When The Generals Talk  

There is a slew of stories appearing this week featuring US army officers criticising Rumsfeld and his handling of the occupation of Iraq. The SMH has an article called "generals demand meddling Rumsfeld go".

Another retired commander of US troops in Iraq has called for the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to step down.

Major-General John Batiste, who led the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-05, has joined several former commanders in harshly criticising Mr Rumsfeld's authoritarian style for making the military's job more difficult. He said it was time for a fresh start at the top of the Pentagon. "We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork."

General Batiste noted that many of his peers felt the same. "It speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defence," he said in a CNN interview.

His comments resonate especially with the army, where it is widely known that he was offered a promotion to lieutenant-general to return to Iraq as the No. 2 officer there but declined because he no longer wished to serve under Mr Rumsfeld.

Time has a story by retired Lieutenant General Greg Newbold on why Iraq Was a mistake.

A military insider sounds off against the war and the "zealots" who pushed it.

Two senior military officers are known to have challenged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the planning of the Iraq war. Army General Eric Shinseki publicly dissented and found himself marginalized. Marine Lieut. General Greg Newbold, the Pentagon's top operations officer, voiced his objections internally and then retired, in part out of opposition to the war. Here, for the first time, Newbold goes public with a full-throated critique:

In 1971, the rock group The Who released the antiwar anthem Won't Get Fooled Again. To most in my generation, the song conveyed a sense of betrayal by the nation's leaders, who had led our country into a costly and unnecessary war in Vietnam. To those of us who were truly counterculture--who became career members of the military during those rough times--the song conveyed a very different message. To us, its lyrics evoked a feeling that we must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it. Never again, we thought, would our military's senior leaders remain silent as American troops were marched off to an ill-considered engagement. It's 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again.

From 2000 until October 2002, I was a Marine Corps lieutenant general and director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq--an unnecessary war.

Slate describes the action as "The Revolt Against Rumsfeld".

The officer corps is getting restless.

It's an odd thought, but a military coup in this country right now would probably have a moderating influence. Not that an actual coup is pending; still less is one desirable. But we are witnessing the rumblings of an officers' revolt, and things could get ugly if it were to take hold and roar.

The revolt is a reluctant one, aimed specifically at the personage of Donald Rumsfeld and the way he is conducting the war in Iraq.

It is startling to hear, in private conversations, how widely and deeply the U.S. officer corps despises this secretary of defense. The joke in some Pentagon circles is that if Rumsfeld were meeting with the service chiefs and commanders and a group of terrorists barged into the room and kidnapped him, not a single general would lift a finger to help him.

Some of the most respected retired generals are publicly criticizing Rumsfeld and his policies in a manner that's nearly unprecedented in the United States, where civilian control of the military is accepted as a hallowed principle. Gen. Anthony Zinni, a Marine with a long record of command positions (his last was as head of U.S. Central Command, which runs military operations in the Persian Gulf and South Asia), called last month for Rumsfeld's resignation. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who ran the program to train the Iraqi military, followed with a New York Times op-ed piece lambasting Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically," and a man who "has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his Cold Warrior's view of the world, and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower."

But the most eye-popping instance appears in this week's Time magazine, where retired Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, the former operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not only slams the secretary and what he calls "the unnecessary war" but also urges active-duty officers who share his views to speak up.

Newbold isn't urging active-duty senior officers to go public, just to speak out directly to the president (whose handlers famously filter the bad news from official reports before they hit the Oval Office). Still, in a climate where the secretary of defense hammers three-star generals for daring to suggest that our troops in Iraq are fighting "insurgents" and not just "terrorists," Newbold's invocation reads like a revolutionary manifesto. Generals of the Pentagon, unite! You have nothing to lose but your stars!

If Rumsfeld is in less danger than these calls for his head might suggest, it's in part because not many generals want to lose those stars—and quite a lot of colonels would like to earn some. (Remember: Zinni, Eaton, and Newbold are retired generals; they have no more promotions to risk.)

...

