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US military in a twilight
zone
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - On Monday, the day that US
citizens honored the nation's war dead, the US
armed forces found themselves in a twilight zone
somewhere between glory and hell.
On the
one hand, the US soldier has rarely ridden as high
in terms of public image; no politician of stature
- neither Democrat nor Republican, neither
conservative nor liberal - dares say anything
negative about the conduct or integrity of those
in uniform. Even anti-war forces affirm their
admiration for the professional military, blaming
scandals such as torture and detainee abuse at Abu
Ghraib prison and elsewhere on civilian bosses.
The military has become "the apotheosis of
all that is great and good about contemporary
America," Boston University professor Andrew
Bacevich, a retired army colonel, write in his new
book, The American Military: How Americans Are
Seduced by War.
On the other hand, the
US Army and Marines find themselves in the middle
of by far their worst recruitment crisis since the
military draft was ended in the waning days of the
Vietnam War - so bad, in fact, that recruiters who
have been told to lower basic eligibility
requirements and offer unprecedented financial and
other inducements for young men and women to join
are still unable to fill their quotas.
"Army recruiting is in a death spiral,"
retired army Lieutenant Colonel Charles Krohn, who
was forced out of the service for publicly noting
the severity of the problem as an army spokesman,
recently told right-wing Washington Post columnist
Robert Novak, while his former boss, the top army
recruitment officer, told the New York Times that
no relief was in sight.
On the one hand,
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his chief
"transformation" advisers could not be more
excited about the new opportunities for Washington
to sustain its full-spectrum military dominance
through space-warfare inventions, such as lasers
and "rods from gods" that will hurl death-dealing
metal from the heavens at more than 100,000
kilometers per hour onto precise, geo-orbitally
located targets far below.
On the other
hand, more than two years after conquering Iraq,
an occupation force of 140,000 US soldiers and
Marines still are unable to secure the highway
that runs between the Green Zone, the center of
the Iraqi government in Baghdad, and the city's
airport just 10 kilometers away against guerrilla
attacks and their increasingly sophisticated
improvised explosive devices.
Thirty years
after their ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam,
senior military officers find themselves at a kind
of mid-point between their dreams of glory -
achieved with stunning speed in their
lightning-like, two-week dash to Baghdad in 2003 -
and nagging nightmares of ultimate defeat, be it
in the form of the war of attrition that kills 15
or 20 of their troops each week, or in the
outbreak of a full-scale civil war in Iraq that
would make their continued presence untenable.
The war of attrition is damaging enough,
according to the latest polls, which show a steady
drop since a brief resurgence four months ago in
the wake of the January 30 Iraq elections, in
public approval both for the original decision to
go to war and in President George W Bush's
handling of the war. The latter has now fallen to
an all-time low of just 37%.
That was
translated into a little-noticed vote on Capitol
Hill last week that must have given the
historically sensitive military officers an
unhappy sense of deja vu: with just a couple of
hours of notice, supporters of a resolution that
called for Bush to submit a plan as soon as
practicable to withdraw all US troops from Iraq
gathered 128 votes.
The resolution was
voted down 300-128, as expected. But a solid
majority of Democratic lawmakers and five
Republicans, including one of the party's most
highly respected foreign-affairs experts, Iowa
Representative James Leach, showed unexpected
support for what Bush administration stalwarts
would call a "cut-and-run" strategy. Four months
ago, a letter calling for such a plan gathered the
support of only 24 Democrats.
Most senior
officers recognize that Bush's adventure in Iraq
has put the military in a precarious state. Not
only have retired officers, such as the former
commander of the US Central Command, Major General
Anthony Zinni, been the most outspoken critics of
the war, but even serving officers have voiced
subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle warnings about
both the prospects for success in Iraq and the
implications of being tied down there
indefinitely.
The chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, air force General Richard Myers,
warned a year ago that "there is no way to
militarily lose in Iraq" and coupled that
assertion with the observation that there is also
now way to win militarily in Iraq. That synopsis
evoked painful memories from Vietnam veterans who
note bitterly that the US lost the war despite the
fact that its troops never lost a single battle.
It was also Myers, long criticized by his
colleagues for not standing up to Rumsfeld, who
told Congress last month in a classified report
leaked to media that the current concentration of
US troops and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan
limited the ability of his forces to deal with
other conflicts speedily and effectively.
That also was the message a year ago from
General John Riggs, a highly decorated Vietnam
veteran who was in charge of the army's
modernization program until he was forced to
resign shortly after he voiced his concerns to the
Baltimore Sun. His previous boss, army chief of
staff General Eric Shinseki, also was
unceremoniously retired early after he warned
Congress that several hundred thousand US troops
would be needed to occupy Iraq.
Both men
clashed publicly with Rumsfeld's notions of
military "transformation" in which the speed and
lethality of the US armed forces have been given a
much higher priority than more mundane and
labor-intensive matters, such as the skills and
equipment needed to maintain law and order or
fight insurgencies. The former may be good for
conventional wars, but for unconventional
conflicts, such as Vietnam 30 years ago or Iraq
today, technology has its limits.
The fact
that they were punished for their views has sent a
strong message to the top brass who, like Myers
and his successor-designate, Marine General Peter
Pace, have accordingly avoided challenging the
civilian leadership on military questions, just as
their predecessors did during the Vietnam years.
To the great frustration of the middle
ranks, repeated assertions by Bush and Rumsfeld
that the military leadership has told them they
have enough troops in Iraq are probably true. "The
military part of [the defense secretary's office]
has been politicized," General Jay Garner, the
Pentagon's original choice to run Iraq, told the
Sun. "If [officers] disagree, they are ostracized
and their reputations are ruined."
Thus, a
cowed and politicized military establishment,
hailed as invincible just two years ago, marches
steadily down a demoralizing but all-too-familiar
path.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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