The Nightstar Zoo

Meh. They're being portrayed as some kind of experts by the press, and while their experience is undoubtably valuable in interpreting the events, it is important to remember two things: they are retired, so they don't have any more information than YOU do and they are people, so they are just as likely to be partisan as I am.

They may be among the most qualified armchair quarterbacks we could find, but that doesn't make it any less of a monday morning.

Except that several of them retired a matter of days or weeks before going to the press. A couple even say that they retired for the express purpose of speaking out agianst Rumsfeld.

from the wikipedia:



You don't command an army by consensus. If you're doing your job right, someone's going to resent it, but a professional soldier's job is to take that resent, and bottle it up where it can never come out and follow the orders given. The fact that these generals went public with their condemnation (and we really should ignore the ones that have been out too long to know anything) instead of taking the matter to the Commander in Chief, or the oversight committee in congress speaks more about the character of the generals than about the man they decry.

These are partisan attacks. Because of that nature, it is very difficult to determine the truth of what they say. In fact, it is impossible for you or I to do it. In this case, we have no choice but to defer to the President and Congress on the matter.

Because Congress and the President are so very non-partisan...

(Not that this is anything more than partisanship on the generals' parts, of course.)

Um, no.


A professional soldier's job is to kill people and break stuff. As a secondary job, they're supposed to refuse unethical orders.

An officer's job on the other hand is to distill merely stupid orders until they are doable. As a last resort, an officer should offer their resignation if this is impossible in the hope that this will wake your superiors up to how STUPID they're being.



You assume that generals have a lot more access to Washington politics than is in fact the case. Of the "thousands" of generals currently in active service, maybe 10 could talk to the President directly at the general's request. As far as I am aware, Congress has no direct oversight into military maneuvers.



I fail to see how attacks, partisan or otherwise, about the past handling of events are out of my ability to judge.

I will admit that you may not have access to sufficient information; I do tend to rely on some academic databases and the fact that I live within 10 minutes of Centcom for information to fill in the gaps left by mass media. While the information you'd need to make a sound judgment about Iraq is in the public domain, it isn't exactly broadcast on C-span.

If your only sources for the situation then and now in Iraq are embedded US or UK reporters, then you may indeed have a hard time judging what has gone on thus far in Iraq. However, I doubt that you cannot get enough information if you tried.

Personally, I find their timing suspicious. Why didn't they wait
a little longer to express their concerns. I don't trust politicians in
this country, or the generals they inspire.

Why <i>should</i> they wait a little longer? If their goal truly is to get Rumsfeld to resign, then it's in their best interest to do this as soon as possible.

_________________
"Vox populi? Vox humbug!"
- William Tecumseh Sherman

I meant that things have been a mess over there for some time. What
took them so long to speak up? With Bush's ratings so low, one has to
wonder why now. I don't care for this administration. I always considered
myself a bit of a conservative in some things, after this administration I'm
ready to join the ACLU.

I'm confused. Are you for or against these generals' actions?

_________________
"Vox populi? Vox humbug!"
- William Tecumseh Sherman

I'm sorry SJ not to have answered you, but I won't be posting here
anymore. Although I love technology, I am not a tech. I think you
are all much more tech-savvy than Iam. The only thing I really know
well is how to destroy a smile from the face of a Tech.

Live long and prosper.

I'm not much of a tech-head either. But how does that apply here? This is a political discussion, not a technical one. I'm just trying to clarify to myself what your stance on this issue is.

*shrug*

Cool male logic, you're right. The night before my last post I looked
for you in _bar to talk to you 'face to face'. It didn't go well. I found
NightStar through TSC, so I thought NS must be populated by techs also.

I have come to see that this country is run by big business, multi-
national corporations, the government also does it's bidding. George
Bush is corporate. He throws money at the corporations hand over fist.
It does not matter that one is republican or democrat., liberal or
conservative. The media is corporate owned, it expresses the corporate
view.

When I see grandstanding from politicians, pundits or generals, I have
to ask myself, 'now what are they up to .'
I am niether for nor against the generals, I am extremely suspicious of
their motives. Most of them will, if not already, be put into soft-cushy
CEO positions in companies they know very little about.

I suppose that is why I sound like that, didn't mean to be confusing.

An interesting question. One of the biggest blots on the records of Westmoreland and a lot of other generals involved in Vietnam was that they continued to serve without resigning or complaining long after it was obvious that that our strategy and policy there were doomed to failure and ethically corrupt.

