An interestng comment on US Generals' criticism of Donald Rumsfeld (from Back to iraq 3.0 - http://www.back-to-iraq.com/)

Why didn't you say so?

TIME Magazine is running what it calls a “full-throated” critique of the Iraq war by Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold (Ret.) He’s one of two generals who opposed the plans before the war, calling the Iraq war “unnecessary” and a distraction from Afghanistan. As he says, “I would gladly have traded my general’s stars for a captain’s bars to lead our troops into Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

So opposed was he that he resigned his position as director of operations for the Join Chiefs four months before the war … and then kept his mouth shut until now.

I am driven to action now by the missteps and misjudgments of the White House and the Pentagon, and by my many painful visits to our military hospitals. In those places, I have been both inspired and shaken by the broken bodies but unbroken spirits of soldiers, Marines and corpsmen returning from this war. The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood. The willingness of our forces to shoulder such a load should make it a sacred obligation for civilian and military leaders to get our defense policy right. They must be absolutely sure that the commitment is for a cause as honorable as the sacrifice.

Well, gee, forgive me if I don’t think he should be given a lot of credit. If he was so opposed to the war, why did he stay silent? Why did he sit by for three years while others “paid in blood” for what he feels is a flawed policy? It’s easy to be opposed to the war now. Why come out now? A clue is here:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent statement that “we” made the “right strategic decisions” but made thousands of “tactical errors” is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting the blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it.

It’s a valiant sentiment to support the men and women fighting the war, and his critiques of Condi’s statement and Rumsfeld’s micromanaging is dead on. But we’ve heard all this before. Anyone following the war can see it’s being run poorly from the big office at the Pentagon and that the civilian leadership has done everything to push blame elsewhere. Again, why now? Why didn’t you say something earlier, Lt. Gen. Newbold, once you were retired and could without fear of retaliation? You blame others for timidity or thick-headedness. “A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war. Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent.”

And, incredibly, you go on to blame Congress and the the media.

Members of Congress — from both parties — defaulted in fulfilling their constitutional responsibility for oversight. Many in the media saw the warning signs and heard cautionary tales before the invasion from wise observers like former Central Command chiefs Joe Hoar and Tony Zinni but gave insufficient weight to their views. These are the same news organizations that now downplay both the heroic and the constructive in Iraq.

Nice, cheap shots. Republicans controlled Congress and were in lockstep with the Bushies. The Dems, as minorities, have almost no power to exercise oversight. A high-profile resignation of — oh, I don’t know — maybe the Joint Chiefs’ director of operations might have provided them some political cover to get something done. And, gee, maybe it might have gotten some attention from the media, who then might have given Zinni and others’ more weight. And now you say we downplay the heroic and the constructive. Is this the kind of heroism you mean?

Don’t lecture us about heroism and constructive roles to play, Lt. Gen. Newbold (Ret.) You could have done something then, and you didn’t. You could have been a powerful symbol, even if you would have taken a lot of flak from your old bosses. You say officers swore an oath to the Constitution, not the men appointed above them, yet you betrayed it with your three-year silence. It’s been said that for evil to triumph, all it takes is for good men to do nothing. Well, you did nothing. You don’t get to be considered good now.

If Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold (Ret.) was so opposed to the war, why did he stay silent?

Perhaps, because as COO of the Potomac Istitute for Policy Studies which makes its money servicing government contracts, he was afraid that if he opened his yap, the government would cut off the Institute's access to the trough?

Counterpunch has a timely article on the issue of why senior military officers don't speak out, written by a former Colonel.

Worth a read.

Richard Steven Hack

www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com 

Whoops, wrong thread. Sorry about my previous post.

That's the most idiotic piece of false equivalency arguing I've seen in quite some time. Congratulations, you're a complete moron.

RogerGathman
I'm glad to see some discussion -- any really -- about the military follow up of the quietly disastrous Tora Bora "incident." If Osama's merry men one day succeed in disrupting Saudi's petro ports, we will have just another in the thousand and one reasons that this administration has the worst national defense record in the long history of the U.S.A.

Tommy Franks shouldn't be on Hardball, he should be in the military court dock, with Rummy, for gross incompetence.

I agree. If Bernard Trainor's assessment is correct -- that the public dissent of a few influential generals could have staved off the war -- that is a bad thing, not a good one.

Correction of myself

seeing the forest through the trees

Should have been

However, in the world of not seeing the forest through the trees, the military issues are the trees.

love covers a multitude of sin but a multitude of sin is done for money.

Yeah?

Maybe Gen. Newbold stayed silent because it is the essence of the American military tradition to let the civilians determine what wars to fight. The Generals present their arguments ~in private~ and then accept the decision from the civilians.

The American officer corps ~does not involve itself in politics!~ Doug MacArthur was an aberation, and was fired for it. Properly so.

