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MY LAI VET SAYS: HERE IT COMES
AGAIN IN IRAQ
Tony Swindell recalls
"Butcher's Brigade" in '69; says "gooks" have now
become "ragheads", every adult male is an "insurgent"
... atrocities against Iraqi civilians are soon going to explode in
America's face; US Government's courtroom jihads against terror stumble.
Alexander Cockburn on Lodi case where Feds paid $250,000 to man who
"saw" world's three top terrorists at mosque. As
neocons and Israel lobby howl for US to bomb Teheran, an Iranian outlines
simple path to peace. CounterPunch
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On
the surface, the question raised by six (at last count) retired
generals of whether Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should
resign has an obvious answer: of course he should. He was a key
man in the cabal that lied us into the war in Iraq, and he may have
been the key man in losing that war. What happens to the COO of
a major corporation who swindles his company into a risky deal,
then blows the deal so the company faces bankruptcy? In today’s
business world he probably pops his golden parachute and leaves
with $100 million. But at least he does leave. So should Rumsfeld.
Off
with his head!
At
that point, the picture grows murkier. Who replaces him? Almost
certainly, someone no different. He is, after all, the COO, and
this company’s problem is that it has a dunce for a CEO. Far
from learning any lessons from the previous failed venture, he wants
to repeat it, this time in Iran. A fish rots from the head, as the
old Russian saying goes, and until this head falls the rot will
spread. Where is the Queen of Hearts when we really need her?
Then
there is the question of why so many generals (not all of them retired)
want Rummy gone. That varies general to general, but when Rumsfeld’s
defenders argue that some of his critics are dinosaurs who resent
“Transformation” because it disrupts business as usual,
they have a point. As anyone who has dealt with the higher ranks
of the U.S. military knows, they put the La Brea tar pits in the
shade as a dinosaur graveyard. As wedded to old ways of doing things
– Second Generation war to be specific – as any other
group of senior Gosplan apparatchiki, they hate any hint of change.
Years ago, when an unconventional Air Force Chief of Staff had me
give my Fourth Generations of Modern War talk to the Air Force’s
“Corona” gathering of three- and four-stars, I felt
like Milton Friedman speaking to the Brezhnev Politburo.
But
here too the story is not so simple. While Rumsfeldian “Transformation”
represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction.
Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the
Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second
Generation’s conception of war as putting firepower on targets
while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the
Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned
comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war
that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has
no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war
with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given
us the defeat in Iraq. Again, Rumsfeld lies at the heart of both.
But, again, his removal and replacement contain no promise of improvement
in either.
At
least one of Rumsfeld’s retired general critics, Greg Newbold,
understands all this. I’ve known and respected Greg since
he was a captain teaching at The Basic School, and many of us hoped
he would be Commandant some day, the first Commandant since Al Gray
who would try to move the Marine Corps beyond Second Generation
war (in more than its doctrine manuals).
But
the Imperial Court gets what is wants, and what it wants are not
generals like Greg Newbold. It wants senior “leaders”
who are, above all, compliant, and it finds no shortage of candidates.
They may growl about Rumsfeld in private, but in public they bow
and scrape, not only to the SecDef and the catastrophic policies
of a failed Presidency, but even more to “high tech”
and its magical ability to expand defense budgets. At some point
they will make a break, because the military does not want to wear
the albatross of (two) lost wars. But not until they have extracted
the uttermost farthing.
The
play is titled, “No Exit.” Unless, unless . . . Rumsfeld’s
head should not be the only one to roll.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director
for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
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