More US generals turn on Rumsfeld

[kern]

More US generals turn on Rumsfeld
Friday April 14, 2006 (AP)

Donald Rumsfeld insists during the Iraq war that the US will accept nothing but 'total surrender'.
Two more retired US generals called overnight on Donald Rumsfeld to resign as US defence secretary, adding to a deepening rift within the Pentagon.
Six generals - two of whom commanded troops in Iraq - have now called on Mr Rumsfeld to stand down over his leadership of the war.

Retired Major General Charles Swannack, who led the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq, said Mr Rumsfeld, 73, had "micromanaged the generals who are leading our forces".

He told CNN: "I really believe that we need a new secretary of defence because Secretary Rumsfeld carries way too much baggage with him."
Retired Major General John Riggs told National Public Radio that Mr Rumsfeld had helped create an atmosphere of "arrogance" among the Pentagon's civilian leadership. "They only need the military advice when it satisfies their agenda. I think that's a mistake, and that's why I think he should resign," he said.

Earlier this week retired Major General John Batiste, who led the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq from 2004 until last year, said Mr Rumsfeld's authoritarian leadership style had made life more difficult for professional soldiers.

"We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And the leadership needs to understand teamwork," he told CNN on Wednesday.

His comments were especially startling because he served as an aide to Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defence secretary and an architect of the Iraq war.

The other retired officers are Major General Paul Eaton, who trained Iraqi troops up to 2004, Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold and retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, a former head of US Central Command and in charge of all American troops in the Middle East from 1997 to 2000.

Of the six, only Gen Zinni is a longstanding critic of the war. Lt Gen Newbold, a director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2000 to 2002, wrote in Time magazine this week that "we are living with [...] the consequences of successive policy failures". The fallout between parts of the US military and Mr Rumsfeld began in early 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq war, when General Eric Shinseki, who at the time was the army chief of staff, was sidelined after he told a congressional hearing that several hundred thousand US troops would be needed bring peace to Iraq - rather than the smaller force Mr Rumsfeld planned to send. Mr Rumsfeld has offered to resign at least twice but George Bush has always turned him down. The White House was last night firm in its support for the defence secretary. White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters "the president believes Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a very fine job during a challenging period".

[Terry Hanushek]

Rob

I heard a recent observation that with Vietnam, it was the enlisted ranks that resisted Nixon's Vietnam war. While in Iraq, it is the generals that are speaking out.

Very telling ..

Terry

[mommalina]

Rob

I heard a recent observation that with Vietnam, it was the enlisted ranks that resisted Nixon's Vietnam war. While in Iraq, it is the generals that are speaking out.

Very telling ...

Terry, I guess in some ways it's true that Iraq is not another Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, was it not the generals who exaggerated the number of enemy casualties? During the Iraq War, the civilian Bush administration dispenses false good news and rewrites the history of bad news (Cpl Pat Tillman, Pvt Jessica Lynch, etc), and probably fudges the true number of troops seriously wounded and killed in action. It does not take the advice of the generals, and generals who tell the truth fail to get promoted or are forced to retire.

During the Vietnam War, the enlisted ranks were the ones who spoke out. They also "silenced" (fragged) some 90-day wonders (ROTC officers) :wacko: who did not know what the hell they were doing and some brass :evil: who knowingly and needlessly risked the lives of grunts to make points with their superiors . Today, most of the enlisted troops fighting in Iraq think Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack! I wonder why ..... oh, I forgot ..... the radio programs they are fed are right-wing :blah: (i.e., Rush Limbaugh), and liberal programs such as Air America Radio are excluded.

.....maybe if there were a draft, fewer lambs would be led to slaughter.


Lina

[RAK]

After reading your post this morning, lina, I came across this article:

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060508&s=parenti


When GI Joe Says No

by CHRISTIAN PARENTI

[from the May 8, 2006 issue]


The question for peace activists thus becomes: How is it that antiwar soldiers continue to fight? And what does it really take for an antiwar soldier to resist? The answers lie largely in the sociology of "unit cohesion" and the ways the military uses solidarity among soldiers as a form of social control. Similarly, the peace activism of IVAW requires the spread of an oppositional form of loyalty and camaraderie.

Since 1973, when Congress ended the draft, the armed forces have been restructured using unit cohesion as a form of deep discipline. In other words, social control in today's military operates through a system that could be straight from a text by French philosopher Michel Foucault: Soldiers are managed not with coercion but with freedom. Because they join of their own free will, they find it almost impossible to rebel. Volunteering implicates them, effectively stripping them of the victim status that conscription allowed. Soldiers who would resist are guilt-tripped and emotionally blackmailed into serving causes they hate. During my time embedded in Iraq, I met several antiwar soldiers, but none of them considered abandoning their comrades. They said things like "you signed that paper" or "they got that contract"--as if contracts are never broken or annulled.

If veterans are supposed to be at the heart of the peace movement, then it would serve progressives to understand this new military culture. Understanding the world of the military is also important because it is a major force in the socialization of young working-class Americans. If you're 20 or 22 and you're not doing what many rich kids do (like a career-boosting summer internship in New York) or doing what some truly poor kids do (like going to state prison on drug charges), chances are you're learning about responsibility and adulthood, and escaping small-town or inner-city America, courtesy of the US armed forces. One of the key lessons you'll learn there is: Look out for your comrades, because they're looking out for you.

