COMMENT American Icarus
flirted with fire By Mark Perry
There is a bar. Set perilously atop the
Marine Memorial Club and Hotel, the Leatherneck
Lounge is one of San Francisco's most legendary
watering holes, an exclusive-of-sorts meeting
place for veterans and their families. It is all
that you might suppose it to be: semi-dark and
warm, quiet and somber, with good steaks and
smooth Scotch and, if you are lucky enough to know
the waiters, you can talk late into the night.
I was a guest there several weeks ago,
seated at a table with eight men who had seen a
bit of war. Arrayed around me were retired three
and four-star generals and a combat colonel. While
they talked (of the "Frozen Chosin" of the Korean
War, the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, Beirut, the
"Highway of Death" and
Anbar in
Iraq) I listened, checking what they had
experienced against what I had read.
The
next morning, as the Boeing 737 carrying me home
struggled into the air headed east, I memorialized
the evening in the pages of my small notebook,
filling 12 pages with anecdotes, quotes and
descriptions. I did this knowing, of course, that
I could never refer to any of the men at that
table by name, nor place the words they had said
in their mouths.
It was not that the
evening had been too personal or emotional, but
that all of them had let down their guard to the
point where I had been given insights to
fundamental truths about their profession and its
current state that were at once both damning and
insightful. To the degree that I have been privy
to such rare evenings among senior military
officers (and I have) is not because I write about
them - but because I don't.
Which is why,
after reading Thomas Barnett's Esquire article on
America's CENTCOM commander, I knew that Admiral
William "Fox" Fallon would be forced into
retirement. After reading the article, the men
around that table would have thought as I do: that
he was lucky he wasn't fired. In truth, I would
have busted him to Seaman Recruit.
On
Tuesday, Fallon submitted his resignation.
Barnett's piece has to rank as one of the
most embarrassing portraits of an American officer
in US military history. Both for Barnett, as well
as for Fallon. And that's saying a lot. Written in
pseudo Tombstone style - a kind of vague signaling
that this is just-between-us tough guys talk -
Barnett presents a military commander who is
constantly on the go, trailing exhausted aides who
never rest (oh, what a man he is!): Fallon doesn't
get angry (he gets "pissed off"); he doesn't have
a father (he has an "old man"); he doesn't spend
time (he does a "stint"); he doesn't walk (he
"sidles"); and he doesn't talk, "he speaks in
measured koans".
It's boorish and,
very often, it's just plain wrong. Thus, Barnett:
"If, in the dying light of the [George W] Bush
administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all
come down to one man. If we do not go to war with
Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that
rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good
cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance.
His name is William Fallon."
Well,
actually, yes - and no. The decision to go to war
will come down to one man, but his name won't be
Fox Fallon, it will be George W Bush. More
accurately, the constitution of the United States
places foreign policy in the hands of the
president as the commander-in-chief and the
decision for declaring war is in the hands of the
US Congress. Fallon's role in all of this, as I am
sure he must know, is to obey orders and to keep
his mouth shut, a point that was undoubtedly made
plain to him by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
in the immediate aftermath of the publication of
this article. And, we might imagine, Gates put his
objections to the article in the following terms:
"Fox, just what in the hell do you think you were
doing talking to Thomas Barrett?"
But this
little exchange, between Barnett and Fallon in
Cairo, is what put the admiral on the retirement
list: "Fallon sidles up to me during a morning
coffee break. 'I'm in hot water again,' he says."
And Barnett asks him: "The White House?" And
Fallon nods his head: "They say, why are you even
meeting with [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak."
And Fallon goes on: "Why? Because it's my job to
deal with this region, and it's all anyone wants
to talk about right now. People here hear what I'm
saying and understand. I don't want to get them
too spun up. Washington interprets this as all
aimed at them. Instead, it's aimed at government
and media in this region. I'm not talking about
the White House ... This is my center of gravity.
This is my job."
Not anymore.
To
hear Barnett talk about it, Fallon is not only a
"man of strategic brilliance", he once actually
stood between us and the apocalypse: "When the
admiral took charge of Pacific Command in 2005, he
immediately set about a military-to-military
outreach to the Chinese armed forces, something
that had plenty of people freaking out at the
Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The Chinese, after
all, were scheduled to be our next war."
Oh really? The Chinese were scheduled to
be our next war? That probably comes as somewhat
of a surprise to Fallon's colleagues in the US
Navy and at the Pentagon and is just the kind of
overblown claim that someone like Barnett thinks
makes a commander a hero to his colleagues - but
doesn't.
It's poison of the worst kind and
makes him ready fodder for every able seaman who
carries papers from one Pentagon office to
another: "Hey Tom, did you hear that Fox Fallon
stopped World War III - that guy's really
something."
It's not as if this hasn't
happened before. Fallon is a modern Mark Clark,
the legendary four-star US Army commander of World
War II who led Allied troops in Italy. Like
Fallon, the gangly Clark was tough talking and
seemingly tireless, but he never met a reporter he
didn't like and he recruited them diligently. He
trailed a tail of reporters who followed him
through North Africa and Italy and posed, hands on
hips, over maps when the photographers crowded
around.
"Take my good side," he said, "my
left side." He hated the British, who had been
bleeding all over North Africa, and commented that
"it was better to fight an ally than be one". When
the Allies landed at Normandy, Clark was angry
because the invasion took headlines away from his
own triumphs. When his army took Rome, he posed
for the cameras and then turned to his colleagues:
"I go now to the sounds of guns," he said.
Standing nearby, a reporter turned to a colleague:
"On this historic occasion I feel like vomiting."
There is a view abroad, commonly held,
that Fallon has been sacrificed, has been gotten
out of the way, by the Bush administration because
he disagreed with its policies on Iran. That
Fallon stood in the way of the neo-conservative
cabal which is bent on expanding the Middle East
conflict and that, when given the order for the
attack (at some point in the future), Fallon would
have courageously refused the order and reversed
the tide or history.
What bunk.
Fallon was and is a navy officer and a
patriot. As such, if given a legitimate order from
the president of the United States, as passed
through the legally constituted chain of command,
he would have obeyed the order. Of this we can
have absolutely no doubt. To do otherwise is
treason and to believe otherwise is to believe
that Fallon would have rejected every moment of
training, every tradition of his service, every
law and custom that has governed US
civilian-military relations. The problem is not
that Fallon disagreed with George Bush.
The problem is that he talked to Thomas
Barnett.
Mark Perry is
a director ofConflicts
Forumand
author of Partners in Command (Penguin
Press, New York, 2007).
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