Tuesday - February 27, 2007

Pentagon Games

I’ve been mulling this over for a few days now and pondering what to think of it. Fortunately, Robert Tracinski at The Intellectual Activist prodded me with this interesting take on the matter in today’s TIA Daily.

The State Department has in recent years been filled with career “civil servants” with a decidedly Leftist bent but the Pentagon has remained loyal to its commander, The President. Now, that seems to be changing, first with top generals expressing lack of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld, leading ultimately to his ouster from office, and now they’re expressing their disdain for any planned attack on Iran.

They’re even going so far as to say they will resign if ordered to attack Iran. My advice to Secretary Of Defense Gates is simply to call them on the carpet and ask each one of the generals in question if he truly feels this way. If the general answers “yes”, the secretary should then politely tell the general “you’re fired, turn in your uniform and get the f**k out of my army.”

Then the general can go whine to foreign newspapers all he or she wants. You see, the unwritten rule for top-ranking officers is that you can disagree all you want privately but if you want to affect policy and take your grievances public then you can do so - from the outside: quit, then bark all you want. As a civilian, not as a military officer.

These military officers know this as sure as God made little green apples. It is a cornerstone of our Constitution that the military is under civilian management. Period. End of story. The military does not decide policy. For that matter, neither does the State Department. This madness has gone quite far enough and needs to stop ... now, before someone gets hurt.

Nowadays, it seems everyone wants to be a pundit and everyone has an opinion on how things should be done. That’s cool ... but there are rules that need to be followed. The first of which (and the most important) concerns something called “dirty laundry” - don’t air it out publicly. That is a lesson I have learned the hard way right here in the pages of this blog (don’t ask). It is a lesson the Dixie Chicks learned. It is also a lesson these generals will learn too - hopefully before they ruin their career ...

If You’re Not Using My Army, Do You Mind If I Borrow It?
-- by Robert Tracinski (TIA Daily)

The war over the war extends to all areas of government. I recently saw an article (sorry, I couldn’t track down the link) indicating that a collection of State Department officials plans to resign in protest if Bush attacks Iran. Now the article below says that some Pentagon officials may do the same, in a “revolt of the generals.”

Aside from the basic problem of military officers attempting to dictate policy to their civilian leaders, the most repugnant aspect of this campaign is the claim that America should not attack Iran because we “don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on.”

America’s annual defense budget is in the neighborhood of $400 billion, while Iran’s military budget is $9 billion. If our generals can’t figure out a way to defeat an enemy that much smaller and weaker, then they ought to resign—not as a protest, but as a confession of professional incompetence.

The phenomenon of generals who don’t want to use the force they are tasked to wield—that is, generals who don’t want to perform their basic responsibility of fighting and defeating our enemies—is nothing new. President Lincoln is supposed to have written, to one overly cautious general, “If you are not using my army, do you mind if I borrow it?”

“US Generals ‘Will Quit’ If Bush Orders Iran Attack,” Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter, Times of London, February 25

Some of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources….

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them….

The threat of a wave of resignations coincided with a warning by Vice-President Dick Cheney that all options, including military action, remained on the table. He was responding to a comment by Tony Blair that it would not “be right to take military action against Iran.”…

The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran could soon produce enough enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs a year, although Tehran claims its programme is purely for civilian energy purposes.

“Speaking of runaway trains, the global warming hysteria is gaining new steam as environmentalists realize that a Democratic Congress is willing to enact their agenda, while the Bush administration seems to have given up trying to stall global-warming legislation. Hollywood gave the juggernaut more energy Sunday night when it awarded Al Gore an Oscar for his role as televangelist for the First Church of the Warming Globe—Hollywood’s official new religion.”

Posted by The Skipper     on 02/27/2007 at 03:54 AM   
Filed Under: • Iraq •  
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