long after the fighting ends. Objections to ever-swelling defensive expenditures are, except in rare cases, a greased slide to political suicide. It should be troublesome to you as professional soldiers that elevation to the pantheon of untouchable icons —right there alongside motherhood, apple pie and the flag—permits a great deal of political lip service to replace genuine efforts to improve the lives and working conditions—in combat and out—of those who serve.
Let me cut closer to the bone. The chickenhawks in Washington, who at this very moment are busily defending you against supposed “insults” or betrayals by the opponents of the war in Iraq, are likewise those who have cut budgets for medical and psychiatric care; who have been so skimpy and late with pay and with provision of necessities that military families in the United States have had to apply for food stamps; who sent the men and women whom you may soon be commanding into Iraq understrength, underequipped, and unprepared for dealing with a kind of war fought in streets and homes full of civilians against enemies undistinguishable from non-combatants; who have time and again broken promises to the civilian National Guardsmen bearing much of the burden by canceling their redeployment orders and extending their tours.
You may or may not agree on the justice and necessity of the war itself, but I hope that you will agree that flattery and adulation are no substitute for genuine support. Much of the money that could be directed to that support has gone into high-tech weapons systems that were supposed to produce a new, mobile, compact “professional” army that could easily defeat the armies of any other two nations combined, but is useless in a war against nationalist or religious guerrilla uprisings that, like it or not, have some support, coerced or otherwise, among the local population. We learned this lesson in Vietnam, only to see it forgotten or ignored by the time this administration invaded Iraq, creating the conditions for a savage sectarian and civil war with our soldiers trapped in the middle, unable to discern civilian from combatant, where it is impossible to kill your enemy faster than rage makes new ones.
And who has been the real beneficiary of creating this high-tech army called to fight a war conceived and commissioned and cheered on by politicians and pundits not one of whom ever entered a combat zone? One of your boys answered that: Dwight Eisenhower, class of 1915, who told us that the real winners of the anything at any price philosophy would be “the military-industrial complex.”
I want to contend that the American military systems that evolved in the early days of this republic rested on a bargain between the civilian authorities and the armed services, and that the army has, for the most part, kept its part of the bargain and that, at this moment, the civilian authorities whom you loyally obey, are shirking theirs. And before you assume that I am calling for an insurrection against the civilian deciders of your destinies, hear me out, for that is the last thing on my mind.
You have kept your end of the bargain by fighting well when called upon, by refusing to become a praetorian guard for a reigning administration at any time, and for respecting civil control at all times. For the most part, our military leaders have made no serious efforts to meddle in politics. The two most notable cases were General George McClellan, who endorsed a pro-Southern and pro-slavery policy in the first year of the war and was openly contemptuous of Lincoln. But Lincoln fired him in 1862, and when McClellan ran for President two years later, the voting public handed him his hat. Douglas MacArthur’s attempt to dictate his own China policy in 1951 ran head-on into the resolve of Harry Truman, who, surviving a firestorm of hostility, happily watched a MacArthur boomlet for the Republican nomination for the Presidency fizzle out in 1952.
On the other side of the ledger, however, I believe that the bargain has not been kept. The last time Congress declared war was in 1941. Since then presidents of the United States, including the one I served, have gotten Congress, occasionally under demonstrably false pretenses, to suspend Constitutional provisions that required them to get the consent of the people’s representatives in order to conduct a war. They have been handed a blank check to send the armed forces into action at their personal discretion and on dubious Constitutional grounds.
Furthermore, the current President has made extra-Constitutional claims of authority by repeatedly acting as if he were Commander-in-Chief of the entire nation and not merely of the armed forces. Most dangerously to our moral honor and to your own welfare in the event of capture, he has likewise ordered the armed forces to violate clear mandates of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions by claiming a right to interpret them at his pleasure, so as to allow indefinite and secret detentions and torture. These claims contravene a basic principle usually made clear to recruits from their first day in service—that they may not obey an unlawful order. The President is attempting to have them violate that longstanding rule by personal definitions of what the law says and means.
There is yet another way the chickenhawks are failing you. In the October issue of the magazine of the California Nurses Association, you can read a long report on “The Battle at Home.” In veterans’ hospitals across the country—and in a growing number of ill-prepared, under-funded psych and primary care clinics as well—the report says that nurses “have witnessed the guilt, rage, emotional numbness, and tormented flashbacks of GIs just back from Iraq.” Yet “a returning vet must wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability benefits,” and an appeal can take up to three years. Just in the first quarter of this year, the VA treated 20,638 Iraq veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, and faces a backlog of 400,000 cases. This is reprehensible.
I repeat: These are not palatable topics for soldiers about to go to war; I would like to speak of sweeter things. But freedom means we must face reality: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Free enough, surely, to think for yourselves about these breaches of contract that crudely undercut the traditions of an army of free men and women who have bound themselves voluntarily to serve the nation even unto death.
The Voice Of Conscience
What, then, can you do about it if disobedience to the chain of command is ruled out?
For one, you didn’t give up your freedom to vote, nor did you totally quit your membership in civil society, when you put on the uniform, even though, as Eisenhower said, you did accept “certain inhibitions” at the time. He said that when questioned about MacArthur’s dismissal, and he made sure his own uniform was back in the trunk before his campaign in 1952. It has been most encouraging, by the way, to see veterans of Iraq on the campaign trail in our recent elections.
Second, remember that there are limitations to what military power can do. Despite the valor and skills of our fighting forces, some objectives are not obtainable at a human, diplomatic, and financial cost that is acceptable. Our casualties in Iraq are not “minute” and the cost of the war has been projected by some sources to reach $2 trillion dollars. Sometimes, in the real world, a truce is the most honorable solution to conflict. Dwight Eisenhower—who is a candidate for my favorite West Point graduate of the 20th century—knew that when, in 1953, he went to Korea and accepted a stalemate rather than carrying out his bluff of using nuclear weapons. That was the best that could be done and it saved more years of stalemate and casualties. Douglas MacArthur announced in 1951 that “there was no substitute for victory.” But in the wars of the 21st century there are alternative meanings to victory and alternative ways to achieve them. Especially in tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a “war on terror”—what, pray tell, exactly is that?—to the mindset of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia, or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process. Help us to think beyond a “war on terror”—which politicians could wage without end, with no measurable way to judge its effectiveness, against stateless enemies who hope we will destroy the neighborhood, creating recruits for their side—to counter-terrorism modeled on extraordinary police work.
Third, don’t let your natural and commendable loyalty to comrades-in-arms lead you into thinking that criticism of the mission you are on spells lack of patriotism. Not every politician who flatters you is your ally. Not every one who believes that war is the wrong choice to some problems is your enemy. Blind faith in bad leadership is not patriotism. In the words of G.K. Chesterton: “To say my country right or wrong is something no patriot would utter except in dire circumstance; it is like saying my mother drunk or sober.” Patriotism means insisting on our political leaders being sober, strong, and certain about what they are doing when they put you in harm’s way.
Fourth, be more prepared to accept the credibility and integrity of those who disagree about the war even if you do not agree with their positions. I say this as a journalist, knowing it is tempting in the field to denounce or despise reporters who ask nosy questions or file critical reports. But their first duty as reporters is to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth and report it to the American people—for your sake. If there is mismanagement and incompetence, exposing it is more helpful to you than paeans to candy given to the locals. I trust you are familiar with the study done for the Army in 1989 by the historian, William Hammond. He examined press coverage in Korea and Vietnam and found that it was not the cause of disaffection at home; what disturbed people at home was the death toll; when casualties jumped, public support dropped. Over time, he said, the reporting was vindicated. In fact, “the press reports were often more accurate than the public statements of the administration in portraying the situation in Vietnam.” Take note: The American people want the truth about how their sons and daughters are doing in Iraq and what they’re up against, and that is a good thing.
Finally, and this above all—a lesson I wish I had learned earlier. If you rise in the ranks to important positions—or even if you don’t—speak the truth as you see it, even if the questioner is a higher authority with a clear preference for one and only one answer. It may not be the way to promote your career; it can in fact harm it. Among my military heroes of this war are the generals who frankly told the President and his advisers that their information and their plans were both incomplete and misleading—and who paid the price of being ignored and bypassed and possibly frozen forever in their existing ranks: men like General Eric K. Shinseki, another son of West Point. It is not easy to be honest—and fair—in a bureaucratic system. But it is what free men and women have to do. Be true to your principles, General Kosciuszko reminded Thomas Jefferson. If doing so exposes the ignorance and arrogance of power, you may be doing more to save the nation than exploits in combat can achieve.
I know the final rule of the military Code of Conduct is already written in your hearts: “I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free...” The meaning of freedom begins with the still, small voice of conscience, when each of us decides what we will live, or die, for.
I salute your dedication to America and I wish all of you good luck.
Bill Moyers is deeply grateful to his colleagues Bernard A Weisberger, Professor Emeritus of History at The University of Chicago, and Lew Daly, Senior Fellow of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, for their contributions to this speech.
Bill Moyers
November 29, 2006
This is an excerpt from the Sol Feinstone Lecture on The Meaning of Freedom delivered by Bill Moyers at the United States Military Academy on November 15, 2006.
Many of you will be heading for Iraq. I have never been a soldier myself, never been tested under fire, never faced hard choices between duty and feeling, or duty and conscience, under deadly circumstances. I will never know if I have the courage to be shot at, or to shoot back, or the discipline to do my duty knowing the people who dispatched me to kill—or be killed—had no idea of the moral abyss into which they were plunging me.
