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Stay the Crooked Course |
Current rating: 0 |
by Ray McGovern
(No verified email address) |
29 Jun 2005
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As was the case in Vietnam, the Iraq war is being run by civilians innocent of military experience and disdainful of advice from the colonels and majors who know which end is up. Aping the president’s practice of surrounding himself with sycophants, Rumsfeld has promoted a coterie of yes-men to top military ranks—men who “kiss up and kick down,” in the words of former Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford, describing UN-nominee John Bolton’s modus operandi at the State Department. So when the president assures us, as he did yesterday, that he will be guided by the “sober judgment of our military leaders” he is referring to the castrati. |
The editors of the New York Times this morning feign shock that in his speech at Fort Bragg yesterday evening President George W. Bush would “raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks.” Kudos for that insight! Better three years late than never, I suppose.
Forget the documentary evidence (the Downing Street minutes) that the war on Iraq was fraudulent from the outset. Forget that the U.S. and U.K. starting pulverizing Iraq with stepped-up bombing months before president or prime minister breathed a word to Congress or Parliament. Forget that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his merry men—his co-opted, castrated military brass—have no clue regarding what U.S. forces are up against in Iraq. The president insists that we must stay the course.
As was the case in Vietnam, the Iraq war is being run by civilians innocent of military experience and disdainful of advice from the colonels and majors who know which end is up. Aping the president’s practice of surrounding himself with sycophants, Rumsfeld has promoted a coterie of yes-men to top military ranks—men who “kiss up and kick down,” in the words of former Assistant Secretary of State Carl Ford, describing UN-nominee John Bolton’s modus operandi at the State Department. So when the president assures us, as he did yesterday, that he will be guided by the “sober judgment of our military leaders” he is referring to the castrati.
This is all lost on doting congresspeople like Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who has been around long enough to know better than to recite oxymorons. Most striking last week was his quixotic appeal to the military’s top brass to give a candid assessment of the situation.
Is there no top military official—active-duty or retired—around to tell it like it is? Active-duty? No. Retired? Sure there are. But the latter get little or no ink or airtime in our domesticated media. There are, Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, for example, or Gen. Brent Scowcroft (USAF), who was national security adviser to George H. W. Bush and, until this year, Chair of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. If their remarks are reported at all, one must dig deep into the inside pages to find them.
A General With the Courage to Speak Truth
More outspoken still has been Lt. Gen. William Odom (US Army, ret), the most respected senior intelligence officer still willing to speak out on strategic and intelligence issues. Unfortunately, you would have to understand German to know what he thinks of “staying the course” in Iraq, because U.S. media are not going to run his remarks.
Her is my translation of what Gen. Odom said last September on German TV’s Panorama program:
“When the president says he is staying the course, that makes me really afraid. For a leader has to know when to change course. Hitler did not change his course: rather he kept sending more and more troops to Stalingrad and they suffered more and more casualties.
“When the president says he is staying the course it reminds me of the man who has just jumped from the Empire State Building. Half-way down he says, ‘I am still on course.’ Well, I would not want to be on course with a man who will lie splattered in the street. I would like to be someone who could change the course...
“Our invasion of Iraq has made it a homeland for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Indeed, I believe that it was the very first time that many Iraqis became terrorists. Before we invaded, they had no idea of terrorism.”
At Fort Bragg yesterday, the president spoke of the need to “prevent al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban: a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America and our friends.” Too late, Mr. President, has no one told you that you’ve succeeded in accomplishing that yourself?
Gen. Odom, now professor at Yale and senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, does not confine his criticism to the president, Rumsfeld, and the malleable generals they have promoted. Odom has also been highly critical of leaders of the intelligence community, an area he knows intimately, having served as chief of Army Intelligence (1981-85) and Director of the National Security Agency (1985-88). Commenting on the farcical pre-election-campaign “intelligence reform” last summer, he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, observing:
“No organizational design will compensate for incompetent incumbents.”
Odom is spot-on. In my 27 years of experience as an intelligence analyst I learned the painful lesson that lack of professionalism is the inevitable handmaiden of sycophancy. Military and intelligence officers and diplomats who bubble to the top in this kind of environment do not tend to be the real professionals.
