That quote sounds to me like Obama's marching orders were to find a way to make a graceful exit, but what do I know.
Agree in general, but I will note that people's views on this tend to change with the nature of the administration.
In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort.
--Bill Kristol
2: You know, I was getting nervous and unhappy about retired generals making broad statements about what we should be doing in Iraq under Bush, when they agreed with me. I really don't like the military trying to set political goals, regardless of which side they're on.
It could be worse. Liberia got coup'ed by a sergeant.
Did I tell the story about meeting a military intelligence person at a backyard barbecue recently ? We hit it off quite well, until I said offhandedly, "Well at the end of the day, as a citizen, I'm basically you're boss."
Boy howdy did that remark (which was made kind of jokingly, in the context of a complaint about immediate superiors) not go over well.
How'd you get internet access? Back to the cooler.
Is it possible that he was merely cringing at your horrible misspelling?
I can remember the horrible misspellings of yore.
7: Oh. Crap.
And it was a she, sexist.
5: said offhandedly, "Well at the end of the day, as a citizen, I'm basically you're boss."
Military intelligence people are legendarily intolerant of grammatical solecisms.
Also, as I understand it, it's not true: the US military aren't supposed to defend US citizens, they're supposed to defend the constitution. If the only way to stop Chicago from being incinerated is to carry out a warrantless search of someone's house, the army shouldn't even hesitate over the choice. Sorry, Chicago.
6: So, in The Great Escape, did anyone else ever wonder why the Nazis didn't destroy McQueen's morale by taking his baseball and glove away when they put him in solitary? It seems like the sort of thing that would have occurred to someone.
11: We assumed he was masturbating with so no one wanted to touch it.
It was a cunning psychological attack on the British prisoner in the cell next door, who was gradually driven mad by the incessant "bonk-bonk-splat" noise of McQueen throwing the ball against the wall and catching it, hour after hour after hour after hour.
Further to 3: Here's the old post I was talking about.
Wait, doesn't the fact that the general spoke to Meet the Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times suggest a green light from the White House? It's not a "top ranking official who requested anonymity" thing.
If the White House is floating a change in the currently stated plan to start withdrawing from Afghanistan next year by hiding behind Petraeus's military expertise, or whatever, Obama is doing something cowardly and wrong and Petraeus is wrong to go along with that. Changes in the ultimate goals of the war are the responsibility of the civilian government, and should be seen to be so.
But I don't think it's clear that Petraeus is following orders from the White House just because he's speaking out openly; McChrystal was out in public disagreeing with administration policy all over, even before the article that got him fired.
18.1: Totally agree.
18.2: The timing and the media outlets (the two big papers and a big Sunday round-table show), such that the story lands big on Monday—I doubt the general's going off-message here.
I understand why it should bother me, but I can't work up a reaction at all. I guess I'm too steeped in the generals of yore to really be bothered by Petraeus. If anything, the generals of now seem to be far more subdued. Remember MacArthur?
(I do think the Petraeus worship is kind of icky; I went to a talk by one of his aides a few years ago and couldn't stop thinking that if he loved Petraeus so much, he should just marry him.)
20: Well, it's a combination of disapproving of the source, and being angry about the message. The article sounds like Petraeus is selling "We need to stay in until we've WON, goddamnit." And you know, I'd be perfectly happy if we packed up everyone we've got in Afghanistan and left.
21; Ahh. Yeah, that I can get behind.
21: Yes, but you* aren't going to vote for Pat Toomey or somebody regardless of what the administration says between now and November. Nobody** cares what you think right now.
*I'm assuming.
**Present company excluded, I'm sure.
2,3: Yeah, when I said "that people's views", I should have said "that some people's views" because I'm angling to become a Washington Post political pundit when I reach my dotage (it's working for Broder). But then I go and specifically point out where Bill Kristol has not been consistent. Damn! I'll never get that gig.
My sense is that Petraeus is doing what he was hired to do. Obama picked Petraeus, because he thought Petraeus would be the best salesman for the war.
peep gets it right, I think. I watched a good portion of the Meet the Press interview with Petraeus yesterday, and that's certainly the way he came across. David Gregory persisted in taking the line that the, er, engagement in Afghanistan was unwinnable without the support of the American people, and Petraeus didn't particularly take issue with that notion; so one got the impression that his entire presentation was geared toward securing American popular support. (To show, for example, that there was indeed a plan, and progress was being made on each of its fronts, and success was defined as having met objectives to just this degree here, and that degree there; and by no means was it the case that there was any useless flailing going on.)
I doubt very much that he said anything not cleared by the administration.
Related to the OP: McChrystal to teach a class at Yale.
