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Breaking
ranks
By David Isenberg
WASHINGTON - For an administration that
places great emphasis, at least rhetorically, on
listening to the opinions of the military
leadership, the George W Bush administration
appears remarkably tone deaf when it comes to
Iraq.
Some high-ranking officers in the
past were quite critical of both the decision to
go to war - Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni,
retired, former commander in chief, US Central
Command - and how the war was conducted - former
army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, who famously
estimated in 2003 that a postwar occupation force
would likely need to be several hundred thousand
troops in size.
Zinni was retired when he
made his criticism and Shinseki was forced to
retire not long after making his remarks; a move
that did not go unnoted in the officer corps. That
would explain why active-duty military personnel
have been fairly restrained in their public
comments on the outlook for the war as the
insurgency in Iraq has gained strength since the
end of major combat operations in 2003. "Nobody
likes to be forced to fall on their sword,"
according to Colonel Dan Smith, US Army, retired,
fellow on military affairs for the Friends
Committee on National Legislation. "If you are
going to speak your mind you want to stay in the
service to fight another day."
But in
recent months that self-restraint has eroded as
American soldiers continue to be steadily killed
and strains in the military establishment become
ever more obvious.
This goes beyond
controversies over issues such as insufficiently
armored vehicles to protect soldiers against
improvised explosive devices or problems with
private contractors. Military officers are
speaking up more because of "what Iraq is doing to
the military" said Smith. For them, the "metrics"
on Iraq, to use a word favored by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are increasingly
negative.
One example is the uncertainty
over the number of attacks by insurgents. A study
by the National Intelligence Council in the
Central Intelligence Agency that was leaked to
Newsweek last month concluded that US government
reporting had so many conflicting sources and
methods of analysis that the results could not be
trusted and that there was inadequate evidence to
support any conclusions about whether the
insurgents were being defeated. In May, the New
York Times reported that some of the US generals
in Iraq pulled back from recent suggestions, some
by the same officers, that positive trends in Iraq
could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000
American troops late this year or early in 2006.
One officer suggested on Wednesday that American
military involvement could last "many years".
On June 12, Knight Ridder news service ran
an article quoting Donald Alston, the chief US
military spokesman in Iraq, who said last week, in
a comment that echoes what other senior officers
have said, "It's going to be settled in the
political process."
Another officer quoted
in the piece was Lieutenant Colonel Frederick P
Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing
the training of Iraqi security troops. He said the
insurgency doesn't seem to be running out of new
recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members
seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.
"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I
kill one I create three."
General George W
Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, expressed
similar sentiments, calling the military's efforts
"the Pillsbury Doughboy idea" - pressing the
insurgency in one area only causes it to rise
elsewhere. This is an interesting about-face for
Casey, as he said on March 9 that "the level of
attacks, the level of violence has dropped off
significantly since the [Iraqi] elections".
But for those who follow the news closely,
Casey was only echoing his superiors. Last month,
Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that success in
defeating militants in Iraq was directly tied to
the political process there. He told NBC's
Today show that "progress in the political
front is going to be key to progress against the
insurgency".
Such criticisms, especially
from those without sufficient clout to protect
them, do not go down well, particularly at the
highest levels of the Pentagon. Case in point is
the May 29 article in the Baltimore Sun that
described how three-star Army general John Riggs,
who spent 39 years in the Army, was forced to
retire at a reduced rank, losing one of his stars,
because of infractions considered so minor they
were not placed in his official record. His crime?
He publicly contradicted Rumsfeld by arguing that
the Army was overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan
and needed more troops.
This is ironic,
considering that even Rumsfeld has acknowledged
problems. For example, in an interview with BBC
television on June 14, Rumsfeld was asked whether
the security situation in Iraq had improved and
responded by saying "statistically, no".
There is an increasing consensus that the
US made severe mistakes in how it prepared to go
war with Iraq. An analysis released last month by
the Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington, DC, stated, "At a grand strategic
level, however, the Bush administration and the
senior leadership of the US military made the far
more serious mistake of wishing away virtually all
of the real world problems in stability operations
and nation-building, and making massive policy and
military errors that created much of the climate
of insurgency in Iraq."
David
Isenberg, a senior analyst with the
Washington-based British American Security
Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background
in arms control and national security issues. The
views expressed are his own.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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