Since World War II military psychologists, sociologists and historians--most notably the army historian S.L.A. Marshall, who interviewed hundreds of combat veterans in the Pacific theater--have agreed that soldiers fight not for justice, democracy or other grand ideas but for the guy next to them. Unit cohesion is the real glue holding the US military together.

"I remember they had this formation to tell us we were going to Iraq," recalls Fernando Braga, a skinny, unassuming 23-year-old Iraq vet who is still enlisted in the New York National Guard. Braga, now a poet and student at CUNY's Hunter College, says he became politicized well before the war, when he helped his immigrant mother clean rich people's homes. "My company is really anti-authoritarian. Guys would regularly skip formations and insult the NCOs. So I thought nobody would go. But, like, everybody went!"And since everybody went, so did Braga. "I had to go. I wasn't going to leave these guys."

[mommalina]

I can really empathize with the troops who do not reenlist. Angry :mad2:and fed-up with constant pressure from a ding-a-ling :noidea: captain to reconsider and reenlist, I finally found the guts to tell her straight out, "Ma'am, I want to be a civilian again and be able to tell my boss, 'You stink! I quit!' "

Sometimes I marvel how I was able to finish my enlistment and get an honorable discharge. That was peace time; they'd probably hang a soldier today for less.

Lina

[Terry Hanushek]

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, Political Analyst Dick Polman offers an interesting perspective on the current and historic roles of military (and retired military) officers in American politics.


Anti-Rumsfeld generals may need to stage retreat

By Dick Polman
Inquirer Political Analyst
April 23, 2006

The so-called Revolt of the Generals, targeting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and featuring several generals who led troops in Iraq, is a troubling portent for the White House.

These six dissident retirees are merely the boldest. Their decision to go public suggests that a sizable number of military leaders are convinced that the war is going badly, that the Bush team deserves the blame - and that retired officers should lead the charge, in defiance of the military code that traditionally bars them from engaging in civilian politics or publicly challenging civilian control.
Yet Bacevich, like many other vets who have no love for the Bush team, is concerned that the military dissidents are meddling beyond their proper role in a democracy. He said: "I know that people in the antiwar camp are happy to get the help, but they have to realize that they're playing with fire here. They may rue the day if military leaders decide that they should have a vote on who gets to be secretary of defense."
The politicization of the current military, while not as dramatic, seems far more endemic. Military leaders - the retirees, anyway - have been dabbling openly in civilian politics since at least the early '90s, with full encouragement and support from the politicians. As Bacevich noted, the urge to participate stems in part from the conviction that they had acquiesced too easily to the civilians who led them astray in Vietnam.
The entire article can be read at:
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/14409315.htm

Polman and the experts he interviewed observe that, historically, retired military officers have seldom been involved in civilian politics. I think that this tradition further emphasizes and magnifies the importance of the current statements by these six generals and the other officers who support them.

In the article, Major General John Baptiste, former commander of the 1st Division in Iraq refers to the "ignorant" Bush team as the "axis of arrogance". What a great observation. This is the first time that I have seen that description but it is not one that I am likely to forget.

Terry

P.S. The ieSpell program tries to convert 'Rumsfeld' to 'misfield', imagine that.

[RAK]

Ya' knoow, sometimes it pays to read an article all the way through; and then, read it again. The quotes don't give it justice, Terry. I was prepared to slam some of these observations, but when I read it through I was impressed.
Bush has brought a lot of this on himself, continually using the military as a backdrop not only to further his policies, but as a cheap politiical ploy. He's the first President(at least of this country) to dress in those psuedo-military outfits that I can recall. Can't imagine Ike walking around like a "Banana Republic" reject?
And these officers do have a reason to be concerned about how history will judge them. Here's a piece from my favorite clearing-house of ideas, The Huffington Post. I read it a while ago and it dove-tails nicely with this article. It concerns an officer named H.R. MacMaster:

H.R. who? He's not exactly a household name, but it's safe to say that every senior officer in the US Army, and probably in the entire Defense Department, knows exactly who H.R. McMaster is. He is the author of a 1997 book, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. Zeroing on 1965, the hinge year of escalation for the Vietnam War, McMaster wrote in his conclusion, "Lyndon Johnson, with the assistance of Robert S. McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had set the stage for America's disaster in Vietnam." Hot stuff, especially since "dereliction of duty" rings bells inside the armed services; it is, after all, a specific term of legal art, punishable according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The book was one long indictment. It had zero legal force, but maximum moral force.

Even hotter was the identity of McMaster. He was no college professor or foreign service officer. A 1984 graduate of West Point, he held a combat command in the 1991 Gulf War and, at the time of his authorship, was an active-duty Army officer. Yet even so, he was fierce in his criticism of two top Army men, Gen. Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Harold K. Johnson, Army Chief of Staff. They were among the "five silent men"--the five being the joint chiefs as a body--whom McMaster savaged.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-pinkerton/a-new-storm-on-the-pentag_b_19161.html

I don't feel worried about retired Generals speaking publicly against civilian policy;after all, they are civilians now, too. I would be more concerned if this was going on behind closed doors. So far this year is shaping up to a grudge match of Bush vs. The First Amendment, and I'd rather put my money on that "damn piece of paper" anytime.

RAK