A graceful exit sounds pretty good from over here, if we could pull one off.
A graceful exit probably looks pretty bad to soldiers in Afghanistan. Soldiers like to believe they are dying for something important not buying time while their commander in chief looks for a way to weasel out of an unwise campaign promise.
28: Not bad, James. Several thousand years of human folly costing millions of lives succinctly illustrated in a two sentence blog comment. "The people we sent to kill other people might feel bad", and their feelings are paramount in any moral scheme of course. Those likely to be killed? Not so much.
The Americans planted a tree in Iraq, Mr. Zebari recalled Mr. Ahmadinejad telling him, with the stilted sympathy of sarcasm. They watered that tree, pruned it and cared for it. "Ask your American friends," he said, shaking his head, "why they're leaving now before the tree bears fruit."
The story in Iraq is unfinished, whatever the Obama administration, and the generals and diplomats who do its bidding, may say. The country is neither occupied nor independent, but rather in a limbo...
Iraq today is replete with American-ordered deadlines, timetables and benchmarks that sought to create realities where realities never existed. The administration is leaving now on its own terms. Perhaps staying would make an already traumatized Iraq worse; much of its dysfunction dates to the American occupation and its earliest days. But the very nature of America's departure -- with no government formed, an unpredictable Iraqi military, and deep popular disenchantment with a hapless political elite -- underscores one of the most enduring traits of American strategy in the Middle East.
Powerful but fickle, the United States has never seemed to understand time, at least not in the way it is acknowledged by Islamic activists willing to serve decades in jail, Syrian presidents assured that American policies will eventually change, and Iraq's neighbors, who bide their turn to fill the vacuum left by an American departure.
...[Former ambassador to Iraq] Mr. Crocker called it more of a burden. "It was a constant fight," he said. " 'We're tired of this, too much in blood and treasure, it isn't working, we have to move on.' It was a constant battle. 'If we don't get X number of benchmarks, by Y date, that equals Z, which is failure.' Our whole notion that we can somehow develop a mathematical model that includes concrete achievements, factor in a time frame and voilà. Iraq doesn't work that way and Afghanistan doesn't work that way."
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Opposable thumbs: useful. Gravity: not always your friend.
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28: Soldiers like to believe they are dying for something important not buying time while their commander in chief looks for a way to weasel out of an unwise campaign promise.
I haven't met any soldiers who think that there's something important to be died for in Afghanistan, James. The best I've heard is "we're staying because we can't afford to be seen to fail".
"We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here...Tune: Auld Lang Syne. Origin: trenches on Western front, 1914-18.
We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here."
They liked to think they were dying for something important, but they knew better.
32
I haven't met any soldiers who think that there's something important to be died for in Afghanistan, James. ...
So why did they volunteer?
34: So they could get an education and a job! What kind of question is that?
re: 34
Because it's a job? I'd be very surprised if among the whole of the British army you could find more than a very small percentage who had volunteered specifically because they had a burning desire to 'solve the Afghan problem'.
People don't 'volunteer' to go to Afghanistan. They join the military, and the military sends them there. Or it might send them somewhere entirely different, and if war was to break out tomorrow somewhere the majority of the soldiers had never even heard of, that's where they'd get sent. They wouldn't have 'volunteered' to serve in the Former Republic of Tabardo-Boringharia, or wherever, in anything but the most tenuous sense of 'volunteer'.
There's no mystery why young men might want to join the military. Because they have no money and need a job; because the only jobs where they are from are shitty ones that pay less money and offer them less apparent self-respect than military service; because it's exciting and dangerous; because they might actually get to kill people; because their family are 'military'; because their best mates already signed up; or for any number of other reasons that don't include a specific ideological commitment to one particular outcome for one particular conflict.
I'd bet in the American army there are a significant number who actually did volunteer specifically for Afghanistan. That they likely ended up in Iraq is just one of the many delightful Republican pranks.
So why did they volunteer?
I'm curious, James. Is that a sincere request for information or a passive-aggressive way of calling me a liar who is inventing conversations with non-existent soldiers in order to win a minor argument with people on the internet?
36
People don't 'volunteer' to go to Afghanistan. They join the military, and the military sends them there. Or it might send them somewhere entirely different, and if war was to break out tomorrow somewhere the majority of the soldiers had never even heard of, that's where they'd get sent. They wouldn't have 'volunteered' to serve in the Former Republic of Tabardo-Boringharia, or wherever, in anything but the most tenuous sense of 'volunteer'.
Perhaps that was true in 2002 but this is 2010. Anyone who joined up since 2002 was volunteering to serve in the Middle East.