Another of the many failures of the Bush administration is to weaken this excellent tradition. It is obvious that the Generals are speaking out with great reluctance because the military has been politically used and misused by the Bush administration. That it is only retired Generals speaking out is a compromise which ~may~ not be a serious violation of the tradition of the military staying out of politics.

Anyone who seriously thinks the Generals should have spoken out earlier better consider what they are asking for. How many countries have democracy only as long as their military forces allow it?

If you really think military interference in politics can't happen here, consider how many other things Bush et. al. have given us that no one thought could happen here. America under Bush is already following Argentina into financial ruin. Do we want the Generals to take over here too? Generals in politics is a step closer to that.

Richard Hack's referral in his post is well worth a read. However, and I may have missed it, it doesn't mention that, aside from an oath to the Constitution, the military is a brotherhood which protects its own, on and off the battlefield. That may be another reason a military man only speaks out when he is out of the military. Even though they are only speaking out for Rumsfeld's resignation, they are also in a way critizing their fellow officers, which I doubt they would do publicly while still in the service.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Richard Holbrooke looks behind the military revolt in this Washington Post Op-Ed.

These generals are not newly minted doves or covert Democrats. (In fact, one of the main reasons this public explosion did not happen earlier was probably concern by the generals that they would seem to be taking sides in domestic politics.) These are career men, each with more than 30 years in service, who swore after Vietnam that, as Colin Powell wrote in his memoirs, "when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons." Yet, as Newbold admits, it did happen again. In the public comments of the retired generals one can hear a faint sense of guilt that, having been taught as young officers that the Vietnam-era generals failed to stand up to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson, they did the same thing.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Eat my tea leaves Hundt. I called this one last summer!

I agree that Generals have no place in American politics. That said, had the leadership opposed Bush's policies, they had the duty to resign and then offer their public criticism. That Gen. Newbold resigned is only half of his duty. The second half would have been to go public at that time with his criticism.

"I agree that Generals have no place in American politics."

The Iraq War is not American politics; it is war. Generals do have a place in war and to warn against unnecessary, foolish, ill-conceived wars.

SherryB

According to this:

U.S. Building Massive Embassy in Baghdad By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
Fri Apr 14, 4:58 PM ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River here will be the largest of its kind in the world, the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defense force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq's turbulent future.

The new U.S. Embassy also seems as cloaked in secrecy as the ministate in Rome.

"We can't talk about it. Security reasons," Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman at the current embassy, said when asked for information about the project.

A British tabloid even told readers the location was being kept secret — news that would surprise Baghdadis who for months have watched the forest of construction cranes at work across the winding Tigris, at the very center of their city and within easy mortar range of anti-U.S. forces in the capital, though fewer explode there these days.

The embassy complex — 21 buildings on 104 acres, according to a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report — is taking shape on riverside parkland in the fortified "Green Zone," just east of al-Samoud, a former palace of Saddam Hussein's, and across the road from the building where the ex-dictator is now on trial.

The Republican Palace, where U.S. Embassy functions are temporarily housed in cubicles among the chandelier-hung rooms, is less than a mile away in the 4-square-mile zone, an enclave of American and Iraqi government offices and lodgings ringed by miles of concrete barriers.

The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy, almost half listed as security, are far more numerous than at any other U.S. mission worldwide. They rarely venture out into the "Red Zone," that is, violence-torn Iraq.

This huge American contingent at the center of power has drawn criticism.

"The presence of a massive U.S. embassy — by far the largest in the world — co-located in the Green Zone with the Iraqi government is seen by Iraqis as an indication of who actually exercises power in their country," the International Crisis Group, a European-based research group, said in one of its periodic reports on Iraq.

State Department spokesman Justin Higgins defended the size of the embassy, old and new, saying it's indicative of the work facing the United States here.

"It's somewhat self-evident that there's going to be a fairly sizable commitment to Iraq by the U.S. government in all forms for several years," he said in Washington.

Higgins noted that large numbers of non-diplomats work at the mission — hundreds of military personnel and dozens of FBI agents, for example, along with representatives of the Agriculture, Commerce and other U.S. federal departments.

They sleep in hundreds of trailers or "containerized" quarters scattered around the Green Zone. But next year embassy staff will move into six apartment buildings in the new complex, which has been under construction since mid-2005 with a target completion date of June 2007.

Iraq's interim government transferred the land to U.S. ownership in October 2004, under an agreement whose terms were not disclosed.

"Embassy Baghdad" will dwarf new U.S. embassies elsewhere, projects that typically cover 10 acres. The embassy's 104 acres is six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York, and two-thirds the acreage of Washington's National Mall.

