Tommy This and Tommy That
Unqualified Offerings frequently sees fellow bloggers alluding to receiving “hate mal” or just “nasty messages.” For some reason, that never happens to UO. The following letter is probably the single harshest e-mail this website has ever received, and even it crosses no bounds of propriety that UO would enforce, for all the excess of its conclusion:
It is not for generals to decide to go to war, it is for them to fight it. Nuclear engineers don’t decide where we need new power plants they build them for those who make the decision. Generals have an attachment to their troops so clearly they might have a sentiment not to go to war.
To put any sort of meaning to generals not wanting war is just grasping for straws to be anti-war. My stance on whether we go to war or not is based on lots of issues, but whether ex-generals want to or not is not one of them. Why not poll ex-military personnel? Going to war is a policy decision for our country, and I don’t recall you ever quoting generals concerning other policy. Are these generals fully up to date on the political ramifications of the middle east to our country and the stability of the world? What makes you think that they understand foreign policy any better than you or I?
Now if the generals told us that there was no way we could win a war because logistically we could not get troops there or the defenses in Iraq were to dense, then that would be a criticism with merit. But why in the world would I care about what they feel in terms of our country’s policy in the middle east? They know combat strategy very well, should we ask them for their football picks? Their job is to command troops, fight for our country and know military strategy.
Your missive tries to deceive your readers into thinking that the generals’ opinions should have some special sway, when in reality they are just persons with opinions. You should be embarrassed to display such faulty logic in your writing.
Surprise: Unqualified Offerings does not agree. Further surprise: Unqualified Offerings finds it massively wrong.
First, several of the generals quoted in articles that UO has linked discussed specifically military difficulties, such as readiness and availability of troops and materiel, plus strategic and operational issues attending a war with Iraq. (Here’s a list of topics on offer currently for general officers at the US Army War College.)
The notion that one becomes and remains a general and a political naif both is…strange. Somehow we keep making them President and Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and Special Envoy here and Ambassador to There decade in and decade out - indeed, century in and century out. How did General Marshall come up with the Marshall Plan anyway? Why did Truman let him do it?
But let’s put aside Marshall and Ike and Colin Powell and not just Tippecanoe but Tyler. It seems obviously unlikely that a general officer in the army of a nation that has strewn its forces from one end of the globe to the other, a man who must perforce consult with military and civilian leaders of other nations in the course of his work, because that’s what generals do, there’s not much leading the Imperial Guard into the teeth of the British guns these days, doesn’t require at least an effective informal political education to do his job. It’s structural. See this profile of war skeptic Anthony Zinni, another General who was tapped for political work by this very administration. Before that, he was head of Central Command, in charge of “36,000 troops based in Saudi Arabia, at a time of heightened tension between the US and Iraq.” Can you imagine being responsible for coordinating all aspects of US military deployment in the Persian Gulf and not giving some attention to the relationships with and among the various countries where your men are stationed?
Characteristically, he began learning Arabic, read a string of books on Arab culture, and spent several months travelling to meet Arab leaders.
Before he retired last year, Zinni spent several months travelling across Central Asia attempting to improve US relations with a number of countries, including Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
“War is the easy part,” Zinni told the Washington Post.
At a guess, I doubt my e-mailer has done more to educate himself about the Middle East and Central Asia than Zinni has. And I believe you’ll find that many US generals have undergone the equivalent of advanced degree programs in relevant subjects or have advanced degrees outright.
There’s a further peculiarity of the current generation of active and just-retired brass. They began their careers as junior officers in Vietnam. That gave them an incentive to think deeply about the political implications of using military force, especially the reckless use of military force. And before hawks smear them as excessively cautious because of that formative experience, I’ll remind you that they won that first war with Iraq people keep pointing to to show how easy things will be this time.
The effort some hawks have made to minimize the skepticism of some of our generals toward their clever plans has led them to denigrate these men in a way that the hawks would never have stood for if Clintonites had done it. Whether my e-mailer should be embarrassed for such behavior, I’ll leave to him to decide.
