Well, when the basic political divide in your country is between those who believe in reality and those who don't, any utterance concerning the existence of anything is a political utterance. It's as if there was a Trappist Party. Every time the Joint Chiefs said anything (even "Mr Aubrey, could I trouble you for the salt?") it would be evidence of anti-Trappism.
What if the Joint Chiefs said something like:
"This is some fine fine Westvleteren!"
Surely that couldn't be considered anti-Trappist?
1 is a great comment.
I think this is entirely a function of the media being convinced that Republican = Manly = Military.
Joint Chiefs of Staff: Hi there, we are a nonpolitical group of the nation's top military officials, and we think the president's plan bites the big one on account of it is insanely cynical and makes no sense even if his goal is strictly to bide time until the second coming of Christ. Please make it clear that we are united on this.
Press: Okay...boy, the president loses another part of his Republican conservative base, eh? Rats leaving the sinking ship, what what? Not to suggest that you're rats, but it's clear which way the tide is turning, I guess. Don't worry, we'll try to find a Democrat somewhere in the military who agrees with you, to balance out the story.
JCoS: No, we've always tried to avoid taking political sides...and we don't want this to become a political story, we want you to actually explain why we think this is a bad idea...oh well.
The message? No. The medium? Yes. This is probably related to the use/mention distinction or one of those other things that philosophomores go on about all the time.
The US military can't give advice that's not related to politics, it's just that now people are paying attention. and right now, the JCS wants to get the hell out. They'll follow orders tho'.
I'll bet there will be a "surge". It won't accomplish anything significant but then the administration will be able blame the Iraqis for what happens. I mean, either the insurgents will hide for a while, things will quiet down, and we can declare a "victory" and leave, or they'll attack the US troops with increased ferocity, we say the Iraqi government is totally useless & they deserve what they get, they can fight it out and partition the country, and we leave.
5: What will happen is that they will put in the extra 20K troops (which really just means preventing 20K from going home on schedule), and the violence will dip as it has every year about this time, regardless of troop levels. And the administration will claim it as some sort of policy vindication when it's nothing of the sort.
7: And then the soldiers can go home? Please?
I was thinking that after the next dip in insurgent violence, we could implement the Shiite-only plan. This would help us resolve the root causes of the insurgency, because we could let the Palestinians take over Palestine and give the Jews a new homeland in the Anbar province. Also, it would bring about the Rapture, which would help a lot of us out.
3 - It's a shame Colin Powell didn't make his contempt for Clinton a little less obvious during the don't ask-don't tell brouhaha. Rumsfeld was obviously both maladroit and malign (and always trying to conquer Eternia); his ideology and relentless attempts to prune the Army have had disastrous effects on our ability to fight wars of occupation; his leadership style has probably encouraged anyone who might have been able to help stop this mess to either shut up and get with his disastrous program or to skip their third star and get out (and I worry that kiss-up kick-down as a way of life has poisoned the upper tier of the armed services now); but I'll give him this -- he never would have let a Joint Chief pull that kind of bullshit on him.
The whole idea of "civilian control of the military" has been somewhat discredited by Bush. There's always been the fear of a military coup d'etat behind that idea, or else excessive military aggression by loose-cannon generals, but there have also been times when generals have been accused of fighting too timidly (McClellan in the Civil War is the example neocons always use). It's funny, though, that the people who usually whine about "political generals" are the conservatives talking about Clinton's army or Roosevelt's army. (Eisenhower and Marshall were both thought of as traitors by the O'Reillys and Limbaughs of WWII -- specifically Joe McCarthy.)
The "Carnation Revolution" in Portugal in 1974 is an example of good military men who resisted bad civilians. This event has been forgotten by history because it was successful and almost bloodless. It deserves more attention. (I'm grasping at straws, of course.)