I have tried to learn about war from those who know it best: veterans, the real experts. But they have been such reluctant reporters of the experience. My father-in-law, Joe Davidson, was 37 years old with two young daughters when war came in 1941; he enlisted and served in the Pacific but I never succeeded in getting him to describe what it was like to be in harm’s way. My uncle came home from the Pacific after his ship had been sunk, taking many friends down with it, and he would look away and change the subject when I asked him about it. One of my dearest friends, who died this year at 90, returned from combat in Europe as if he had taken a vow of silence about the dark and terrifying things that came home with him, uninvited.
Curious about this, some years ago I produced for PBS a documentary called “D-Day to the Rhine.” With a camera crew I accompanied several veterans of World War II who for the first time were returning together to the path of combat that carried them from the landing at Normandy in 1944 into the heart of Germany. Members of their families were along this time—wives, grown sons and daughters—and they told me that until now, on this trip—45 years after D-Day—their husbands and fathers rarely talked about their combat experiences. They had come home, locked their memories in their mind’s attic, and hung a “no trespassing” sign on it. Even as they retraced their steps almost half a century later, I would find these aging GIs, standing alone and silent on the very spot where a buddy had been killed, or they themselves had killed, or where they had been taken prisoner, a German soldier standing over them with a Mauser pointed right between their eyes, saying: “For you, the war is over.” As they tried to tell the story, the words choked in their throats. The stench, the vomit, the blood, the fear: What outsider—journalist or kin—could imagine the demons still at war in their heads?
What I remember most vividly from that trip is the opening scene of the film: Jose Lopez— the father of two, who had lied about his age to get into the Army (he was too old), went ashore at Normandy, fought his way across France and Belgium with a water-cooled machine gun, rose to the rank of sergeant, and received the Congressional Medal of Honor after single-handedly killing 100 German troops in the Battle of the Bulge—Jose Lopez, back on Omaha Beach at age 79, quietly saying to me: “I was really very, very afraid. That I want to scream. I want to cry and we see other people was laying wounded and screaming and everything and it’s nothing you could do. We could see them groaning in the water and we keep walking”—and then, moving away from the camera, dropping to his knees, his hands clasped, his eyes wet, as it all came back, memories so excruciating there were no words for them.
The Poetry Of War
Over the year I turned to the poets for help in understanding the realities of war; it is from the poets we outsiders most often learn what you soldiers experience. I admired your former superintendent, General William Lennox, who held a doctorate in literature and taught poetry classes here because, he said, “poetry is a great vehicle to teach cadets as much as anyone can what combat is like.” So it is. From the opening lines of the Iliad:
Rage, Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ Son Achilles…hurling down to the House of Death so many souls, great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion for the dogs and birds….
to Wilfred Owen’s pained cry from the trenches of France:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend…
to W. D. Ehrhart’s staccato recitation of the
Barely tolerable conglomeration of mud, heat, sweat, dirt, rain, pain, fear…we march grinding under the weight of heavy packs, feet dialed to the ground…we wonder…
Poets with their empathy and evocation open to bystanders what lies buried in the soldier’s soul. Those of you soon to be leading others in combat may wish to take a metaphorical detour to the Hindenburg Line of World War I, where the officer and poet Wilfred Owen, a man of extraordinary courage who was killed a week before the Armistice, wrote: “I came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can.”
People in power should be required to take classes in the poetry of war. As a presidential assistant during the early escalation of the war in Vietnam, I remember how the President blanched when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said it would take one million fighting men and 10 years really to win in Vietnam, but even then the talk of war was about policy, strategy, numbers and budgets, not severed limbs and eviscerated bodies.
That experience, and the experience 40 years later of watching another White House go to war, also relying on inadequate intelligence, exaggerated claims and premature judgments, keeping Congress in the dark while wooing a gullible press, cheered on by partisans, pundits, and editorial writers safely divorced from realities on the ground, ended any tolerance I might have had for those who advocate war from the loftiness of the pulpit, the safety of a laptop, the comfort of a think tank, or the glamour of a television studio. Watching one day on C-Span as one member of Congress after another took to the floor to praise our troops in Iraq, I was reminded that I could only name three members of Congress who have a son or daughter in the military. How often we hear the most vigorous argument for war from those who count on others of valor to fight it. As General William Tecumseh Sherman said after the Civil War: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”
Remembering Emily Perez
Rupert Murdoch comes to mind—only because he was in the news last week talking about Iraq. In the months leading up to the invasion Murdoch turned the dogs of war loose in the corridors of his media empire, and they howled for blood, although not their own. Murdoch himself said, just weeks before the invasion, that: “The greatest thing to come of this to the world economy, if you could put it that way [as you can, if you are a media mogul], would be $20 a barrel for oil.” Once the war is behind us, Rupert Murdoch said: “The whole world will benefit from cheaper oil which will be a bigger stimulus than anything else.”
Today Murdoch says he has no regrets, that he still believes it was right “to go in there,” and that “from a historical perspective” the U.S. death toll in Iraq was “minute.”
“Minute.”
The word richoted in my head when I heard it. I had just been reading about Emily Perez. Your Emily Perez: Second Lieutenant Perez, the first woman of color to become a command sergeant major in the history of the Academy, and the first woman graduate to die in Iraq. I had been in Washington when word of her death made the news, and because she had lived there before coming to West Point, the Washington press told us a lot about her. People remembered her as “a little superwoman”—straight A’s, choir member, charismatic, optimistic, a friend to so many; she had joined the medical service because she wanted to help people. The obituary in the Washington Post said she had been a ball of fire at the Peace Baptist Church, where she helped start an HIV-AIDS ministry after some of her own family members contracted the virus. Now accounts of her funeral here at West Point were reporting that some of you wept as you contemplated the loss of so vibrant an officer.
“Minute?” I don’t think so. Historical perspective or no. So when I arrived today I asked the Academy’s historian, Steve Grove, to take me where Emily Perez is buried, in Section 36 of your cemetery, below Storm King Mountain, overlooking the Hudson River. Standing there, on sacred American soil hallowed all the more by the likes of Lieutenant Perez so recently returned, I thought that to describe their loss as “minute”—even from a historical perspective—is to underscore the great divide that has opened in America between those who advocate war while avoiding it and those who have the courage to fight it without ever knowing what it’s all about.
We were warned of this by our founders. They had put themselves in jeopardy by signing the Declaration of Independence; if they had lost, that parchment could have been their death warrant, for they were traitors to the Crown and likely to be hanged. In the fight for freedom they had put themselves on the line—not just their fortunes and sacred honor but their very persons, their lives. After the war, forming a government and understanding both the nature of war and human nature, they determined to make it hard to go to war except to defend freedom; war for reasons save preserving the lives and liberty of your citizens should be made difficult to achieve, they argued. Here is John Jay’s passage in Federalist No. 4:
It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.
And here, a few years later, is James Madison, perhaps the most deliberative mind of that generation in assaying the dangers of an unfettered executive prone to war:
In war, a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.
I want to be clear on this: Vietnam did not make me a dove. Nor has Iraq; I am no pacifist. But they have made me study the Constitution more rigorously, both as journalist and citizen. Again, James Madison:
In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.
Twice in 40 years we have now gone to war paying only lip service to those warnings; the first war we lost, the second is a bloody debacle, and both rank among the great blunders in our history. It is impossible for soldiers to sustain in the field what cannot be justified in the Constitution; asking them to do so puts America at war with itself. So when the Vice President of the United States says it doesn’t matter what the people think, he and the President intend to prosecute the war anyway, he is committing heresy against the fundamental tenets of the American political order.
An Army Born In Revolution
This is a tough subject to address when so many of you may be heading for Iraq. I would prefer to speak of sweeter things. But I also know that 20 or 30 years from now any one of you may be the Chief of Staff or the National Security Adviser or even the President—after all, two of your boys, Grant and Eisenhower, did make it from West Point to the White House. And that being the case, it’s more important than ever that citizens and soldiers—and citizen-soldiers—honestly discuss and frankly consider the kind of country you are serving and the kind of organization to which you are dedicating your lives. You are, after all, the heirs of an army born in the American Revolution, whose radicalism we consistently underestimate.
No one understood this radicalism—no one in uniform did more to help us define freedom in a profoundly American way—than the man whose monument here at West Point I also asked to visit today—Thaddeus Kosciuszko. I first became intrigued by him over 40 years ago when I arrived in Washington. Lafayette Park, on Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the White House, hosts several statues of military heroes who came to fight for our independence in the American Revolution. For seven years, either looking down on these figures from my office at the Peace Corps, or walking across Lafayette Park to my office in the White House, I was reminded of these men who came voluntarily to fight for American independence from the monarchy. The most compelling, for me, was the depiction of Kosciuszko. On one side of the statue he is directing a soldier back to the battlefield, and on the other side, wearing an American uniform, he is freeing a bound soldier, representing America’s revolutionaries.
Kosciuszko had been born in Lithuania-Poland, where he was trained as an engineer and artillery officer. Arriving in the 13 colonies in 1776, he broke down in tears when he read the Declaration of Independence. The next year, he helped engineer the Battle of Saratoga, organizing the river and land fortifications that put Americans in the stronger position. George Washington then commissioned him to build the original fortifications for West Point. Since his monument dominates the point here at the Academy, this part of the story you must know well.