And who pays the price? The young men and women we send off to a misbegotten, unnecessary war.
When the president spoke last evening, Medal of Freedom winners former CIA director George Tenet, Gen. Tommy Franks, and Ambassador Paul Bremer no doubt were cheering him on from their armchairs. A most unsavory spectacle.
If they question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
--Rudyard Kipling
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. Now retired, he is a 27-year veteran of the analysis division of the CIA, and more recently co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
A pre-Fort Bragg-speech version of this article appeared yesterday on TomPaine.com. |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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War or Impeachment |
by Robert Parry
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
29 Jun 2005
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In the days ahead, American politicians and pundits will talk a lot about “leveling” with the people by speaking the hard truth about Iraq, meaning an admission that the war is sure to rage for years and require an even heavier sacrifice in money and blood.
But this “leveling” will be just the latest spin. What they won’t tell you are these two other hard truths:
First, whatever lies ahead in the Iraq War, the outcome is almost certain to be far worse for Iraqis and Americans than it would have been if the U.S.-led invasion had never happened. Despite the uplifting political rhetoric about democracy and peace, the smart money is on a staggering death toll, a grisly civil war, possibly even genocide, with Sunnis killing Shiites and Shiites killing Sunnis.
CIA analysts also have concluded that Iraq is emerging as a far more effective training ground for Islamic terrorists than Afghanistan ever was. Iraq is both more central to the Arab world and provides hands-on experience in bomb-making, kidnapping, assassination and conventional attacks on military targets. [Reuters, June 22, 2005]
If the Iraq insurgency ever ends, these battle-hardened terrorists also would be freed up to turn their skills on American targets around the world or on pro-U.S. governments in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan., according to an internal CIA analysis written in May 2005.
A drawn-out Iraq War also is certain to damage America’s volunteer military, with some of the nation’s best warriors killed, wounded or embittered after repeated tours in Iraq. Recruiters have struggled to meet quotas, and many current GIs have stayed in the military only because the Bush administration has invoked so-called “stop-loss” orders that prevent soldiers from leaving when their tours of duty are up.
Another sign of how poorly “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is going is that one of the mission’s chief goals now is a major expansion of Iraq’s prison system. In other words, the expectation is that Saddam Hussein’s old police state will be succeeded by a government that will lock up even more people.
Two Choices
The second hard truth is that the American people have only two choices on what to do next: they can continue to send their young soldiers into the Iraqi death trap for at least the next several years and hope for the best, or they can build a movement for impeaching George W. Bush and other administration officials – and then try to make the best of a bad situation in Iraq.
Although the realistic prospects for electing a Congress in 2006 that would act against Bush may appear slim, an impeachment movement would create at least a focus for a national political campaign, much like the Republicans used the Contract with America to gain their congressional majorities in 1994.
An impeachment strategy would have two other benefits: it would create the framework for an official investigation into the deceptions that led the nation to war in 2002-2003 (as well as into the incompetence with which the war was fought) and it would offer a legal structure for achieving some accountability.
No accountability means that a precedent has been set for future presidents misleading the nation into other aggressive wars of choice and paying no price.
While many liberals and Democrats reject an impeachment strategy – fearing that it would be too confrontational and carry too many political risks – there are dangers, too, in again trying to finesse the Iraq War, as Democrats did in the disastrous elections of 2002 and 2004.
Arguably, the Democrats would be no worse off – and might actually be in control of the government – if they had stood up to Bush’s war hysteria in 2002 and made the case in 2004 that the war must be brought to a swift conclusion. If Election 2006 is a reprise of the past two elections, the Republicans might actually gain ground against a demoralized Democratic base.
But these two “hard truths” – the recognition that the Iraq War fails any reasonable cost-benefit analysis and the realization that only extraordinary political courage can force a change of course – are sure not to be part of Bush’s new PR push on Iraq, even as the politicians and the pundits say they’re finally “leveling” with the American people.
[To read the speech that George W. Bush would have to give if he really wanted to “level” about how and why the United States is bogged down in Iraq, click here: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/062805a.html]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.
© 2005 The Consortium for Independent Journalism, Inc.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/ |
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