At this point I'm actually hoping for a tacit sitdown strike by the military. They almost seem to be a more likely source of resistances than the Democrats, and certainly more than the media, which is made up of people very much like Bush (look good, repeat slogans, be loyal to the program). Without the media mass resistance is unlikely to happen, and in general mass resistance as such has been discredited and jokified in the wake of the Vietnam War, a false story of which is now orthodox in the hive mind. So the Iraq war now has about 20% approval or so, but a fair chunk of the 80% are super-hawks worse than Bush.
The Democrats have been steadily improving, but not fast enough, and in time of war Congress has almost no leverage over the C in C anyway.
12 to 9.
Snarkout - that's another reason to hate Colin Powell. With My Lai, Iran-Contra, betraying the Shia in 1991 and lying to the UN in 2003, that makes five! Is there any military-related crime or screwup that Powell wasn't complicit in over the last forty years? Tailhook, maybe...
The Joint Chiefs are as political as anyone else, and always have been. They advance their services' interests, and the military's generally as they perceive it. They've been engaged in a protracted ass-covering strategy for some time.
In this case, they're perfectly right that a surge won't help anything. But what would they rather do? Certainly not "cut and run" -- the only thing that really makes sense at this point.
The "Carnation Revolution" in Portugal in 1974 is an example of good military men who resisted bad civilians. This event has been forgotten by history because it was successful and almost bloodless. It deserves more attention. (I'm grasping at straws, of course.)
Well, and isn't the modern history of Turkey (I say ignorantly, without much real knowledge) about a reasonably sensible military leadership propping up an otherwise shaky democracy?
But I still find it disturbing.
Funny, I was just typing a comment about Turkey, LB. The Turkish military (IIRC) took control of the government three times in the 20th century, made the adjustments they felt were needed, then handed control back over to civilians. You don't see this pattern much anywhere else.
One thing that has to be repeated and repeated, and this is what motivates the generals I think: there's no way that a 10% increase in forces can change anything militarily. especially when it's being done mostly by holding people longer and giving them shorter breaks in sooner. The reason that the increase of forces is so small (far too small), and everyone knows this, is that we've committed everything we have already. We have no reserve. It's an obvious window-dressing desperation move and the strategists on the other side have already figured this out. That means that if they've got anything up their sleeve, and how could they not, we'll see it before, during, or immediately after the buildup.
I don't know where the slogan "one last push" came from -- the media or the administration -- but the word "last" is a dead giveaway. It cues you to ask "And after that, what?"
My guess is either that a.) the Bush people are buying time to allow them to set up the "stabbed in the back" accusation, b.) they have a bunker mentality and are completely irrational or c.) as many have said before, they're so committed to spin, misinformation, and politics over policy that they're doing the only thing that they know how to do (something that has worked for them very well for a decade or more).
John, that Carnation Revolution stuff is cheering on a gloomy day, and I didn't know any of it (I didn't even know that Portugal had been a dictatorship after WWII). Thanks for mentioning it.
Slightly OT, and probably news to no one here, but I've been doing more reading on the situation in Iraq right now (after being relatively unplugged for a few months) and man, we've gotten ourselves into a serious mess over there. Like, in a bad way.
At this point I'm actually hoping for a tacit sitdown strike by the military.
That's a big part of what finally got us out of Vietnam: a refusal by significant numbers of troops, and not just draftees either, to follow orders to deploy and fight.
One thing that has to be repeated and repeated, and this is what motivates the generals I think: there's no way that a 10% increase in forces can change anything militarily. especially when it's being done mostly by holding people longer and giving them shorter breaks in sooner. The reason that the increase of forces is so small (far too small), and everyone knows this, is that we've committed everything we have already. We have no reserve. It's an obvious window-dressing desperation move and the strategists on the other side have already figured this out. That means that if they've got anything up their sleeve, and how could they not, we'll see it before, during, or immediately after the buildup.
This seems obviously true to me. At this point, it's probably not possible for the Administration to pass a draft to increase the size of the army, even if they wanted to. Which means that we've got what we've got, in terms of forces, and aren't likely to get much more.
Patience! The cracks in the facade are lengthening before our eyes, and corporate media isn't going to be able to hold it together.