But what many don’t realize about Kosciuszko is the depth of his commitment to republican ideals and human equality. One historian called him “a mystical visionary of human rights.” Thomas Jefferson wrote that Kosciuszko was “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.” That phrase of Jefferson’s is often quoted, but if you read the actual letter, Jefferson goes on to say: “And of that liberty which is to go to all, and not to the few and the rich alone.”
There is the clue to the meaning of freedom as Thaddeus Kosciuszko saw it.
After the American Revolution, he returned to his homeland, what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1791 the Poles adopted their celebrated May Constitution—Europe’s first codified national constitution (and the second oldest in the world, after our own.) The May Constitution established political equality between the middle class and the nobility and also partially abolished serfdom by giving civil rights to the peasants, including the right to state protection from landlord abuses. The autocrats and nobles of Russia feared such reforms, and in 1794, when the Russians sought to prevent their spread by partitioning the Commonwealth, Kosciuszko led an insurrection. His untrained peasant forces were armed mostly with single-blade sickles, but they won several early battles in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, until they were finally overwhelmed. Badly injured, Kosciuszko was taken prisoner and held for two years in St. Petersburg, and that was the end of the Polish Commonwealth, which had stood, by the way, as one of Europe’s leading centers of religious liberty.
Upon his release from prison, Kosciuszko came back to the United States and began a lasting friendship with Jefferson, who called him his “most intimate and beloved friend.” In 1798, he wrote a will leaving his American estate to Jefferson, urging him to use it to purchase the freedom and education of his [Jefferson’s] own slaves, or, as Jefferson interpreted it, of “as many of the children as bondage in this country as it should be adequate to.” For this émigré, as for so many who would come later, the meaning of freedom included a passion for universal justice. In his Act of Insurrection at the outset of the 1794 uprising, Kosciuszko wrote of the people’s “sacred rights to liberty, personal security and property.” Note the term property here. For Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” Kosciuszko substituted Locke’s notion of property rights. But it’s not what you think: The goal was not simply to protect “private property” from public interference (as it is taught today), but rather to secure productive property for all as a right to citizenship. It’s easy to forget the difference when huge agglomerations of personal wealth are defended as a sacred right of liberty, as they are today with the gap between the rich and poor in America greater than it’s been in almost one hundred years. Kosciuszko—General Kosciuszko, from tip to toe a military man—was talking about investing the people with productive resources. Yes, freedom had to be won on the battlefield, but if freedom did not lead to political, social and economic opportunity for all citizens, freedom’s meaning could not be truly realized.
Think about it: A Polish general from the old world, infusing the new nation with what would become the marrow of the American Dream. Small wonder that Kosciuszko was often called a “hero of two worlds” or that just 25 years ago, in 1981, when Polish farmers, supported by the Roman Catholic Church, won the right to form an independent union, sending shockwaves across the Communist empire, Kosciuszko’s name was heard in the victory speeches—his egalitarian soul present at yet another revolution for human freedom and equal rights.
After Jefferson won the presidency in l800, Kosciuszko wrote him a touching letter advising him to be true to his principles: “do not forget in your post be always a virtuous Republican with justice and probity, without pomp and ambition—in a word be Jefferson and my friend.” Two years later, Jefferson signed into being this professional officers school, on the site first laid out as a fortress by his friend, the general from Poland.
A Paradox Of Liberty
Every turn in American history confronts us with paradox, and this one is no exception. Here was Jefferson, known for his vigorous and eloquent opposition to professional armies, presiding over the establishment of West Point. It’s a paradox that suits you cadets to a T, because you yourselves represent a paradox of liberty. You are free men and women who of your own free choice have joined an institution dedicated to protecting a free nation, but in the process you have voluntarily agreed to give up, for a specific time, a part of your own liberty. An army is not a debating society and neither in the field or in headquarters does it ask for a show of hands on whether orders should be obeyed. That is undoubtedly a necessary idea, but for you it complicates the already tricky question of “the meaning of freedom.”
I said earlier that our founders did not want the power of war to reside in a single man. Many were also dubious about having any kind of regular, or as they called it, “standing” army at all. Standing armies were hired supporters of absolute monarchs and imperial tyrants. The men drafting the Constitution were steeped in classical and historical learning. They recalled how Caesar in ancient times and Oliver Cromwell in more recent times had used the conquering armies they had led to make themselves dictators. They knew how the Roman legions had made and unmade emperors, and how Ottoman rulers of the Turkish Empire had supported their tyrannies on the shoulders of formidable elite warriors. Wherever they looked in history, they saw an alliance between enemies of freedom in palaces and in officer corps drawn from the ranks of nobility, bound by a warrior code that stressed honor and bravery—but also dedication to the sovereign and the sovereign’s god, and distrust amounting to contempt for the ordinary run of the sovereign’s subjects.
The colonial experience with British regulars, first as allies in the French and Indian Wars, and then as enemies, did not increase American respect for the old system of military leadership. Officers were chosen and promoted on the basis of aristocratic connections, commissions were bought, and ineptitude was too often tolerated. The lower ranks were often rootless alumni of jails and workhouses, lured or coerced into service by the paltry pay and chance of adventure—brutally hard types, kept in line by brutally harsh discipline.
Not exactly your model for the army of a republic of free citizens.
What the framers came up with was another novelty. The first battles of the Revolution were fought mainly by volunteer militia from the states, such as Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys, the most famous militia then. They were gung-ho for revolution and flushed with a fighting spirit. But in the end they were no substitute for the better-trained regiments of the Continental line and the French regulars sent over by France’s king after the alliance of 1778. The view nonetheless persisted that in times of peace, only a small permanent army would be needed to repel invasions—unlikely except from Canada—and deal with the frontier Indians. When and if a real crisis came, it was believed, volunteers would flock to the colors like the armed men of Greek mythology who sprang from dragon’s teeth planted in the ground by a divinely approved hero. The real safety of the nation in any hour of crisis would rest with men who spent most of their working lives behind the plow or in the workshop. And this was long before the huge conscript armies of the 19th and 20th centuries made that a commonplace fact.
And who would be in the top command of both that regular force and of volunteer forces when actually called into federal service? None other than the top elected civil official of the government, the President. Think about that for a moment. The professional army fought hard and long to create a system of selecting and keeping officers on the basis of proven competence, not popularity. But the highest commander of all served strictly at the pleasure of the people and had to submit his contract for renewal every four years.
And what of the need for trained and expert leadership at all the levels of command which quickly became apparent as the tools and tactics of warfare grew more sophisticated in a modernizing world? That’s where West Point came in, filling a need that could no longer be ignored. But what a special military academy it was! We tend to forget that the West Point curriculum was heavily tilted toward engineering; in fact, it was one of the nation’s first engineering colleges and it was publicly supported and free. That’s what made it attractive to young men like Hiram Ulysses Grant, familiarly known as “Sam,” who wasn’t anxious to be a soldier but wanted to get somewhere more promising than his father’s Ohio farm. Hundreds like Grant came to West Point and left to use their civil engineering skills in a country badly needing them, some in civil life after serving out an enlistment, but many right there in uniform. It was the army that explored, mapped and surveyed the wagon and railroad routes to the west, starting with the Corps of Exploration under Lewis and Clark sent out by the protean Mr. Jefferson. It was the army that had a hand in clearing rivers of snags and brush and building dams that allowed steamboats to avoid rapids. It was the army that put up lighthouses in the harbors and whose exhaustive geologic and topographic surveys were important contributions to publicly supported scientific research—AND to economic development—in the young republic.
All of this would surely have pleased General Kosciuszko, who believed in a society that leaves no one out. Indeed, add all these facts together and what you come up with is a portrait of something new under the sun—a peacetime army working directly with and for the civil society in improving the nation so as to guarantee the greater opportunities for individual success inherent in the promise of democracy. And a wartime army in which temporary citizen-solders were and still are led by long-term professional citizen-soldiers who were molded out of the same clay as those they command. And all of them led from the top by the one political figure chosen by the entire national electorate. This arrangement—this bargain between the men with the guns and the citizens who provide the guns—is the heritage passed on to you by the revolutionaries who fought and won America’s independence and then swore fidelity to a civil compact that survives today, despite tumultuous moments and perilous passages.
West Point's Importance
Once again we encounter a paradox: Not all our wars were on the side of freedom. The first that seriously engaged the alumni of West Point was the Mexican War, which was not a war to protect our freedoms but to grab land—facts are facts—and was not only bitterly criticized by part of the civilian population, but even looked on with skepticism by some graduates like Grant himself. Still, he not only fought well in it, but it was for him, as well as for most of the generals on both sides in the impending Civil War, an unequalled training school and rehearsal stage.
When the Civil War itself came, it offered an illustration of how the meaning of freedom isn’t always easy to pin down. From the point of view of the North, the hundreds of Southern West Pointers who resigned to fight for the Confederacy—Robert E. Lee included—were turning against the people’s government that had educated and supported them. They were traitors. But from the Southern point of view, they were fighting for the freedom of their local governments to leave the Union when, as they saw it, it threatened their way of life. Their way of life tragically included the right to hold other men in slavery.