Anyone who joined up since 2002 was volunteering toknowing they might serve in the Middle East.
37: amazing animation. Thanks.
For those who were worried: it's entirely SFW and not in the least peculiar.
41
I'm curious, James. Is that a sincere request for information or a passive-aggressive way of calling me a liar who is inventing conversations with non-existent soldiers in order to win a minor argument with people on the internet?
I am sincerely puzzled as to why anyone (given the alternatives available to the typical American volunteer) would sign up for a war they believed to be a dangerous pointless fiasco. And I think it is understandable that their officers would try to to inspire them by telling them that they are fighting for something important. And if you don't like our Afghanistan policy the person to blame is Obama.
re: 40
It's almost like you haven't read the rest of 36.
To simplify:
Doing X, knowing that X* might mean Y, isn't the same as doing X for the sake of Y.
* for some reason or other, including some of those already given.
given the alternatives available to the typical American volunteer
James has a point. I did have a hard time deciding whether to enlist or to pet cats at the animal shelter once a week.
Seriously, for what value of "volunteer"? What other volunteers get paid a real wage and benefits?If you're thinking of Americorps, it pays only a stipend.
Afghanistan has cats you could pet, Kraab.
46
Seriously, for what value of "volunteer"? What other volunteers get paid a real wage and benefits?If you're thinking of Americorps, it pays only a stipend.
By using the word volunteer I wasn't intending to only compare to other volunteer work. I meant they had volunteered to be soldiers.
So what are the alternatives, available to the typical American military enlistee, that you were thinking of?
And really, what's the point of this facet of the conversation at all? Shearer, (a) your beliefs about the policy positions of the average American soldier don't seem to be based on much, and (b) in the hypothetical case that you had managed to correctly intuit that American soldiers would generally be opposed to our pulling out of Afghanistan, why should that be a major consideration when deciding whether pulling out is a good idea?
A graceful exit probably looks pretty bad to soldiers in Afghanistan.
LB has the correct response to this - "why should that be a major consideration when deciding whether pulling out is a good idea?" - but that response was anticipated by James himself here.
I have to say, I suspect James's intuition here is correct. The folks who are sacrificing the most in the wars tend to be among the greatest supporters of them. Cindy Sheehan was unusual.
Here's Wikipedia's offering on the subject of Iraq in 2006.
A Zogby poll in March 2006 found that 72% of US soldiers in Iraq say the war should be ended within a year, and a quarter say that all troops should be withdrawn immediately.[31]
So 72% of soldiers were against the war, right? Well, I dunno. The same sort of statement coming from Thomas Friedman back then - or David Petraeus today - is rightly regarded as pro-war. This kind of war opposition is like the Augustinian prayer: Give me peace, "but not yet."
52: that doesn't really distinguish "we're not doing any good here, we should leave as soon as decently possible" from "this war could be ended very quickly if they'd just let us take the gloves off"...
52
So 72% of soldiers were against the war, right? Well, I dunno. The same sort of statement coming from Thomas Friedman back then - or David Petraeus today - is rightly regarded as pro-war.
Really? I'm generally on the anti-Friedman side, and I don't see this. He certainly has never been saying it should end immediately. As for within the year, the meme is that he's always saying that the upcoming six months is uniquely decisive, but as far as I know he's not saying that we should be leave in six months.
34: Quite a lot didn't - they were called out from the reserves. I doubt many 1980s National Guard enlistees expected to invade Iraq, or many 1990s ones expected to go to Afghanistan.
50
And really, what's the point of this facet of the conversation at all? Shearer, (a) your beliefs about the policy positions of the average American soldier don't seem to be based on much, and (b) in the hypothetical case that you had managed to correctly intuit that American soldiers would generally be opposed to our pulling out of Afghanistan, why should that be a major consideration when deciding whether pulling out is a good idea?
My objection is to your words "graceful exit" which I took to mean no longer trying to win but not pulling out immediately either. Some of troops might prefer immediate withdrawal others might prefer trying to win. However I doubt engaging in a futile effort just to save some face for Obama is a real popular position.
49
So what are the alternatives, available to the typical American military enlistee, that you were thinking of?
Basically getting a job. The military doesn't take the dregs anymore so I expect the average enlistee could find an ok job.
55
Quite a lot didn't - they were called out from the reserves. I doubt many 1980s National Guard enlistees expected to invade Iraq, or many 1990s ones expected to go to Afghanistan.
And how many of these people are still in the military involuntarily now?
57: the average somewhat bright but poorly educated poor kid could find a full-time job with salary, benefits, money for college, an extensive program to help with placement into other positions, tons of room for advancement, an impressive level of responsibility granted to junior personnel, and no demand for prior experience or skills beyond basic good health and fitness? Well, damn, they must be the ones who are taking 'em from the rest of us.