I'm as chary as you about the armed forces per se representing a side in some imaginary national debate. Here they're doing their jobs, and I find no fault with these judgments—I know you don't either.
My deepest fear about the US military is always that it may become too invested in the mission, and eventually convince itself that our way of life depends on "winning" in some particular context. The danger is that victory or defeat, winning or losing, become all-important in themselves, divorced from the "politics by other means" framework that gives their actions policy meaning.
This is a hard question, because nobody wants an army not to make extraordinary demands on itself to carry out a mission. But there is such a thing as military statesmanship, exemplified by Marshall and Eisenhower during WWII, by Ridgeway and Van Fleet in Korea, by Abrams and Bruce Palmer and Fred Weyand in the later phases of Vietnam. Excellence and efficiency in military effort, combined with realistic, definite and worthwhile objectives.
I'm not too worried about this at the moment.
So here's a question: Fairly recently, I saw some stories indicating that the Armed Forces generally had met their 2006 recruiting goals. Now, it seems clear to me that the Army, right now, isn't big enough to do what we're asking it to do: that regardless of whether the best policy is to withdraw from Iraq (answer: Yes.), the Army's overstrained trying to do what we have it doing now with the number of soldiers it has.
So why are the recruiting goals set at something achievable rather than at some aspirational goal slightly beyond the most possible recruits they think they might be able to come up with?
Did anyone see the Simpsons a couple weeks ago where they were mocking military recruitment efforts? For the rest of the night, there was a military recruiting commercial during every break.
If that's a serious question, LB, the answer is that meeting recruiting goals has become a political metric for how popular and successful the war is among soldiers, and everyone is under orders not to set goals that could embarrass the administration.
22 is actually reassuring to me, because it implies that the older generation is significantly more likely than my generation to envision a potential invasion by the US that does not end up in a chaotic debacle. I don't know many people who thought Bush's non-WMD goals for the Iraq war were less than nonsensical, even people who don't know anything about foreign policy.
28: That's certainly my guess, but I was kind of seriously wondering if there was some other explanation, like maybe there's a training bottleneck so that we can't make the Army bigger by recruiting more soldiers at more than a certain very limited rate.
If one wanted to surge, recruiting does not seem like the answer. Rather, one would send active forces after less of a break in rotation and mobilize reserves to keep up the tempo. Recruiting more people is important if you want long-term growth, but I do not see it helping much if you need a short-term surge--it takes about half a year to train an infantryman, and even then, before you can make more units, you need officers and NCOs and equipment and training as a unit. This all takes time.
Ideal, were you in the military just after Vietnam? If so, how big a deal was the "hollowing out" of the military, and the sense that there was a fair bit of rot in the hierarchy as a result of the war?
31: Sure, but we've been in the position of being strapped for troops, but (IIRC) announcing that we were meeting recruiting standards, for years now.
23: That's a big part of what finally got us out of Vietnam: a refusal by significant numbers of troops, and not just draftees either, to follow orders to deploy and fight.
Interesting - can you say a bit more about that? Or provide a link or something? It sounds credible but I hadn't heard it before.
30: there is a sort of bottleneck in that you need y recruits every year to sustain an army at a size z, and you need x instructors to train y recruits a year, and if you want to increase the army to 2z you need to increase recruitment to at least 2y, so you will need to train another x instructors first, which will take a few months.
It's been a long time since the army was actually increased in size, so it's tricky to judge the actual timelag that would exist between saying "the army needs twice as many brigades" and the army actually having twice as many brigades.
But in reality the limit on the army's size is willing recruits, and that limit has pretty well been reached given current conditions of pay and service. (viz.: not very much; going to Iraq).
Sic Semper Tyrannis ...Good blog, by a scarey dude:Vietnam Seal + ME Spook
19:From that blog's comments, the plan includes words to the effect:"rapid clearing of hostiles in areas". "Rapid" only possible with area bombing. The 20-30k is most likely simply force protection because it will likely get very ugly. The Army and Marines will withdraw to FOB's, and the Air Force and Artillery will be unleashed on Sunni and Sadrist neighborhoods in Baghdad. With tens of thousands of civilian deaths, the surrounding nations, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia may get involved, military or with oil. An excuse to attack Iran may arise, with consequent nationwide Shia uprising, Sistani calling for Jihad.