The Civil War, nonetheless, confirmed the importance of West Point training. European military observers were amazed at the skill with which the better generals on both sides, meaning for the most part West Pointers and not political appointees, maneuvered huge armies of men over vast areas of difficult terrain, used modern technologies like the railroad and the telegraph to coordinate movements and accumulate supplies, and made the best use of newly developed weapons. The North had more of these advantages, and when the final victory came, adulation and admiration were showered on Grant and Sherman, who had come to a realistic and unromantic understanding of modern war, precisely because they had not been steeped in the mythologies of a warrior caste. Their triumph was seen as vindication of how well the army of a democracy could work. Just as Lincoln, the self-educated rail-splitter, had provided a civilian leadership that also proved him the equal of any potentate on the globe.
After 1865 the army shrank as its chief engagement was now in wiping out the last vestiges of Indian resistance to their dispossession and subjugation: One people’s advance became another’s annihilation and one of the most shameful episodes of our history. In 1898 the army was briefly used for the first effort in exporting democracy—an idea that does not travel well in military transports—when it warred with Spain to help the Cubans complete a war for independence that had been in progress for three years. The Cubans found their liberation somewhat illusory, however, when the United States made the island a virtual protectorate and allowed it to be ruled by a corrupt dictator.
Americans also lifted the yoke of Spain from the Filipinos, only to learn that they did not want to exchange it for one stamped ‘Made in the USA.’ It took a three-year war, during which the army killed several thousand so-called “insurgents” before their leader was captured and the Filipinos were cured of the illusion that independence meant…well, independence. I bring up these reminders not to defame the troops. Their actions were supported by a majority of the American people even in a progressive phase of our political history (though there was some principled and stiff opposition.) Nonetheless, we have to remind ourselves that the armed forces can’t be expected to be morally much better than the people who send them into action, and that when honorable behavior comes into conflict with racism, honor is usually the loser unless people such as yourself fight to maintain it.
Our brief participation in the First World War temporarily expanded the army, helped by a draft that had also proven necessary in the Civil War. But rapid demobilization was followed by a long period of ever-shrinking military budgets, especially for the land forces.
Not until World War II did the Army again take part in such a long, bloody, and fateful conflict as the Civil War had been, and like the Civil War it opened an entirely new period in American history. The incredibly gigantic mobilization of the entire nation, the victory it produced, and the ensuing 60 years of wars, quasi-wars, mini-wars, secret wars, and a virtually permanent crisis created a superpower and forever changed the nation’s relationship to its armed forces, confronting us with problems we have to address, no matter how unsettling it may be to do so in the midst of yet another war.
The Bargain
The Armed Services are no longer stepchildren in budgetary terms. Appropriations for defense and defense-related activities (like veterans’ care, pensions, and debt service) remind us that the costs of war continue long after the fighting ends. Objections to ever-swelling defensive expenditures are, except in rare cases, a greased slide to political suicide. It should be troublesome to you as professional soldiers that elevation to the pantheon of untouchable icons —right there alongside motherhood, apple pie and the flag—permits a great deal of political lip service to replace genuine efforts to improve the lives and working conditions—in combat and out—of those who serve.
Let me cut closer to the bone. The chickenhawks in Washington, who at this very moment are busily defending you against supposed “insults” or betrayals by the opponents of the war in Iraq, are likewise those who have cut budgets for medical and psychiatric care; who have been so skimpy and late with pay and with provision of necessities that military families in the United States have had to apply for food stamps; who sent the men and women whom you may soon be commanding into Iraq understrength, underequipped, and unprepared for dealing with a kind of war fought in streets and homes full of civilians against enemies undistinguishable from non-combatants; who have time and again broken promises to the civilian National Guardsmen bearing much of the burden by canceling their redeployment orders and extending their tours.
You may or may not agree on the justice and necessity of the war itself, but I hope that you will agree that flattery and adulation are no substitute for genuine support. Much of the money that could be directed to that support has gone into high-tech weapons systems that were supposed to produce a new, mobile, compact “professional” army that could easily defeat the armies of any other two nations combined, but is useless in a war against nationalist or religious guerrilla uprisings that, like it or not, have some support, coerced or otherwise, among the local population. We learned this lesson in Vietnam, only to see it forgotten or ignored by the time this administration invaded Iraq, creating the conditions for a savage sectarian and civil war with our soldiers trapped in the middle, unable to discern civilian from combatant, where it is impossible to kill your enemy faster than rage makes new ones.
And who has been the real beneficiary of creating this high-tech army called to fight a war conceived and commissioned and cheered on by politicians and pundits not one of whom ever entered a combat zone? One of your boys answered that: Dwight Eisenhower, class of 1915, who told us that the real winners of the anything at any price philosophy would be “the military-industrial complex.”
I want to contend that the American military systems that evolved in the early days of this republic rested on a bargain between the civilian authorities and the armed services, and that the army has, for the most part, kept its part of the bargain and that, at this moment, the civilian authorities whom you loyally obey, are shirking theirs. And before you assume that I am calling for an insurrection against the civilian deciders of your destinies, hear me out, for that is the last thing on my mind.
You have kept your end of the bargain by fighting well when called upon, by refusing to become a praetorian guard for a reigning administration at any time, and for respecting civil control at all times. For the most part, our military leaders have made no serious efforts to meddle in politics. The two most notable cases were General George McClellan, who endorsed a pro-Southern and pro-slavery policy in the first year of the war and was openly contemptuous of Lincoln. But Lincoln fired him in 1862, and when McClellan ran for President two years later, the voting public handed him his hat. Douglas MacArthur’s attempt to dictate his own China policy in 1951 ran head-on into the resolve of Harry Truman, who, surviving a firestorm of hostility, happily watched a MacArthur boomlet for the Republican nomination for the Presidency fizzle out in 1952.
On the other side of the ledger, however, I believe that the bargain has not been kept. The last time Congress declared war was in 1941. Since then presidents of the United States, including the one I served, have gotten Congress, occasionally under demonstrably false pretenses, to suspend Constitutional provisions that required them to get the consent of the people’s representatives in order to conduct a war. They have been handed a blank check to send the armed forces into action at their personal discretion and on dubious Constitutional grounds.
Furthermore, the current President has made extra-Constitutional claims of authority by repeatedly acting as if he were Commander-in-Chief of the entire nation and not merely of the armed forces. Most dangerously to our moral honor and to your own welfare in the event of capture, he has likewise ordered the armed forces to violate clear mandates of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions by claiming a right to interpret them at his pleasure, so as to allow indefinite and secret detentions and torture. These claims contravene a basic principle usually made clear to recruits from their first day in service—that they may not obey an unlawful order. The President is attempting to have them violate that longstanding rule by personal definitions of what the law says and means.
There is yet another way the chickenhawks are failing you. In the October issue of the magazine of the California Nurses Association, you can read a long report on “The Battle at Home.” In veterans’ hospitals across the country—and in a growing number of ill-prepared, under-funded psych and primary care clinics as well—the report says that nurses “have witnessed the guilt, rage, emotional numbness, and tormented flashbacks of GIs just back from Iraq.” Yet “a returning vet must wait an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability benefits,” and an appeal can take up to three years. Just in the first quarter of this year, the VA treated 20,638 Iraq veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, and faces a backlog of 400,000 cases. This is reprehensible.
I repeat: These are not palatable topics for soldiers about to go to war; I would like to speak of sweeter things. But freedom means we must face reality: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Free enough, surely, to think for yourselves about these breaches of contract that crudely undercut the traditions of an army of free men and women who have bound themselves voluntarily to serve the nation even unto death.
The Voice Of Conscience
What, then, can you do about it if disobedience to the chain of command is ruled out?
For one, you didn’t give up your freedom to vote, nor did you totally quit your membership in civil society, when you put on the uniform, even though, as Eisenhower said, you did accept “certain inhibitions” at the time. He said that when questioned about MacArthur’s dismissal, and he made sure his own uniform was back in the trunk before his campaign in 1952. It has been most encouraging, by the way, to see veterans of Iraq on the campaign trail in our recent elections.
Second, remember that there are limitations to what military power can do. Despite the valor and skills of our fighting forces, some objectives are not obtainable at a human, diplomatic, and financial cost that is acceptable. Our casualties in Iraq are not “minute” and the cost of the war has been projected by some sources to reach $2 trillion dollars. Sometimes, in the real world, a truce is the most honorable solution to conflict. Dwight Eisenhower—who is a candidate for my favorite West Point graduate of the 20th century—knew that when, in 1953, he went to Korea and accepted a stalemate rather than carrying out his bluff of using nuclear weapons. That was the best that could be done and it saved more years of stalemate and casualties. Douglas MacArthur announced in 1951 that “there was no substitute for victory.” But in the wars of the 21st century there are alternative meanings to victory and alternative ways to achieve them. Especially in tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a “war on terror”—what, pray tell, exactly is that?—to the mindset of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia, or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process. Help us to think beyond a “war on terror”—which politicians could wage without end, with no measurable way to judge its effectiveness, against stateless enemies who hope we will destroy the neighborhood, creating recruits for their side—to counter-terrorism modeled on extraordinary police work.
Third, don’t let your natural and commendable loyalty to comrades-in-arms lead you into thinking that criticism of the mission you are on spells lack of patriotism. Not every politician who flatters you is your ally. Not every one who believes that war is the wrong choice to some problems is your enemy. Blind faith in bad leadership is not patriotism. In the words of G.K. Chesterton: “To say my country right or wrong is something no patriot would utter except in dire circumstance; it is like saying my mother drunk or sober.” Patriotism means insisting on our political leaders being sober, strong, and certain about what they are doing when they put you in harm’s way.