Zinni, Eaton, and Newbold are explicitly trying to supplant the lesson of Shinseki with an earlier lesson—one that was propagated throughout the U.S. armed forces in the late 1990s but laid aside once the war in Iraq got under way. It came from a book called Dereliction of Duty, by H.R. McMaster, then an Army major, now a colonel. Based on extensive research into declassified files, the book concluded that during the 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff betrayed their constitutional duties by failing to provide their honest military judgment to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the quagmire of Vietnam. When McMaster's book was published in 1997, during the Clinton administration, Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the JCS chairman, ordered all his service chiefs and commanders to read it and follow its lessons to the letter—to express disagreements to their superiors, even at the risk of getting yelled at. William Cohen, Clinton's secretary of defense, echoed the sentiment. Ever since, Dereliction of Duty has been a must-read for all senior officers.

I'm glad the author quickly puts down his idea of a military coup - its probably the one thing that would work out worse in the long term than having Rummy and the other neocon nuts continuing their war for global domination.

Speaking out against the Iraq war (and looming Iran war) might be possible for retired Marine Corps generals but it appears it doesn't work out so well for mere air force doctors, with an Australian member of the RAF jailed for refusing to return for another tour of duty in Iraq on the basis that the invasion and occupation are illegal.

Kendall-Smith could face an unlimited jail sentence if found guilty in what is the first case of its kind in Britain over Iraq.

He had served in Iraq previously but refused a call-up in June and July of 2005, arguing the incursion in Iraq by UK forces was illegal and he would be legally complicit with potential war crimes if he served in Iraq. He cited World War II's Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals which invalidated the "only following orders" defence.

Kendall-Smith studied legal opinion on the legality of the Iraq occupation before informing the RAF he was not willing to serve there. As he attempted to give evidence of that legal opinion, he was stopped by Bayliss.

Greg Palast says even that even though most people would agree with the generals that its time for Rumsfeld to be dispatched to an old peoples home (or perhaps a jail or a lunatic asylum, depnding on your point of view), they are ignoring the other culprits - Bush and Cheney.

Well, here they come: the wannabe Rommels, the gaggle of generals, safely retired, to lay siege to Donald Rumsfeld. This week, six of them have called for the Secretary of Defense's resignation.

Well, according to my watch, they're about four years too late -- and they still don't get it.

I know that most of my readers will be tickled pink that the bemedalled boys in crew cuts are finally ready to kick Rummy In the rump, in public. But to me, it just shows me that these boys still can't shoot straight.

It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who stood up in front of the UN and identified two mobile latrines as biological weapons labs, was it, General Powell?

It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who told us our next warning from Saddam could be a mushroom cloud, was it Condoleeza?

It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who declared that Al Qaeda and Saddam were going steady, was it, Mr. Cheney?

Yes, Rumfeld is a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a duplicitous chicken-hawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and Tinker-Toy Napoleon -- but he didn't appoint himself Secretary of Defense.

Let me tell you a story about the Secretary of Defense you didn't read in the New York Times, related to me by General Jay Garner, the man our president placed in Baghdad as the US' first post-invasion viceroy.

Garner arrived in Kuwait City in March 2003 working under the mistaken notion that when George Bush called for democracy in Iraq, the President meant the Iraqis could choose their own government. Misunderstanding the President's true mission, General Garner called for Iraqis to hold elections within 90 days and for the U.S. to quickly pull troops out of the cities to a desert base. "It's their country," the General told me of the Iraqis. "And," he added, most ominously, "their oil."

Let's not forget: it's all about the oil. I showed Garner a 101-page plan for Iraq's economy drafted secretly by neo-cons at the State Department, Treasury and the Pentagon, calling for "privatization" (i.e. the sale) of "all state assets ... especially in the oil and oil-supporting industries." See it here. The General knew of the plans and he intended to shove it where the Iraqi sun don't shine. Garner planned what he called a "Big Tent" meeting of Iraqi tribal leaders to plan elections. By helping Iraqis establish their own multi-ethnic government -- and this was back when Sunnis, Shias and Kurds were on talking terms -- knew he could get the nation on its feet peacefully before a welcomed "liberation" turned into a hated "occupation."

