Posted by
celtic-dragon on Saturday, April 05, 2008 3:15:53 PM
There is a good essay at
World Affairs Journal concerning the poisonous state of military and civilian affairs today.
Quote:
In the civil-military arena, the consequences of even a slowly
unraveling debacle in Iraq could be quite ugly. Already, politicians
and generals have been pointing fingers at one another; the Democrats
and some officers excoriating the administration for incompetence,
while the administration and a parade of generals fire back at the
press and anti-war Democrats. The truly embittered, like retired Army
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded in Iraq in 2003–04,
blame everyone and everything: Bush and his underlings, the civilian
bureaucracy, Congress, partisanship, the press, allies, even the
American people. Last November, Sanchez went so far as to deliver the
Democrats’ weekly radio address—and, with it, more bile and invective.
Thomas Ricks, chief military correspondent of the Washington Post,
detects a “stab in the back narrative . . . now emerging in the U.S.
military in Iraq. . . . [T]he U.S. military did everything it was
supposed to do in Iraq, the rest of the U.S. government didn’t show up,
the Congress betrayed us, the media undercut us, and the American
public lacked the stomach, the nerve, and the will to see it through.”
Ricks thinks this “account is wrong in every respect; nonetheless, I am
seeing more and more adherents of it in the military.”
Rumsfeld started this ball rolling with his ham fisted and truculent management style, earning him the nickname "Screwdriver" for his McNamara tendency to micromanage at long distance. His shabby treatment of USMC General Zinni and Army General Shinseki has not been forgotten. In fact, essays have appeared in Army journals charging the top brass with cowardice for not pushing back against Rumsfeld when it became bitterly obvious he was dead wrong in many areas.
Fred Kagan at
The Weekly Standard has been spreading the fundamentally dishonest idea that
victory is just around the elusive corner. Therefore, the Dems will be, of course, stabbing the military in the back by, doing whatever it is they will do. From acclaimed Middle East defense blogger
Abu Muqawama :
Abu Muqawama read this passage this past week and realized exactly why so much of what the Kagans write about Iraq makes him angry. Divorced from the complicated realities on the ground, the Kagans' narrative allows readers of the Weekly Standard
to think that Iraq is a black-and-white world in which Our Brave Boys
are winning the fight. Although the left says Iraq is a disaster, they
are all lying -- it's actually going 100% well. Why is this dangerous?
Because when the next president -- Obama or
McCain -- comes to office and is suddenly confronted with the messy
reality of Iraq, he might have to make some tough decisions. And if he
decides to start cutting our loses and moving our finite troops to
Afghanistan and back to the U.S. for re-training, he -- especially if
it's Obama -- is going to get mercilessly crucified by the right for
abandoning the glorious success that was our involvement in Iraq. The
"stabbed in the back" narrative will take hold, and it proponents will
seize the dishonest picture of Iraq painted by the Kagans as evidence
that we were winning in Iraq before the cowardly liberals took charge.
The left, meanwhile, is reading their own version of events in newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent. The left and center-left will also have the testimony of folks like Gen. William Odom and Nir Rosen to rely on. (Read excerpts via Abu Aardvark.) Abu Muqawama disagrees with Nir about a lot but respects his friend for spending years on the ground in Iraq, speaking (Arabic!)
with normal Iraqis of all political and sectarian stripes. Sometimes
Abu Muqawama thinks Nir loses the forest for the trees, but his
description of the reality on the ground in Iraq is closer to the truth
than anything Fred Kagan is going to write from his office at AEI.
Hard decisions will have to be made, and the current contemptible practice of using military officers as political accessories only adds the sense of frustration that the military feels right now. I was stunned just this week to see General Petraeus on a short list of VP candidates for Senator McCain. I have argued before that we need a dose of hard, clear eyed realism in our war in Iraq, and I am not seeing any signs that we are actually getting it. We are getting political grandstanding and sound bite "gotcha!" moments where anything short of saying we are at the threshold of *utterly undefinable* victory is denounced as sedition.
I see no chance whatsoever that Iraq will become a real, functioning democracy , at least as has been described to us. The fighting in Basra was a disaster for the Iraqi Army. Units mutinied or defected, and Basra remains beyond the reach of the Maliki Government.
See the April 4 entries by Juan Cole...
Without realism...and realistic goals in play...we are left with simplistic, dishonest rhetoric, an angry and embittered military, and a public that is cynical and distrustful of its' leadership.
This is intolerable.