Fourth, be more prepared to accept the credibility and integrity of those who disagree about the war even if you do not agree with their positions. I say this as a journalist, knowing it is tempting in the field to denounce or despise reporters who ask nosy questions or file critical reports. But their first duty as reporters is to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth and report it to the American people—for your sake. If there is mismanagement and incompetence, exposing it is more helpful to you than paeans to candy given to the locals. I trust you are familiar with the study done for the Army in 1989 by the historian, William Hammond. He examined press coverage in Korea and Vietnam and found that it was not the cause of disaffection at home; what disturbed people at home was the death toll; when casualties jumped, public support dropped. Over time, he said, the reporting was vindicated. In fact, “the press reports were often more accurate than the public statements of the administration in portraying the situation in Vietnam.” Take note: The American people want the truth about how their sons and daughters are doing in Iraq and what they’re up against, and that is a good thing.
Finally, and this above all—a lesson I wish I had learned earlier. If you rise in the ranks to important positions—or even if you don’t—speak the truth as you see it, even if the questioner is a higher authority with a clear preference for one and only one answer. It may not be the way to promote your career; it can in fact harm it. Among my military heroes of this war are the generals who frankly told the President and his advisers that their information and their plans were both incomplete and misleading—and who paid the price of being ignored and bypassed and possibly frozen forever in their existing ranks: men like General Eric K. Shinseki, another son of West Point. It is not easy to be honest—and fair—in a bureaucratic system. But it is what free men and women have to do. Be true to your principles, General Kosciuszko reminded Thomas Jefferson. If doing so exposes the ignorance and arrogance of power, you may be doing more to save the nation than exploits in combat can achieve.
I know the final rule of the military Code of Conduct is already written in your hearts: “I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free...” The meaning of freedom begins with the still, small voice of conscience, when each of us decides what we will live, or die, for.
I salute your dedication to America and I wish all of you good luck.
Bill Moyers is deeply grateful to his colleagues Bernard A Weisberger, Professor Emeritus of History at The University of Chicago, and Lew Daly, Senior Fellow of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, for their contributions to this speech.
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Vets for Peace Meeting, Tues. Dec 12, 7 pm Title Wave Books
Vets,
Our next Vets for Peace meeting is Tues. Dec 12, 7 pm at Title Wave Books on
There will be music making on Monday night, Dec. 11 at Café Felix on
VFP is participating in a national drive (a joint project of Working Assets, CODEPINK, Veterans for Peace, Gold Star Families for Peace, and Iraq Veterans Against the War) to get phone cards to vets in VA hospitals across the country on Monday, Dec 18. I have signed up to participate. I hope you can join me. Here is the link: http://www.workingassets.com/webgraphics/WALD/cardsforvets.html
The latest email I got from VFP had this tag—I like it!
VETERANS WORKING TOGETHER FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE THROUGH NON-VIOLENCE.
WAGE PEACE!
Veterans For Peace, 216 S. Meramec, St. Louis , MO 63105
www.veteransforpeace.org
Jon Lockert
Breathe, smile & work for Peace
Saturday, December 02, 2006
War Films Saturday & Monday
“The War Tapes”
Saturday, 12.02 @ 6pm •
MUSEUM of History & Art (audience discussion to follow)
THE WAR TAPES is the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves. It is Operation Iraqi Freedom as filmed by Sergeant Steve Pink, Sergeant Zack Bazzi and Specialist Mike Moriarty. Each leaves a loved one behind - a girlfriend, a mother, a spouse. Through their candid footage, these men open their hearts and take us on an unforgettable journey, capturing camaraderie and humor along with the brutal and terrifying experiences they face. The film, directed by Deborah Scranton, and produced by Robert May (THE FOG OF WAR) and Steve James (HOOP DREAMS) recently won the award for Best Documentary at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.
“Caught in the Crossfire - The Untold Story of Falluja”
Saturday, 12.02 @ 8pm •
MUSEUM of History & Art
(panel discussion/audience Q&A to follow; panel to include Sergeant Zach Bazzi from the film The War Tapes and locals)
Independent filmmaker Mark Manning and Iraqi humanitarian aid worker Rana Mustafa traveled to Falluja, un-embedded, to live with the refugees of Falluja and experience life from their point of view, returning with them to their destroyed city after Operation Phantom Fury in November 2004. They experienced the checkpoints, witnessed the devastation of thousands of homes, shops and mosques, and documented the horrors of the siege as recounted by those who survived inside the city during the battles. This film brings to the audience word of the attack on Falluja and the plight of its innocent victims largely ignored by the American government and media.
Monday, 12.04 @ 8:30pm • FIREWEED Theater (Sergeant Zack Bazzi will introduce the film; panel discussion/audience Q&A to follow; panel will include Zach Bazzi)
Jon Lockert
Breathe, smile & work for Peace
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Reminder VFP Meeting, Thursday, Nov. 30 7 pm Title Wave Books
Vets,
Reminder VFP Meeting, Thursday, Nov. 30 7 pm Title Wave Books.
I just checked the VFP website and it looks like the next big national anti-war action will take place in
See http://www.unitedforpeace.org/ for details of the demonstration in January.
A partial list of sponsors:
Many national organizations are members of the UFPJ coalition, including: American Friends Service Committee, Black Radical Congress, Center for Constitutional Rights, CODEPINK, Friends of the Earth, Global Exchange, Gold Star Families for Peace, Green Party of the United States, Greenpeace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, National Organization for Women, National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, Not in Our Name, PAX Christi USA, RainbowPUSH Coalition, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, TrueMajority, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, US Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and War Resisters League.
Jon Lockert
Breathe, smile & work for Peace
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Vets for Peace Meeting, Thurs 11/30 7 pm Title Wave Books
After one week in Colorado, two weeks in the Grand Canyon and the election! have prompted reflection on what I am doing and how. I realize that even though the American people have voted their concerns about this war, we are a long way from seeing that more war is not the way to make peace. Our voices as Vets are even more important to help our leaders find the way out of the morass.
I have heard from the National Office and we finally have our 10 documented Vets! I will find out exactly what our next steps are to become an official chapter. A writeup done by member Ron McGee on Ernest Gruening was sent to everyone on the mailing list. If you would like to propose naming our chapter after anyone else, please be prepared to make your case. Better yet, if you would send me your suggestion, I will distribute before the meeting so we get this settled.
I look forward to catching up with everyone. Thanks in advance to any of you who can show up at the downtown PAC at 3 pm on Friday, 11/24 (meet inside the PAC outside the Discovery theater). The event for the military families precedes the following tree lighting ceremony at 5:30. So come down early, help out and then enjoy this public event.
PAC 11/24
Jon Lockert
I have heard from the National Office and we finally have our 10 documented Vets! I will find out exactly what our next steps are to become an official chapter. A writeup done by member Ron McGee on Ernest Gruening was sent to everyone on the mailing list. If you would like to propose naming our chapter after anyone else, please be prepared to make your case. Better yet, if you would send me your suggestion, I will distribute before the meeting so we get this settled.
I look forward to catching up with everyone. Thanks in advance to any of you who can show up at the downtown PAC at 3 pm on Friday, 11/24 (meet inside the PAC outside the Discovery theater). The event for the military families precedes the following tree lighting ceremony at 5:30. So come down early, help out and then enjoy this public event.
PAC 11/24
Jon Lockert
Monday, November 20, 2006
Military Support from Vets for Peace, PAC, Fri 11/24 @ 3 pm
We need some folks to orient the military folks in the right direction after they come into the PAC. You would be on the inside standing by the main entrances. If you could get there around 3:00 PM we could give you the basic information and get you familiar with what we are doing. The reception will be in the Voth Hall (second level) right next to the Discovery Theatre. My Cell is 230-2626 and you can call me when you get there. We are expecting 200 – 300 people to show up for the reception. The reception will have lots of good food, gifts, and entertainment for the kids.
Hope to see you there.CW
I am sending this response to everyone on Vets for Peace mailing list. Could you provide some more detail on when we should show up at the PAC? I assume we would want to get there a bit before 3:30 so we can get oriented as to the instructions we will be giving out. Would we be standing outside or near a door where we would want to dress more warmly than usual? I am sure that we can provide some folks to help out.
CW Floyd (floydcw@muni.org)
Hope to see you there.CW
I am sending this response to everyone on Vets for Peace mailing list. Could you provide some more detail on when we should show up at the PAC? I assume we would want to get there a bit before 3:30 so we can get oriented as to the instructions we will be giving out. Would we be standing outside or near a door where we would want to dress more warmly than usual? I am sure that we can provide some folks to help out.
Message From CW
I wanted to make you aware that next Friday, November 24, 2006; we are having our annual Tree Lighting Ceremony at
The First Lady Military & Family Support Initiative is sponsoring the reception in conjunction with AT&T, the Downtown Partnership, and the Armed Services YMCA. We could use some volunteers to serve as “greeters” to help direct the military families to the correct location in the
This is our 2nd year for this event and it is a lot of fun. I hope you can participate.
CW Floyd (floydcw@muni.org)
Monday, October 23, 2006
Vets for peace co-sponser of movie.
Alaskan's for Peace and Justice are showing the documentary film The Ground Truth on November 3 in room 118 in the social sciences building on the UAA campus. It will start at 7:00 PM. This film consist of interviews with soldiers that have been in combat in Iraq.