But, Garner knew, a freely chosen coalition government would mean the death-knell for the neo-con oil-and-assets privatization grab.

On April 21, 2003, three years ago this month, the very night General Garner arrived in Baghdad, he got a call from Washington. It was Rumsfeld on the line. He told Garner, in so many words, "Don't unpack, Jack, you're fired."

...

President Bush is one lucky fella. I can imagine him today on the intercom with Cheney: "Well, pardner, looks like the game's up." And Cheney replies, "Hey, just hang the Rumsfeld dummy out the window until he's taken all their ammo."

Generals, let me give you a bit of advice about choosing a target: It's the President, stupid.

Billmon has followed up a couple of asides on the topic with a full post, which is kind of defeatist if you'd like to see Rummy given the boot forthwith, but entertaining enough - and even refers to the great British TV series "House of Cards" that I mentioned last year.

It's obvious why so many of Rummy's enemies are crawling out of the woodwork now -- they're hoping to improve the odds that the field marshall wil be swept away by the same broom that removed Andy Card and that is said to be hovering over the posteriors of McClellan and John Snow.

My advice would be: Fuggetaboutit. The chances that Dick Cheney will fire his old boss and ideological comrade in crime are only slightly higher than the chances that Rumsfeld's removal would lead to even a minor improvement in the situation in Iraq. It's almost like asking Cheney to fire himself.

To be honest, I think the pair of them would get rid of Junior before they would ever consider stepping down. This absolute determination to hold on to office at all costs may seem bizarre, considering how old and sick these guys are -- and how much shit is coming down on their heads every day -- but it's just the way these things work.

Some years back there was a wonderful series on Masterpiece Theatre, in which an uber-Machiavellian politician (played by the great Scottish actor Ian Richardson) first plots and murders his way to the prime ministership and then engineers the destruction of his enemies (including the King of England.) But at last, worn out and beset by scandal, he is challenged by younger ambitious rivals -- carnivores much like himself -- who think he is finally weak enough to be brought down for the kill. Even though he has every reason in the world to resign and walk away, he fights for his job, ferociously.

One memorable scene shows him staring bleakly out a window at 10 Downing Street, thinking (in an internal monologue we can overhear) that power is ultimately all that matters. "In the end," he tells himself (this is from memory) "it all comes down to the grabbing and the keeping and the holding on."

Of course, FU's equivalent in real life (John Major) really did get the boot against his wishes, so maybe Rummy (and Bush) might find themselves on the wrong side of a financial undermining by a next generation George Soros too...

I'll close with the now almost customary tinfoil decoration, this one from the comments at RI, where starroute, one of the more interesting denizens of the tinfoil world, outlines why crazy talk about coups or revolutions is not only incredibly stupid, but fails to notice that the world has moved on - its all about shaping perception, and thus "reality" (something Rummy understands well, to give him some credit, even though he's not doing much of a job shaping "reality" these days, given the uphill battle he is fighting against factual events).

One of the insistent messages of this blog is that it really is all Mindwar. Computers and blogs are having the same leveling effect now that guns did back when it was all flintlocks. You no longer need to own a printing press or a tv station to get the message out. The battle is over who gets to shape people's reality.

Mass protests -- whether peaceful or violent -- no longer cut it, because the iconic effect of images on television no longer has the power it did in the 60's. That was always a secondhand way of getting the message out, anyway, and depended on tv stations being more interested in ratings than in serving as tools of government propaganda.

Shape reality. That's the only way to go. The professional psy-ops guys may have a head start on us, but they also have the limitation that the reality they're trying to sell is totally lame. Ultimately, it will all boil down to who can tell better stories.

As a final thought on the above -- the real battles of the next few years will be over "intellectual property" and who controls the pipes of the Internet. They will be doing their best to keep [information] from being created or distributed. We have to make sure the flow of information remains unimpeded. It's that simple. All the rest -- even threats of atomic armageddon -- is just background noise.