Bush is not going to lose this war. Y'all are about to see what real war looks like. Real war looks like Hamburg, Dresden, Nanking, Nagasaki. Millions instead of thousands.
I am even less sane today. Need to withdraw.
Would it be cooler if McManus were a thirteen year-old boy or a fifty-something woman who comments while she knits?
Bush is not going to lose this war.
Oh, he is. Just not gracefully.
Ideal, were you in the military just after Vietnam? If so, how big a deal was the "hollowing out" of the military, and the sense that there was a fair bit of rot in the hierarchy as a result of the war?
Yes. I enlisted in 1974. The Army I joined was a joke compared to the Army I retired from in 1994. I do not know if "rot in the hierarchy" is the right way to describe the Army in 1974. More that people were tired and demoralized and were not working nearly hard enough at making the Army as effective fighting force as a should have been. Part of that was a reflection of the times--there were race riots at some bases in Germany. During my first tour in Germany, the Army's strict anti-drug policy had become catching and getting rid of the heroin adicts and trying to get the people smoking hashish to not do it in the barracks.
However, the Army's senior leadership, beginning with General Rogers in the late 1970's, turned all that around.
That plan certainly sounds like a way to lose it, bob.
Oh, he is. Just not gracefully I wish this contradicted Bob's prophecy, but it doesn't.
The key is Hakim. All Hakim cares about is the SE oil sites and the Holy Cities. The rest of Iraq, as far as Hakim is concerned, can simply die. Hakim has been begging the US to unleash the Air Force for years, but has been restrained by Sistani, Sadr, and whatever remained of decency.
Hakim meeting with Bush in the WH meant Hakim will get his way. Who did you think Bush was? LBJ, a misguided dude with a huge heart? Bush is a homicidal monster who refuses to lose. Whatever it takes.
By fall, maybe many of the rest of you won't care much about living, like me.
I would love it if the army just refused to obey Bush (for instance, if he called for a McManus-like scenario). I'm not sure that failure to obey civilian authorities is a "dangerous precedent" when the civilian authorities in question are arguably illegitimate and in any case running roughshod over the constitution and when they're calling for an insane and desperate escalation of what was already a futile and criminal war.
The dangerous precedent would be if the army showed that it would show absolute lockstep obedience no matter what kind of nutjob somehow wormed his way into the Oval Office.
Of course, I've never quite understood the liberal idolatry of "process."
Whatever it takes.
I agree with your assessment of Bush, but whatever it takes remains vastly more than Bush has to work with, and more than he's able to assemble before 2009. He can and likely will make it ugly and bloody, and then use that as a pretext to expand the bombing eastward to Iran, but there is no way to "win" this war.
Seymour Hersh has been writing about a version of what Bob was talking about for awhile now.
For most of the hawks, chaos and devastation in the Middle East is a feature, not a bug. And if oil prices go sky high, qui bono?
Nixon's bombing of Cambodia could not win the war, but it could wreck Cambodia and assure the hawks that they were being tough enough.
The JCS is likely resisting, but we have all read the stories about Colorado Springs. The Air Force is, for a lot of reasons even excluding the crazy Christians, a different kind of beast. They never meet Iraqis and in most cases see little hostile fire or the consequences of their missions.
43: Bush has a lot of resources left, including 10, 000 warheads. I don't know if the other major powers will pay the cost to stop him.
Only the military can stop him. That really sucks.
I've a feeling he'll be restrained by people closer to him than the generals.
I was particularly crazy over at Matt's. This is why I was calling for full mobilization in 2002. WWII level mobilization.