We've been asked to co-sponser this event. I took the liberty to say yes to the request, so our name will show up as a co-sponser for the event.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Re: volunteer opportunities to help active duty folks and their families
Van:
Please let me know what you need, and I'll help.
Ron McGee
786-4184
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
volunteer opportunities to help active duty folks and their families
Hello folks,
Jon asked met to try to schedule a meeting for our group as soon as possible after our recent meeting (Oct 6) with the municipality veterans affairs folks to see how we can help the families left behind by the stryker brigade. Rather than schedule a meeting, I think I can pose the questions via email.
There are 3 different areas we can assist in:
1. Debra Bonito is scheduleing 2 events (one in November and one in December ) for military families. She needs folks that are willing to provide activities for youth and children at this event. If you have talents in these areas and are willing to volunteer an evening with the military youth and children please let me know, and I'll pass your name on to Debra.
2. The armed services YMCA is schedulinga silent auction on October 21 to benefit military families, and they need items for the auction. If you have items to donate please let me know. We also need folks to call or visit local merchants and ask them to donate items for the auction. If you are willing to do this in your spare time please let me know.
3. The third area we can help is buying, solociting, or donating items for care packages for the soldiers in Afganistan and Iraq. If you are willing to buy a few items (usually less tha 10 bucks worth of stuff plus 10 bucks postage). We can also staff a booth at the ymca or mayor's events to get people to send care packages (we would be distributing pre addressed boxes).
Please get back to me if you are interested in helping in any of these areas, and I will forward your name to the appropriate person.
Thanks, van
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
RE: Armed Services YMCA of Alaska needs help
Diane & Vets,
Here is a specific request for help from the Armed Services YMCA of Alaska for an event on 10/21 (via Diane DiSanto with the Mayor’s office). Beyond the obvious donation of items to the silent auction, I am not sure if they are looking for folks to help out in person (especially if we are identifying ourselves as members of Vets for Peace. Since I am leaving town on Sat, 10/7, please include Van Waggoner with any comments you might have about this.
Serving Those Who Serve
The Armed Services YMCA is a non-profit organization that was designed to meet the challenges facing today's Military and their families most in need. The programs we offer complement and supplement those provided by the Armed Forces - in essence we try to fill in the gaps and we need your help to keep these programs going.
The ASYMCA is hosting Alaska Military Gold Rush, a silent auction, on October 21, 2006 at the Anchorage Railroad Depot downtown. We are asking for your assistance to make this event memorable by donating door prizes and silent auction items. Not only will you be enhancing the morale among our troops and families, you will be recognized as a business that supports our Armed Forces. We would also like to extend an invitation to join us for the festivities.
I will be in touch with you in the next couple of weeks regarding your continued support of our Alaskan Military. Feel free to call me with any questions and we look forward to seeing you at the event. Thank you in advance for your support and assistance to this worthy cause.
The Armed Services YMCA qualifies as a 501(c)(3) tax -Exempt Corporation, making your donation tax deductible. TAX I.D. # 92-0016680. The Armed Services YMCA did not provide any goods, services or remuneration in consideration, in whole or in part, for the above donation.
Sincerely,
Mari Jo Imig
Deputy Director
Armed Services YMCA of
Looking for someone who would be willing to support the Bush Adm's position on the war in Iraq
Sharon,
Sharon, Interfaith folks and Vets,
Sharon wrote to me: As you may know, I am organizing a session here at UAA
while Kathy Kelly is in Alaska. It is on Monday, October 16th at 2:30. I am
arranging this as panel discussion and am looking for someone who would be
willing to speak for the Bush Adm.'s position on the war in Iraq.
My response: The only person I can think of is Rev Rick Koch who is a
chaplain in the Army. He spoke at our forum on the 3rd anniversary of the
war last March. He basically stuck to what he saw while serving in the north
of Iraq where indeed the Kurds are relatively OK with the US occupation. He
did not venture beyond the view of just "helping out, until...???" So he did
not venture into policy or long-term plans or objectives.
I am cc'ing my contacts in the Anchorage Interfaith group who would
certainly know how to get in contact with Rick. If Rick is not able or
willing, maybe someone in this group could offer you a name.
The other person I can think of is Laddie Shaw (landlshaw@gci.net) who is a
Vietnam Vet who guessed that he and I would disagree on some things when I
invited him to join Vets for Peace. I will also cc my Vets for Peace folks
to see if they know of anyone.
Jon Lockert
jon4paz@acsalaska.net
Breathe, smile & work for Peace
-----Original Message-----
From: Sharon K. Araji [mailto:afska1@uaa.alaska.edu]
Jon,
As you may know, I am organizing a session here at UAA while Kathy Kelly
is in Alaska. It is on Monday, October 16th at 2:30. I am arranging this
as panel discussion and am looking for someone who would be willing to
speak for the Bush Adm.'s position on the war in Iraq. Do you or anyone
in the AK for Peace and Justice know who I might contact? I have gone
through a list of about 8 people and only found one who is willing to
take this position.
Thanks,
Sharon K. ARaji
jon4paz@acsalaska.net wrote:
>Note: For those of us who think we can somehow muddle thru in Iraq, the
military folks cited in this article will dissuade you from our wishful
thinking. While it is long article, the kind of world we will live in for
years to come depends on the choices we make now. Please pass on to as many
folks as you can.
>
>Revolt of the Generals
>By Richard J. Whalen, The Nation
>Thursday 28 September 2006
>
> A revolt is brewing among our retired Army and Marine generals.This
rebellion - quiet and nonconfrontational, but remarkable nonetheless - comes
not because their beloved forces are bearing thebrunt of ground combat in
Iraq but because the retirees see the USadventure in Mesopotamia as another
Vietnam-like, strategically failedwar, and they blame the errant, arrogant
civilian leadership at thePentagon. The dissenters include two generals who
led combat troops inIraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the
82nd AirborneDivision, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First
InfantryDivision (the "Big Red One"). These men recently sacrificed
theircareers by retiring and joining the public protest.
>
> In late September Batiste, along with two other retired seniorofficers,
spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democraticpolicy hearing,
with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeldwas "not a competent
wartime leader" who made "dismal strategicdecisions" that "resulted in the
unnecessary deaths of Americanservicemen and women, our allies and the good
people of Iraq."Rumsfeld, he said, "dismissed honest dissent" and "did not
tell theAmerican people the truth for fear of losing support for the
war."</p><p class="mobile-post"> This kind of protest among senior
military retirees during wartimeis unprecedented in American history - and
it is also deeply worrisome.The retired officers opposing the war and
demanding Rumsfeld's ousterrepresent a new political force, and therefore a
potentially powerfulfactor in the future of our democracy. The former
generals' growinglobby could acquire a unique veto power in the future by
publiclyopposing reckless civilian warmaking
>Once we get our troops safely out, a newly elected, post-2008administration
in Washington may be able to begin reassemblingAmerica's scattered global
allies to address the region's problemsanew, next time multilaterally, and
through diplomacy rather thanpre-emptive unilateral military force.</p><p
class="mobile-post"> America is a uniquely favored nation that redefines
itself in eachgeneration. But we have had a lifetime of embracing one
democraticglobal war, and numerous presidentially inspired, politicized
andsecret smaller wars that have turned out badly. Sixty-five years
afterPearl Harbor, we owe it to the past three generations to resume
thedebate on our national identity, suspended on December 7, 1941,
andforeshortened on September 11, 2001.</p><p class="mobile-post"> In the
post-cold war era, we have severely cut back our militarymanpower, reducing
the regular Army to only 480,000 troops, but we havenot cut back
fantastically expensive Air Force weapons systems or thesom
>A key argument in the ex-generals' indictment is this undeniablefact: Our
armed forces are too small to police and reorder the worldand intervene
almost blindly, as we have in Iraq. That invasion actedout the
world-changing daydreams of pro-Israel neoconservative policyintellectuals
like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others who gainedwarmaking power and
influence atop the Pentagon but who evidently neverasked themselves, Suppose
we're wrong? What happens then? Sober,realistic Israelis privately fear the
neocons' "friendship," and whereit has led America, more than any Arab
enemies. In the inevitablepost-Iraq War tsunami of US political
recrimination, such Israelisforesee Christian Zionist evangelicals, whose
lobbying muscle inCongress was decisive in the run-up to the Iraq War,
attempting toscapegoat the high-profile neocons and endangering
Israel'sall-important security ties to the United States.</p><p
class="mobile-post"> Growing public disgust and frustration with the Iraq
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Alaskans Working Together to End the War in Iraq
>
>REPLY TO: peace@alaskans4peace.org
>
>
Monday, October 02, 2006
VFP-Southcentral Mailing List
Van,
Here is my VFP Mailing List. If you would like me to add anyone to the list, just let me know. If anyone wants to be taken off, now would be a good time to let me know.
Jon Lockert
Breathe, smile & work for Peace
Revolt of the Generals
Revolt of the Generals
By Richard J. Whalen, The Nation
Thursday 28 September 2006
A revolt is brewing among our retired Army and Marine generals.This rebellion - quiet and nonconfrontational, but remarkablenonetheless - comes not because their beloved forces are bearing thebrunt of ground combat in Iraq but because the retirees see the USadventure in Mesopotamia as another Vietnam-like, strategically failedwar, and they blame the errant, arrogant civilian leadership at thePentagon. The dissenters include two generals who led combat troops inIraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd AirborneDivision, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First InfantryDivision (the "Big Red One"). These men recently sacrificed theircareers by retiring and joining the public protest.
