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.
