The Military vs. the GOP - Are they falling out of love? By Timothy Noah | Slate 9/29/03
Noah suggests that from top to bottom the military has issues with both the administration's strategy and tactics. Especially ironic is a passage he quotes from Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait:
[W]ithout civilian control the military, especially the staff of the joint chiefs, inevitably became the managers of their own affairs. This came more and more to mean that military promotions were determined on the basis not of ability but of congeniality with one's fellows. (emphasis added)
Isn't this the criticism Rumsfeld's fellow travellers have been levelling at Clark? That instead of being a unifying figure, his military record reveals a polarizing and de-stabilizing force? Makes you think that Rumsfeld, much like those on the far left, regard the military as a necessary evil and a spending black hole.
Speaking specifically of Gen. Clark, Noah suggests Clark has taken flak from other candidates for being a Johnny-come-lately to the Democratic Party: He voted for Reagan, praised George W. Bush, etc., before entering the Democratic nomination race. But this misses an important point: Never before in the modern era has a politically ambitious high-ranking military officer found it desirable, even from a purely careerist perspective, to associate himself with the Democrats. (emphasis added.) An important taboo has been broken.
But most damning is this appraisal of current policy by Anthony Zinni, the former U.S. commander for the Middle East: This administration came in with an idea of transforming the military into something—God knows what—lighter, smaller, quicker, whatever. The bill payer was going to be ground units, heavy units. And now we have a shortage of exactly what we needed out there. …
[W]hen we put [American soldiers] into harm's way, it had better count for something. It can't be because some policy wonk back here has a brain fart of an idea of a strategy that isn't thought out.
They should never be put on a battlefield without a strategic plan, not only for the fighting—our generals will take care of that—but for the aftermath and winning that war. Where are we, the American people, if we accept this, if we accept this level of sacrifice without that level of planning? Almost everyone in this room, of my contemporaries—our feelings and our sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam; where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. We swore never again would we do that. We swore never again would we allow it to happen. And I ask you, is it happening again?
I suspect that many of us who did our best to avoid service in the sixties and partied through the seventies will be among those most insistent that the troops be treated fairly. We'll see how applicable WKC's quality of life reforms in the service are applicable to domestic problems, but by treating the armed forces as a touchstone of contemporary citizenship, the general can't help but expose the hypocrisy of the chickenhawks.
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The NH Town Meeting 9/26 was very impressive. See my transcript of the general's opening remarks.