In late September Batiste, along with two other retired seniorofficers, spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democraticpolicy hearing, with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeldwas "not a competent wartime leader" who made "dismal strategicdecisions" that "resulted in the unnecessary deaths of Americanservicemen and women, our allies and the good people of Iraq."Rumsfeld, he said, "dismissed honest dissent" and "did not tell theAmerican people the truth for fear of losing support for the war."
This kind of protest among senior military retirees during wartimeis unprecedented in American history - and it is also deeply worrisome.The retired officers opposing the war and demanding Rumsfeld's ousterrepresent a new political force, and therefore a potentially powerfulfactor in the future of our democracy. The former generals' growinglobby could acquire a unique veto power in the future by publiclyopposing reckless civilian warmaking in advance.
No one should be surprised by the antiwar dissent emerging amongthose who have commanded our legions on the fringes of the US militaryempire. After more than sixty-five years of increasingly centralizedand secret presidential warmaking, we have concentrated ultimatecivilian authority in fewer and fewer hands. Some of these leaders havebeen proved by events to be incompetent.
I speak regularly to retired generals, former intelligence officersand former Pentagon officials and aides, all of whom remain close totheir active-duty friends and protégés. These well-informed seniorstell me that whatever the original US objective was in Iraq, ourunderstrength forces and flawed strategy have failed, and that wecannot repair this failure by remaining there indefinitely. Fundamentalchanges are needed, and senior officers are prepared to make them.According to my sources, some active-duty officers are working behindthe scenes to end the war and are preparing for the inevitable USwithdrawal. "The only question is whether a war serves the nationalinterest," declares a retired three-star general. "Iraq does not."
How widespread is antiwar feeling among the retired and active-dutysenior military? And does it extend into the younger active-dutyofficer corps? These are unanswerable questions. The soldiers whodefend our democracy on the battlefield fight within military, andtherefore nondemocratic, organizations. They are sworn to uphold theConstitution and obey orders. Traditionally, they debate only on the"inside."
Earlier this year, Gen. George Casey, the top American commander inIraq, drafted a highly classified briefing plan that was leaked to theNew York Times in June. It called for sharply reducing US troop levelsin Iraq from the current fourteen combat brigades to a half-dozen or soby late December 2007. The plan contained a great many caveats, andevents soon rendered it obsolete. Now General Casey says the Iraqisecurity forces may be ready to take the lead role in twelve toeighteen months, but he says nothing about troop withdrawals.
Casey's leaked plan revealed the thinking of some of today'stop-level officers. These senior military men believe that our forceswill have to win the potentially decisive battle for Baghdad before theUnited States can leave. In August the Army announced an urgenttransfer of American forces from insecure western Iraq to the capitalin preparation for that coming battle. The move barely doubled thenumber of troops in Baghdad, to only 14,000 GIs spread over a sprawlingmetropolis with a population exceeding 7 million.
On August 3 the commander of US forces in the Middle East, Gen.John Abizaid, the universally respected, Arabic-speakingwarrior-scholar who knows Iraq intimately, testified before the SenateArmed Services Committee that worsening Iraqi sectarian violence,especially in Baghdad, "could move [Iraq] towards civil war." Inprivate, senior officers openly refer to civil war, and have indicatedthat the Army would depart in such circumstances to avoid being caughtin the crossfire.
The dissenting retired generals are bent on making Iraq thisnation's last strategically failed war - that is, one doggedly waged bycivilian officials largely to avoid personal accountability for theirbad decisions. A failed war causes mounting human and other costs,damaging or entirely destroying the national interest it was supposedto serve.
Let me interject a personal note. At the height of the Vietnam War,between 1966 and 1968, I was a conservative Republican in my early 30son the campaign staff of the likely next President, Richard Nixon. WhatI heard from junior officers returning from Vietnam convinced me thatUS military involvement there should give way to diplomacy. We nolonger had a coherent political objective, and were fighting only toavoid admitting defeat. I wrote Nixon's secret plan for "ending the warand winning the peace," a rhetorical screen for striking a summit dealwith the Soviet Union, followed by a historic opening to China thatwould allow us to extricate ourselves from what we belatedly recognizedwas an anti-Chinese Indochina.
After I left Nixon's staff in August 1968, I helped end the draft.In 1969-70, I co-wrote and edited the Report of the President'sCommission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force. Our blockbuster proposal toend the draft combined political expediency and libertarian idealism.Our staff's numbers crunchers calculated that if we raised enlistedmen's pay scales, retention rates among the sons of lower- tomiddle-income families would stay high enough to create a de factoall-volunteer Army. So why not take credit for acting on principle?Nixon's domestic adviser Martin Anderson pushed it, the privatecomputers of consultant Alan Greenspan (who would go on to become chairof the Federal Reserve System) confirmed it and I delivered the textthat the commission accepted. Nixon, for once, enjoyed the media'sacclaim. The draft was swiftly abolished.
The Iraq War only confirms the wisdom of the nation's commitment tothe all-volunteer armed forces. A draft would merely prolong the Iraqagony, not avoid defeat. More than 2,700 GIs killed and more than20,000 wounded, along with tens of thousands of dead and woundedIraqis, are enough to carry on the nation's conscience.
Some of the officers from the first generation of the volunteerArmy, now mostly retired, are speaking out and influencing theiractive-duty colleagues. Retired Lieut. Gen. William Odom calls the IraqWar "the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States"and draws a grim parallel with the Vietnam War. He says that USstrategy in Iraq, as in Vietnam, has served almost exclusively theinterests of our enemies. He says that our objectives in Vietnam passedthrough three phases leading to defeat. These were: (1) 1961-65,"containing" China; (2) 1965-68, obsession with US tactics, leading to"Americanization" of the war; and (3) 1968-75, phony diplomacy andself-deluding "Vietnamization." Iraq has now completed two similarphases and is entering the third, says Odom, now a senior fellow at theHudson Institute. In March he wrote in the newsletter of Harvard'sNieman Foundation:
Will Phase Three in Iraq end with U.S. helicopters flying out ofBaghdad's Green Zone? It all sounds so familiar. The difference lies inthe consequences. Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on U.S.power that Iraq is already having. On this point, those who deny theVietnam-Iraq analogy are probably right. They are wrong, however, inbelieving that staying the course will have any result other thanmaking the damage to U.S. power far greater than would changing courseand making an orderly withdrawal.... But even in its differences,Vietnam can be instructive about Iraq. Once the U.S. position inVietnam collapsed, Washington was free to reverse the negative trendsit faced in NATO and U.S.-Soviet military balance, in the worldeconomy, in its international image, and in other areas. Only bygetting out of Iraq can the United States possibly gain sufficientinternational support to design a new strategy for limiting theburgeoning growth of anti-Western forces it has unleashed....
The fact that so many retired generals are speaking out against thewar and against Rumsfeld, and are doing so at such forums as New York'sprestigious Council on Foreign Relations, reflects the depth andintensity of the military's dissent. Traditional discipline andcareer-protecting reticence prompt many disillusioned field-gradeofficers (majors and above) to keep silent. These are "the Carlisleelite," who attend the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,and from whose ranks are selected the generals and top leaders oftomorrow.
The military's senior active-duty leadership will not openlyrevolt. "We're not the French generals in Algeria," says Maj. Gen. PaulEaton. "But we damned well know that the Iraq War we've won militarilyis being lost politically." The well-read retired Marine Lieut. Gen.Gregory Newbold wrote in a Time magazine essay: "I retired from themilitary four months before the [March 2003] invasion, in part becauseof my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack oursecurity policy." Newbold calls the Iraq War "unnecessary" and says thecivilians who launched the war acted with "a casualness and swagger"that are "the special province" of those who have never smelled deathon a battlefield.
When civilian Pentagon officials bungled the long, dishonorableendgame of the Vietnam War, disciplined senior soldiers kept silent.After that war ended in US defeat and humiliation, a flood of firsthandmilitary accounts of the war appeared. Embittered generals and otherofficers, like future general Colin Powell, vowed it would never happenagain.
Today, a retired major general privately asserts: "For ourgeneration, Iraq will be Vietnam with the volume turned way up. Threedecades ago, the retired generals who are now speaking out against theIraq War were junior officers in Vietnam. The seniors who trained andmentored us, and who became generals but who kept silent, did not speakout after retirement against Vietnam." Now, even before the Iraq Warhas ended, generals have shed their uniforms and begun publicly tofight back against Rumsfeld's bullying and a new generation of Pentagoncivilians' bloodstained mistakes. These former generals despiseRumsfeld, with several, like Batiste, describing him as totallydismissive of their views. They recall repeatedly trying to warnRumsfeld before the Iraq invasion that the US forces he was planning todeploy were barely half the 400,000 they said were needed.
Rumsfeld publicly humiliated all who dissented, beginning with ArmyChief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was virtually dismissed the dayhe honestly gave his views to Congress. Rumsfeld's deputy,neoconservative ideologue Paul Wolfowitz, listened respectfully beforerejecting the generals' advice. As the Iraqi insurgency grew, thegenerals found Rumsfeld "completely unable and unwilling to understandthe collapse of security in Iraq," says Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, nowretired. The severely understrength US forces have never been able toprovide adequate security. Once Iraqi civilians lost their trust andconfidence in America's protection, the war was lost politically. AsGeneral Newbold says: "Our opposition to Rumsfeld is all about hisaccountability for getting Iraq wrong from day one."