Y'all think it is impossible. No, Bush can make it becessary, inevitable, irrevocable. He probably could not have had a draft, a war economy, the destruction of the welfare state in 2002. But a gradual ramp up to where other nations have no choice but to attack us;where we lose a carrier group, a couple divisions, get the oil shut off and the dollar crashed was doable. Then we will be in WWIII. Like Czechoslavakia and Austria and all of a sudden Poland and aw shit I hate Hitler but WTF can I do? IRREVOCABLE.
"Save one life and save the world" Fuck. I have seen millions die in my relatively peaceful lifetime. Politics is so serious, it is always a matter of life and death.
Compared even to Nixon, Bush has very few elder statemen near him. Haig and Kissinger were genuinely sinister guys, but they were rational and had their own credibility. Most of Bush's people are political operatives and Bush Family made men.
Maybe after Bush dissed BFMM Baker with his snarky little high-school joke, something will happen. Baker had to take that personally. But as Atrios just explained, the elder statesmen are irrelevant by now. No one has to listen to them.
I've been reading Suskind's One-Percent Solution this past day or so, and one of its lessons is that Dick Cheney is a stone-cold psycho. And he's hyper-controlling: doing things like hiding critical reports from Bush, or excising key lines from his public speeches at the last minute, or annoucing major new policy in interviews, let alone all of the weird intelligence stove-piping.
Of course, the moral of Woodward's latest was that Rumsfeld was *also* a hyper-controlling stone-cold psycho. I take it that the czar knows, and that he likes it that way.
34: This movie is a pretty good introduction to the subject (I saw it via Iron Weed Films, which is a very cool service that everyone here should check out). The "GI Movement Archives" on the site has a lot of info and source materials from the time, and the "Web Links" is also good, particularly the "Publishers and Publications" section.
Oh, and the purported relevance of 51 to the thread is that right now it seems like it's Cheney and his team against the whole of civilization. Since the whims of a feeble President will be the arbitrator, I give the struggle even odds.
If only we weren't personally affected by Cheney's stone-cold psychosity, I would find it kind of wonderfully fascinating. I want him to be a John LeCarre character, instead of real.
50: Process is cool during normal circumstances, but when you're in a crisis situation (such as the Bush administration), pretending like process is going to save you strikes me as wilfull blindness.
Of course, maybe the Bush administration doesn't really represent a crisis. Maybe we can afford to just let things play out. I hope so, because apparently that's what those in power have decided to do.
This scene, for example, would make good cinema:
On Wednesday, April 24 [2002], the catering staff at the Intercontinental Hotel in Houston spun from their duties to behold a surreal sight: Dick Cheney--leg propped high from a recently implanted shunt behind his knee--flying through the kitchen in a motorized wheelchair, wingtip poised as a battering ram.From Suskind's book.
Of course, maybe the Bush administration doesn't really represent a crisis.
It doesn't. People need to get comfortable with the breadth and depth of US strength. Problems we have will play out over decades, not months or years. And it is, for good reasons, hard to convince people that you have insight into what's going to happen in a decade or so.
56: I can't help but picturing the actor who played the non-Jeff Bridges Lebowski in that role.
And it is, for good reasons, hard to convince people that you have insight into what's going to happen in a decade or so.
But what if you use that patented McManus-Prophecy-Of-Doom tone?
55: The worry, of course, is that it does set a precedent, and that even if the military coup solved a real crisis this time (I agree with 57, though), next time the 'crisis' probably won't be as serious.
Plus, process is good. No process means we can keep detainees as long as we like because we're really not hurting them, what with the lemon chicken and all. Big fan of process.
maybe the Bush administration doesn't really represent a crisis
It does, but the crisis is this: Democrats issue subpeonas after the next Congress begins, Bush tells them to go fuck themselves, and then the Democrats discover that their unwillingness to filibuster Bush's cryptofascist judges has left them with a judiciary that won't come down on the side of the rule of law.
Speaking of the Big Lebowski, the actor may be recognizable from other roles. I know I said "Oh yeah! That was him!" after seeing that he was the judge near the end of the "Producers" musical, and the mayor in "Blazing Saddles".
We just need to reboot. Install Gore as president, get rid of all the judges who's been appointed in the last six years, repeal every law that's been passed.