Reviving the Generals' Revolt

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Reviving the Generals' Revolt
By Jed Babbin
July 6, 2006

There was a time not long ago when a general would resign rather than follow an order he could not, in good conscience, obey. A conscience is an essential part of the character we expect our officers to possess. But it is an inconvenience to a politician. Some generals who become politicians - such as Dwight Eisenhower - overcome the inconvenience by remaining faithful to their conscience. Lesser men overcome conscience by letting it fall prey to the fatal flaws of political character: ambition and the desire to take revenge.

Last April, six retired generals, each of whom had been promoted to significant rank under the Clinton administration, publicly criticized the president's handling of the Iraq war and - some clearly and some in muddled terms - demanded the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. On April 16, in the midst of what he labeled a "military revolt," former Clinton UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke wrote a Washington Post op-ed that characterized the generals' mini-revolt as, "the most serious public confrontation between the military and an administration since President Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur."

Asked if the generals were coordinating their campaign, one participant, retired MGen. John Batiste, denied that they were. But to some of us who comment on national security matters there was an unmistakable similarity among the generals' remarks. Holbrooke's article casually attributed the similarity to the fact that recently-retired generals stay in close touch. But there was obviously more going on. Holbrooke, who is said to be a likely Secretary of State in a future Democratic administration but who lacks any military credentials, wasn't a likely candidate to organize and urge the generals to rebel against civilian authority. But his column hinted darkly at more to come:
"If more angry generals emerge - and they will - if some of them are on active duty, as seems probable; if the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan does not turn around...then this storm will continue until finally it consumes not only Donald Rumsfeld. The only question is: Will it come so late that there is no longer any hope of salvaging something in Iraq and Afghanistan?"

Holbrooke's startling reference to active duty officers participating in such a political revolt spurred the Washington Times's Tony Blankley to write an incisive column saying that such action by active officers could be a courts-martial offense. Apparently afraid that he'd spilled the beans on a big political secret, Holbrooke is rumored to have called Blankley in an effort to explain.

The revolt against Rumsfeld failed. The president restated his confidence in Rumsfeld and the story faded away just as the previous rounds of Rumsfeld-bashing had. Holbrooke's coverup of what is apparently a carefully-managed Democratic Party operation succeeded.

But now the next chapter of the generals' revolt is about to be published. Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks's new book, "Fiasco: The American Adventure in Iraq" will be released in less than three weeks. From the publicity surrounding it we can conclude that Holbrooke did leak a big Dem political op, and that Blankley may have been prescient in thinking to apply the Uniform Code of Military Justice to any active duty officers involved.

The publisher's Amazon.com ad page for Ricks's book says it is, "a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted [the Iraq war], drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time...The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks...As many in the military publicly acknowledge here for the first time, the guerrilla insurgency that exploded several months after Saddam's fall was not foreordained. In fact, to a shocking degree, it was created by the folly of the war's architects. But the officers who did raise their voices against the miscalculations, shortsightedness, and general failure of the war effort were generally crushed, their careers often ended. A willful blindness gripped political and military leaders, and dissent was not tolerated."

Like the New York Times did for James Risen's book and his articles that exposed the NSA terrorist surveillance program, we can expect these words to appear over and over again on the Washington Post's front page to attack the president and promote Ricks's book. But why is "anger" the prevailing theme? Why has Ricks apparently focused on men whose opinions were allegedly ignored and their careers ended?

In the April episode of the generals' revolt, statements by Iraq campaign commander Gen. Tommy Franks and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers seemed to put to rest all the claims of crushed dissent and willful blindness. Ricks now revives them - quoting whom we yet don't know - to recreate the April controversy. Who he quotes, and what conclusions he draws, will determine his and the book's credibility.

Unlike the New York Times's Risen, Ricks isn't an ideologue. But he, and the generals he's bound to quote, were comfortable in the Clintons' Pentagon. And like those same generals, Ricks may have lost the personal access he once had. Ricks's theme of anger-based analysis may be rooted in little more than loyalty to those who once befriended him. But - like Risen and the rest of Keller & Co. - Ricks will no longer be able to claim to be an unbiased reporter. Those reporters bound by their ideological or personal biases, once exposed, can no longer claim to be otherwise. If Ricks's book appears in the form advertised, the Post will have to choose between keeping him on the defense beat and maintaining any pretense of unbiased Pentagon coverage

Ricks - wittingly or not, and Holbrooke intentionally - may be fomenting a confrontation between the administration and the military that would not otherwise exist. Politics and the military are combined at our risk. Like church and state, they cannot be combined without conflicting with our system of government - which is something the Clintons worked hard to change as I wrote about three years ago.

The Clintons - and the plural is more accurate than the singular - picked generals for their political fealty rather than military prowess. The worst public examples were Wesley Clark (a Friend of Bill from their Oxford Rhodes scholar days), and Anthony Zinni. Having spent too much time in the company of Arab leaders, Zinni became addicted to stability in the Middle East and opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. But in the middle of the April "revolt", Zinni - echoing Congressman Jack Murtha - once accused Rumsfeld of, "disbanding the Army."

The least public and most political general is former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. When Rumsfeld took over the Pentagon, his orders were to shake the military out of its Cold War mindset and strategies. According to one source (who was an active duty army officer when he told me this) Shinseki tried to make Rumsfeld an offer he couldn't refuse: Shinseki would make Rumsfeld look good on Capitol Hill if Rumsfeld would leave the Army alone and not force it out of its Cold War garrison-force mentality. Rumsfeld didn't take the bait, and instead treated Shinseki gently, allowing him to retire with dignity instead of firing him. And then Rumsfeld went about building a better team made up of war-fighting generals who could transform the force under fire. Could Rumsfeld have treated some people more gently? Certainly. Were careers ended? Yes, and deservedly so.

Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have certainly made mistakes in the Iraq war. And, unless the only histories are written by people such as the angry Ricks, they will be judged fairly. One mistake they didn't make is turning the military into a political arm of the White House. Which brings us back to the conscience of a general.

How many of the generals now cooperating with Ricks and Holbrooke and the Democratic Party resigned rather than obey orders that conflicted with their conscience? None. That is the best measure of the credibility of these men and the writers who rely on them.

[10thzodiac]

Mark Perry's ''Four Stars'' is a history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that focuses on an issue of civil-military relations not often addressed, however much those relations are generally debated: can military leaders be expected to create forces and strategies that will meet the needs of national policy without also participating in making the policy? To Mr. Perry, the entire recent history of the Joint Chiefs, which consists of the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, hinges on a little-known and still scantily documented crisis involving a rebellion of the Chiefs in August 1967 over how the Vietnam War was being fought, a rebellion that sprang from the above question. Mr. Perry, a Washington correspondent for The Nation whose first book this is, believes that, as far as the Chiefs are concerned, everything that came before August 1967 helped lead to that crisis and almost all events since have revolved around efforts to prevent its repetition. While ''Four Stars'' often diverges from this straightforward theme, and in doing so achieves a wealth of historical detail, there is much to be said in favor of its central organizing thesis as a key to understanding the Joint Chiefs.
The early years of the Joint Chiefs, from their first meeting on Feb. 9, 1942, were a time of conspicuous interservice quarreling. Mr. Perry may overemphasize the infighting during World War II a bit, but certainly interservice rivalry dominated public perceptions of the Chiefs from the Harry S. Truman years of the so-called Revolt of the Admirals (a feud among the services over control of America's nuclear arsenal) through the Dwight D. Eisenhower years of Army discontent with the policy of massive nuclear retaliation. Mr. Perry argues, however, that the interservice battles obscured - and also weakened the Joint Chiefs' hand in - a more fundamental issue, the Chiefs' belief that they must have more influence in the formulation of foreign policy. With only marginal influence on policy making, they often felt in danger of backing policies for which no adequate military support was possible.
According to Mr. Perry's account of the 1967 crisis, the Vietnam War justified the Chiefs' fears. When the Johnson Administration escalated our involvement in Vietnam, all the Chiefs resisted the drift toward a ground war involving American troops. Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff, was the most deeply opposed. At no time did he feel confident in the wisdom of our fighting in Vietnam, and his custom, prolonged until it became impossible, of writing personally to the parents of every soldier killed in action reflected his agonizing over it. Even the famously hawkish Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, sought an abrupt escalation of the bombing in Vietnam precisely to avoid a ground war. Adm. David L. McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations, essentially agreed with General LeMay. Earle G. Wheeler, the Army general who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, stood somewhere between General Johnson and General LeMay in believing that swift and harsh bombing of North Vietnam could actually short-circuit the war and save South Vietnam. But General Wheeler tirelessly sought a voice in policy making to avoid an unwinnable ground war, with intense bombing of the North as the best option he thought he could offer, but with realistic assessments of the determination of the North and the viability of the South always as his desired foundations of policy.
He and the other Chiefs did not believe such realism underlay the policy making of President Lyndon Johnson or, especially, that of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The Chiefs' doubts reached their gravest on Aug. 25, 1967, when Mr. McNamara testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and argued that current policy and strategy would eventually bring victory, this in defiance of the Chiefs' interpretation of recent intelligence reports and particularly of their belief that only bombing the North and interdicting its supplies could possibly win the war. Mr. Perry argues that the Chiefs regarded this testimony not only as an expression of disagreement with what they had told Mr. McNamara about immediate policy issues, but as something much more serious - a rupture of the unofficial contract between our democracy's civil and military powers, whereby the military pledges to obey the civil authorities without question but in return the civilian leaders implicitly pledge that their policies will not cause needless loss of life.
According to Mr. Perry's sources, on the afternoon after Mr. McNamara's testimony, General Wheeler proposed that the Chiefs resign en masse in protest against a policy that was immoral in its sacrifice of American lives in pursuit of unworkable strategies. By the next morning, however, General Wheeler reversed course, deciding that mass resignation would amount to mutiny and that it was better to persist in seeking change from within than to precipitate an open breakdown of civil-military relations.
Mr. Perry argues, however, that while the breakdown did not become open, it forever changed those relations. He portrays the subsequent history of the Joint Chiefs as a campaign by the military leaders - now at last minimizing their interservice quarrels - to gain leverage on policy making to spare them from having to condone actions they considered futile and even immoral.
This later history culminated in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act. The law was designed to discourage interservice battles by making the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the members collectively, responsible for providing military advice to the President. And, more important, in an attempt to deal with the underlying cause of the 1967 crisis, the law made the chairman a member of the National Security Council, assuring him the right to advise civilian officials whether he was asked or not.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the chairman's advice will be heeded. Nevertheless, ''Four Stars'' makes it clear that the evolution of the Joint Chiefs has led to a little-understood reversal of traditional patterns of the civil-military relationship. The historic separation of the military from the creation of national policy is at an end. By law the military is no longer simply the servant of policy. Some sense of what the implications of this may prove to be emerges from this thoughtful analysis of the events and ideas that produced the change.

[10thzodiac]

According to Mr. Perry's sources, on the afternoon after Mr. McNamara's testimony, General Wheeler proposed that the Chiefs resign en masse in protest against a policy that was immoral in its sacrifice of American lives in pursuit of unworkable strategies. By the next morning, however, General Wheeler reversed course, deciding that mass resignation would amount to mutiny and that it was better to persist in seeking change from within than to precipitate an open breakdown of civil-military relations.