Bureaucratic accountability comes hard and very slowly. Accordingto a stark consensus of global terrorism trends by America's sixteenseparate espionage agencies, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq"helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and [expand] theoverall terrorist threat." This highly classified National IntelligenceEstimate is, according to the New York Times, "the first report sincethe war began to present a comprehensive picture" of global terrorismtrends.
There's blame enough to go around. In his recently publishedbestseller Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, ThomasRicks, the Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, offers adevastating, heavily documented indictment of almost incrediblecivilian and military shortsightedness and incompetence, such as thefoolish decisions that encouraged the Iraqi insurgency. "When wedisbanded the Iraqi Army, we created a significant part of the Iraqiinsurgency," explains Col. Paul Hughes, whose advice to retain the armywas rejected. Before he retired he told Ricks, "Unless we ensure thatwe have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically." The mostcritical political-strategic decisions about post-Saddam Iraq's futurewere made by deeply mistaken civilian officials in Washington and inthe Green Zone by our "viceroy," Paul Bremer, administrator of theCoalition Provisional Authority.
The senior military dissenters will not rest until they indict themistakes of Rumsfeld and his principal civilian aides at Congressionalhearings. The military always plays this game of accountability forkeeps. Should the Democrats gain control of a Congressional chamber inthe November midterms, televised Capitol Hill hearings in 2007 willfeature military protagonists speaking of "betrayal" and "tragicallywasted sacrifices." The retired generals believe nothing would begained, and much would be lost, by keeping the truth about Iraq fromthe families of America's dead and wounded.
Says retired two-star General Eaton: "The repeated rotations ofArmy Reservists and National Guardsmen are hollowing out the US groundforces. This whole thing in Iraq is going to fall off a cliff.... Yetwe have a moral obligation to see this thing [the Iraqi occupation]through. If we fail, it will cause America grave problems for severaldecades to come." These earnest, if contradictory, sentiments echo whatsome conflicted US military officers told me thirty-five years ago, asVietnam was being abandoned. After President Nixon's Watergate disgraceand resignation, a fed-up American public and a heavilyDemocratic-controlled Congress finally pulled the plug on our Saigonally, allowing South Vietnam to fall.
Over the past year, the United States has pressed into servicenewly trained Iraqi army, police and security forces, replacingelements of the 140,000-plus US troops. But the Iraqi forces lackeverything from body armor to tanks and helicopters. Major GeneralEaton, who in 2003-04 was in charge of training Iraqi security forces,says the United States needs another five years to train the Iraqiarmy, and as much as another decade to train and equip an effectiveIraqi police force.
Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a hero in the 1991 Gulf War who visited Iraqand Kuwait this past spring, writes in an unpublished report: "We needto better equip the Iraqi Army with a capability to deter foreignattack and to have a leveraged advantage over the Shia militias and theinsurgents they must continue to confront. The resources we are nowplanning to provide are inadequate by an order of magnitude or more.The cost of a coherent development of the Iraqi security forces is theticket out of Iraq - and the avoidance of the constant drain of hugeU.S. resources on a monthly basis."
Thus, the crucial "Iraqification" process has barely begun and ismostly still self-deception. New York Times Iraq correspondent DexterFilkins reports that Baghdad has become "a markedly more dangerousplace" over the past year. This undercuts "the central premise of theAmerican project here: that Iraqi forces can be trained and equipped tosecure their own country, allowing the Americans to go home," a replayof the failed Vietnamization scenario.
The retired generals' revolt may be inspired by their apprehensionover a wider Mideast conflict spreading to potentially nuclear Iran,writes former Pentagon planner and now antiwar critic KarenKwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and a razor-sharpPhD. Writing in MilitaryWeek.com, she speculates that the generals aretrying to get rid of Rumsfeld now to head off a conflict with Iran. TheBush Administration reportedly has contingency plans to bomb Iran'sUN-disapproved nuclear sites. Some underemployed Navy and Air Forceofficers are lobbying to strike Iran, but the overstretched groundcombat forces overwhelmingly oppose it as the worst of all possiblewars. She writes: "If Rumsfeld retires, we will not 'do' Iran underBush 43." Such concern over Tehran is well founded. According toKwiatkowski and retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, American SpecialForces are already secretly inside Iran, identifying potential targetsfor future air strikes. The Iranians are of course aware of theiruninvited visitors.
The obvious diplomatic recourse is for the Bush Administration totalk to Tehran about our pending exit from Iraq, but the White Houserefused to do so until late September, when the Bush family's longtimepolitical fixer, former Secretary of State James Baker, entered thepicture as a deal-maker. Baker is co-chair, with retired IndianaDemocratic Representative Lee Hamilton, of the Congressionally createdIraq Study Group (ISG), which is due to issue a comprehensive report onUS options in Iraq after the November elections. After a four-day visitto Iraq, Baker, Hamilton and the eight other members of the bipartisantask force returned to Washington with an obvious recommendation: Starttalking to Tehran. After receiving President Bush's immediate approval,Baker invited an unidentified "high representative" of the Iraniangovernment, as well as Syria's foreign minister, to meet with the ISG.Baker realizes the leverage is largely on Iran's side of the table.
An expert on Shiite Islam, Professor Vali Nasr of the NavalPostgraduate School, sees a glaring missed opportunity the ISG couldhelp seize. He suggested in the July-August Foreign Affairs that "Iranwill actively seek stability in Iraq only when it no longer benefitsfrom controlled chaos there, that is, when it no longer feelsthreatened by the United States' presence. Iran's long-term interestsare not inherently at odds with those of the United States; it iscurrent U.S. policy toward Iran that has set the countries' respectiveIraq policies on a collision course."
General McCaffrey warns that "U.S. public diplomacy and rhetoricabout confronting Iranian nuclear weapons development is scaringneighbors in the Gulf. Our Mideast allies believe correctly that theyare ill equipped to deal with Iranian strikes to close the Persian Gulfand the Red Sea. They do not think they can handle politically ormilitarily a terrorist threat nested in their domestic Shiapopulations."
The recent war in Lebanon has only made the prospect of war withIran more problematic. As Richard Armitage, the astute onetime NavySEAL and former Deputy Secretary of State, told reporter Seymour Hersh:"When the Israel Defense Forces, the most dominant military force inthe region, can't pacify little Lebanon [population: 4 million], youshould think twice about taking that template to Iran, with strategicdepth and a population of 70 million."
McCaffrey's report raises the possibility that US forces will haveto fight their way out of Iraq. He says, "A U.S. military confrontationwith Iran could result in [the radical Islamic Mahdi Army's] attackingour forces in Baghdad or along our 400-mile line of communications outof Iraq to the sea." The Bush Administration needs Iranian cooperationfor the eventual safe exit of our troops, as General McCaffrey advises.This assumes that the Iranians will not risk World War III by trying toentrap our hostage Army in a humiliating Dunkirk-in-the-desert. Aftersuccessful negotiations, the United States should be able to withdrawvia the southern exit route leading through Kuwait to the Persian Gulfand the blue waters beyond.
Once we get our troops safely out, a newly elected, post-2008administration in Washington may be able to begin reassemblingAmerica's scattered global allies to address the region's problemsanew, next time multilaterally, and through diplomacy rather thanpre-emptive unilateral military force.
America is a uniquely favored nation that redefines itself in eachgeneration. But we have had a lifetime of embracing one democraticglobal war, and numerous presidentially inspired, politicized andsecret smaller wars that have turned out badly. Sixty-five years afterPearl Harbor, we owe it to the past three generations to resume thedebate on our national identity, suspended on December 7, 1941, andforeshortened on September 11, 2001.
In the post-cold war era, we have severely cut back our militarymanpower, reducing the regular Army to only 480,000 troops, but we havenot cut back fantastically expensive Air Force weapons systems or thesomewhat more useful but still gold-plated Navy. Nor have we redefinedour strategic goals to fit realistically within reduced budgets. Wehave "paid" for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan byborrowing heavily from foreign dollar-holders, such as China, that areawash in trade surpluses, and have left debt service to future USgenerations.
A key argument in the ex-generals' indictment is this undeniablefact: Our armed forces are too small to police and reorder the worldand intervene almost blindly, as we have in Iraq. That invasion actedout the world-changing daydreams of pro-Israel neoconservative policyintellectuals like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others who gainedwarmaking power and influence atop the Pentagon but who evidently neverasked themselves, Suppose we're wrong? What happens then? Sober,realistic Israelis privately fear the neocons' "friendship," and whereit has led America, more than any Arab enemies. In the inevitablepost-Iraq War tsunami of US political recrimination, such Israelisforesee Christian Zionist evangelicals, whose lobbying muscle inCongress was decisive in the run-up to the Iraq War, attempting toscapegoat the high-profile neocons and endangering Israel'sall-important security ties to the United States.
Growing public disgust and frustration with the Iraq War has begunto arouse a self-defeating desire to retreat into isolationism. Rather,the United States should revive the traditional but recently neglectedrealistic approach to foreign policy, as the ISG is starting to do, andit should begin with a renewed multilateral approach to peacemaking inthe Middle East.
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