57: I think this is untrue, James. However, I'm about to have dinner and can't look it up for you now.
57: "Anymore" must be pretty recent:
The latest [2008] statistics...show that the percentage of new Army recruits with high-school diplomas has plunged from 94 percent in 2003 to 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007.
62
The military takes very few people from the bottom quarter of the population.
Basically getting a job. The military doesn't take the dregs anymore so I expect the average enlistee could find an ok job.
James, away and have a look at that animation apo posted in 37.
Petraeus tells Spackerman what a withdrawal might look like:
"You can reduce your forces. But you thin out," Petraeus tells Danger Room in an interview from his professorial Kabul office. "You don't just hand over. The whole unit doesn't leave."
At least not in the early stages after the Obama administration's announced date to start a withdrawal. And some of those troops won't come home right away: They'll be "reinvested" at first in parts of the country where security remains dicey.
So that would be the kind of withdrawal that looks like not withdrawing.
I believe you've cracked the code.
65: The whole unit doesn't leave.
Lay-deez ..
What could possibly go wrong?
Also from the Attackerman interview:
Petraeus says the recommendations will come from "those who know it best" -- his subordinate commanders.
If you want to eliminate projects, the best way to do it is always to rely on the people with direct responsibility to tell you whether their own projects need to be cut.
Spackerman is not impressing me at all. On Journolist he's this pseudo-tough guy threatening to beat up conservatives, and when he's in Afghanistan he's a dutiful and unquestioning stenographer for Peteraeus' plan to delay withdrawal.
Excellent piece by Andrew Bacevich on civilian control of the military.
69: He reported what Petraeus told him. What was he supposed to do?
Ask tough questions. But that makes it harder to get interviews.
28: Soldiers like to believe they are dying for something important
Soldiers also probably like to believe that they'll eventually win the lottery if they keep buying more tickets. That doesn't mean that they will, or that there is any basis in fact to their belief.
Seriously, all this nonsense about the feelings of the individual soldier is just ridiculous. Nobody in a position of power cares what soldiers think (except in the unfortunately rare occasion that they start thinking it would be better to turn their rifles on their commanders rather than shoot some civilians.) Until soldiers have been de-indoctrinated (by their own efforts or someone else's) I'm going to assume that a lot of what they say, especially in public fora, is based on the internal military propaganda they're constantly being fed. Maybe it's not, but that's the way to bet.
Seriously, all this nonsense about the feelings of the individual soldier is just ridiculous. Nobody in a position of power cares what soldiers think
I don't always agree with you, but this statement is 110% true and could not be more obvious.
57: The military doesn't take the dregs anymore
I think you'd have to go back to the Civil War to find the US military taking "the dregs" -- unless we're defining "dregs" extraordinarily broadly. The US military has lowered their recruitment standards recently, in addition to running those prep programs for potential enlistees who are too fat or whatever to initially muster in. I think, in this economy, that it would be very easy, especially if you came from a community that had historically had a high rate of participation in military service, to look at the news, and talk to the recruiter, and figure that you had a fairly low chance of dying in Afghanistan (which is basically true), and a fairly high chance of remaining unemployed or underemployed if you stayed a civilian. So there is an aspect of economic coercion here, even if it is perhaps not as drastic as in other times or places.
73
I don't always agree with you, but this statement is 110% true and could not be more obvious.
Obviously wrong. Anyone who cares about having an effective military cares about what the soldiers think just as they care about whether the weapons work or the reserve supplies exist. Because these things affect how the military performs.
Boot camp is designed to make soldiers think what they need to. Insofar as anybody cares what soldiers think, they care about making them think what is necessary.
I think PGD should go to Afghanistan. That'll show 'em!
For what it's worth. My bookpartner's son joined the military, oh, 6 or 7 years ago: he's since been deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He's a smart guy -- I think he's 28 or so now. He knows quite well that these engagements are deeply problematic, but it's his job to do his best within the parameters of his job. He's not remotely brainwashed. He's also doing quite well financially, for a 28-year-old. I should say, he's also risen fairly quickly to so-called Special Ops (which seems to be dedicated to the winning of hearts of minds, rather than the raiding of homes).
That said, from his reports, many of his fellow soldiers are, if not gung-ho, not very bright.
78, con'd: If you start with people who are malleable, it's easier to keep them thinking along the desired lines. So it is reported.
Speaking of "what do the warfighters think?", DoD is now surveying military spouses about DADT. What next, surveying parents and children?
77: I would withdraw immediately. Certainly by July 2011.