Strategic decision...
Obwon
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1992/dunlap.htm
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Strategic decision
Growing sentiment in the Army:
Support our troops, impeach Rumsfeld.
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By Sidney Blumenthal
printe-mail
May 13, 2004 | Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
told Bush in February of torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib
prison. From the dearth of detail Rumsfeld has recalled
of that meeting one can deduce that Bush gave no
orders, insisted on no responsibility, asked not to see
the already commissioned Taguba report. If there are
exculpatory facts, Rumsfeld has failed to mention them.
If he received orders from the commander in chief, he
neglected to implement them. One must presume
Bush gave none. He acted as he did when he
received the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily
briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike
in US" -- complacent and passive. Bush had
asserted that the PDB required no action
because it did not include exact times and
places of attack; in the Taguba report, however,
word about torture was highly specific.
The threat as Rumsfeld perceived it from the
beginning was the news of torture itself.
Suppressing it broadened into a defense at
all costs of his position. For decades,
Rumsfeld has gained a reputation, swimming
in the bureaucratic seas, as a "great white
shark" -- sleek, fast moving and voracious.
As counselor to President Nixon during his
impeachment crisis, his deputy was young
Dick Cheney, who learned at his knee. Together
they helped right the ship of state under
President Ford, where they got a misleading
gloss as moderates. Sheer competence at
handling power was confused with pragmatism.
Cheney became the most hard-line of
congressmen, and Rumsfeld informed
acquaintances that he was always more
conservative than they may ever have
imagined. One of the lessons the two
appear to have learned from the Nixon
debacle was ruthlessness. His collapse
confirmed in them a belief in the imperial
presidency based on executive secrecy.
One gets the impression that they, unlike
Nixon, would have burned the incriminating
White House tapes.
Under President Bush, the team of Cheney
and Rumsfeld spread across the top rungs
of government, and staffed themselves with,
members of the neoconservative cabal, infusing
their right-wing temperaments with ideological
imperatives. The unvarnished will to power was
covered with the veneer of ideas and idealism.
Invading Iraq was not a case of vengeance or
mere power -- it was Rumsfeld, after all, who
had traveled to Baghdad to lend U.S. support
to Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran and
help provide him with weapons of mass
destruction -- but the cause of democracy
and human rights.
On Rumsfeld's survival depends the fate of
the neoconservative project. If he were to go,
so would his deputy, the neoconservative
Robespierre Paul Wolfowitz, and below him
the cadres who stovepiped the disinformation
that Iraqi exile and neoconservative darling
Ahmed Chalabi used to manipulate public
opinion before the war. It was Rumsfeld who
argued immediately after Sept. 11 that
Afghanistan was a steppingstone to Iraq,
inserted his reliable man to write the National
Intelligence Estimate that claimed WMD as
the rationale for the war (suppressing contrary
evidence) and dismissed Colin Powell's State
Department's warnings about violent insurgency
in the postwar period.
In his Senate testimony last week, Rumsfeld
explained that the government asking the press
not to report news of Abu Ghraib "is not against
our principles. It is not suppression of the news."
War is peace.
Six soldiers from a National Guard unit from West
Virginia, who allegedly treated Abu Ghraib as a
playpen of pornographic torture, have been
designated as scapegoats. Will the show trials
of these working-class antiheroes end inquiries
about the chain of command? An extraordinary
editorial published by the Army Times, which
hasn't previously ventured into such controversy,
said, "The folks in the Pentagon are talking about
the wrong morons ... This was not just a failure of
leadership at the local command level. This was
a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability
here is essential -- even if that means relieving top
leaders from duty in a time of war."
Retired Gen. William E. Odom, a former staff member
of the National Security Council and now at the
Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, reflects
the depth of dismay in the upper ranks of the military.
"It was never in our interest to go into Iraq," he told
me. He calls that war a "diversion" from the war on
terrorism; the rationale for the war, finding WMD,
"phony"; the U.S. Army overstretched, being
driven "into the ground"; and the prospect of
building a democracy in Iraq "zero." In Iraqi
politics, he says, "legitimacy is going to be
tied to expelling us. Wisdom in military affairs
dictates withdrawal in this situation. 'We can't
afford to fail' -- that's mindless. But the danger
has been done. The issue is how we stop failing
more. I'm arguing [for] a strategic decision."
One high-level military strategist told me that
Rumseld is "detested" and that "if there's a
sentiment in the Army, it is 'Support Our Troops,
Impeach Rumsfeld.'"
The Council on Foreign Relations has been
showing old movies with renewed relevance
to its members. "The Battle of Algiers," which
depicts the nature and costs of a struggle with
terrorism, is the latest feature. The seething in
the military against Bush and Rumsfeld might
prompt a showing of "Seven Days in May,"
about a coup staged by a right-wing general
against a weak liberal president, an artifact
of the conservative hatred of President
Kennedy in the early 1960s.
In 1992, Gen. Powell, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, awarded the prize for his Strategy
Essay Competition at the National Defense
University to Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap for
"The Origins of the American Military Coup
of 2012." His cautionary tale imagined an
incapable civilian government creating a
vacuum that draws a competent military
into a coup disastrous for democracy. The
military, of course, is bound to uphold the
Constitution. But Dunlap wrote: "The
catastrophe that occurred on our watch
took place because we failed to speak
out against policies we knew were wrong.
It's too late for me to do any more. But it's
not for you." "The Origins of the American
Military Coup of 2012" is being circulated
today among top U.S. military strategists.
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About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and
senior advisor to President Clinton and the
author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a
column for Salon and the Guardian of
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