Original cost estimates ranged over $1 billion, but Congress appropriated only $592 million in the emergency Iraq budget adopted last year. Most has gone to a Kuwait builder, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, with the rest awarded to six contractors working on the project's "classified" portion — the actual embassy offices.

Higgins declined to identify those builders, citing security reasons, but said five were American companies.

The designs aren't publicly available, but the Senate report makes clear it will be a self-sufficient and "hardened" domain, to function in the midst of Baghdad power outages, water shortages and continuing turmoil.

It will have its own water wells, electricity plant and wastewaster-treatment facility, "systems to allow 100 percent independence from city utilities," says the report, the most authoritative open source on the embassy plans.

Besides two major diplomatic office buildings, homes for the ambassador and his deputy, and the apartment buildings for staff, the compound will offer a swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building.

Security, overseen by U.S. Marines, will be extraordinary: setbacks and perimeter no-go areas that will be especially deep, structures reinforced to 2.5-times the standard, and five high-security entrances, plus an emergency entrance-exit, the Senate report says.

Higgins said the work, under way on all parts of the project, is more than one-third complete."

___

Associated Press news researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed to this report.

We're moving in for the long haul. Who is going to pay for the luxury suites? You and me.

Why do we need to mobilize against anyone who is not an actual threat? N. Korea has no intention of bombing the U.S. and since Israel ALREADY has nukes, who wouldn't want to have them as a deterrent against attack? America has ALWAYS been the greatest nuclear threat in the world. It was NOT the Soviet Union after Stalin died.

And before anyone says anything about the Cuban Missile Crisis, they were put there in response to OUR installation of nukes in Turkey.

NeoLotus

********

- Making judgements without intellectual justification is prejudice.
- We do not act rightly because we have virture, we have virtue because we act rightly.
- To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.

Well, no, Iran is no where near able to deal with the US military in a conventional warfare sense.

However, they WILL be able to cause serious damage to US forces in Iraq IF they decide to throw their whole force there - that would include the half million regular military and Revolutionary Guards, and possibly some of their one million militia. They will take devastating casualties, however, if they follow that policy and will ultimately lose. US forces, however, may sustain several thousand deaths (if not ten or twenty thousand deaths) and tens of thousands of casualties in the process - to add to the current total of 2300 deaths and probably 20-30,000 casualties.

More likely, they can also institute a guerrilla war if the US is so stupid as to actually invade Iran, and there they have the forces to run an insurgency ten to one hundred times bigger than the one we face in Iraq. First, their population is bigger by a factor of 2-3. Second, they have a militia of up to one million, if not six or seven million. If any significant fraction of that, along with the over one hundred thousand Revolutionary Guards, are involved in an insurgency against the US, either in Iran or Iraq - and possibly in conjunction with Shia militia in Iraq which number in the scores of thosuands - the US military is in very deep shit. It will take a million US troops in Iraq and Iran to control that - at least.

North Korea, on the other hand, has a one million man military, and has spent the last fifty years building its military force to confront the US and South Korea on the battlefield. They have a REALLY large amount of artillery that has been estimated to be able to deliver half a million shells on the DMZ every 24 hours. They would be able to wipe out our 35,000 troops in South Korea within 72 hours once they got rolling - which is why the US troops are being moved out of the DMZ to positions south of Seoul.

North Korea also has over 100,000 Special Forces troops trained in infiltration through tunnels and via their small submersible and submarine fleet.

To show you how tough those guys are, one infiltration was detected by South Korea when the submersible ran aground. In the attempt to capture the North Korean infiltrators, two escaped and remained at large for 53 days, killing 11 of their pursuers.

These guys are no joke.

Finally, of course, North Korea actually HAS nukes - it's not just speculation. The only speculation is in how many they have - one, two, six, ten, twenty? If Kim is about to lose the war - and the US WOULD win eventually (assuming China did not enter on the North's side, and that is very unlikely) - there is little doubt he would use those weapons. He could even put them on the North's submarines and deliver them to the US West Coast ports and cost the US several hundred billion dollars in port damage and economic impact.

So now you know why we're not attacking North Korea with anything but threats. Besides which, they have no oil.

Richard Steven Hack

www.computerproblemssolvedcheap.com 

To be fair, most of them probably dismissed it as another exercise and another attempt to get good reviews of their performance. The article is correct that this sort of thing is done all the time, using fictionalized versions of real countries. It was done for Iraq years ago, IIRC.

However, coming as it did immediately after the invasion of Iraq, I'm sure some of them suspected what the next step would be.

At that point, however, what could any of them really say? Without the current run up politically, or the evidence that Bush intends to use nukes, it would be career suicide for them to start bitching about invading Iran when there was no clear operational planning yet done.

Today is a different story. Now somebody needs to blow the whistle before Bush kills a half million or more Muslims with nukes.

Richard Steven Hack

www