The American military has a two-hundred year tradition of staying out of politics. A sound and wise policy. Historically, far more democracies have been overthrown by their own generals than by foriegn invaders. It is a measure of how disasterous Rumsfeld's regime has been that so many professional military men have risked their reputations and post-retirement careers to oppose him.

I strongly suspect that many of them suspect that Bush and Rummy would be loony enough to use nukes in Iran. Or start a war requiring ground forces, which would be only slightly less of a strategic catastrophe for the United States. The Iranians, if we push them, are actually capable of driving us out of Iraq. The only thing that would stop them would be the massive application of air power. The resulting destruction of property and massive civilian casualties would result in our being driven completely out of the Middle East.

Berken,

I don't know that much about the Vietnam War, but the same forces that
drove that war are probably driving this one. Corporate profit.

I hope I'm wrong about these generals, I wouldn't mind being wrong. It
would be nice to see some conviction instead of pandering to the powers
that be.

As you can tell, I don't hold corporate structure in high esteem.

Vietnam didn't have much to do with corporate profit. It had to do with fear of the Communists (China was Communist, and it was thought that if Vietnam became Communist they'd take over all of Asia) and being allied with the very crooked "leaders" of South Vietnam, who had little or no support among the populace.

There are very real instances of corporate interests starting or supporting wars, but there are also instances where claims of such fall into the category of conspiracy theories.

The most famous example is World War I. There actually were munitions manufacturers pressuring their governments towards war, even to the extent of owning jingoistic drumbeating newspapers. Of course, virtually none of the important people who share the blame for starting that war thought it would last more than a few months. When it dragged on for four years, it ruined Europe.

Alliances between industrial combines and radical nationalists in Germany and Japan let to the rise of militarist governments in both countries, massive armaments programs, and eventually the wars of conquest that merged to form World War II. Whether the industrialists were more nationalistic than greedy or more greedy than nationalistic was not one of the questions that came up in my history classes. The situation in France, Great Britain, and the United States was just the opposite. The populaces wanted desperately to avoid war. Business interests were still staggering from the effects of the Great War and the Depression and exerted no pressure towards war worth noting. In fact, all three western powers delayed their rearmament programs until it was almost too late.

There are conspiracy theories about Roosevelt letting the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor to get us into a war, but Roosevelt's policies were, and had to be, to delay any war for as long as he possibly could. The United States was seen as so weak militarily that we would not be able to confidentally defend our own coasts until 1943.

I think Gwalla is pretty much correct about Vietnam. If corporations, even weapons manufacturers, wanted to get the United States involved in a war, Vietnam was the last place to do so. In fact, it wasn't until Johnson decided to escalate in 1964 or thereabouts that we had any plans to commit major resources there. It was not until that was well underway that the military-industrial complex began to make significant profit for the war, and those profits were being degraded by a stagnant economy.

In the case of the current conflict, the oil and defence industries may not have instigated the war in Iraq, but there is plenty of evidence that they supported the politicians (the Neocons, most particularly) who wanted an agressive strategy in the Middle East to secure the oil resources---and the tens of billions of dollars in oil contracts that might have gone to Europeans or local governments.

At this point, the crooked contractors and the oil companies have plenty of blood on their hands, along with 8 or 9 billion dollar of blood-stained money. That said, the blame for the entire fiasco still falls on Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Their arrogance and simple-minded nationalism got us into Iraq, and they've botched every major strategic decision of the war so far. Everyone else just enabled them.

Thanks gwalla and Berken,

You've given much food for thought and I wouldn't mind further reading to
see what was happening with foreign policy in those days.

As for conspiracy theories. I don't think conspiracy adequately describes
anything, almost always it sounds ludicrous. But power does seek power,
and power, especially in this day and age, seeks to insulate itself.

A tip for reading Berken's posts: the first 3/4 or so will be well thought out, informative, and interesting. The last paragraph or so will be a political rant. You can tell which ones these are by the presense of the names Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.

_________________
"Vox populi? Vox humbug!"
- William Tecumseh Sherman

A tip for liberals, moderates, libertarians, and traditional conservatives on this forum: any criticism of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld will be denounced as a "rant," or "crazy," in any forum their supporters frequent, including the floor of the United States congress. Most of them are quite sincere in their beliefs, so it is best to politely ignore the insult and carry on.


Addenda: as an example of how to deal with this sort of thing, here is Clarence Page defending fellow writer Don Wycliff on the O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly's constant volcanic snarl is a bit hard to take for anyone who isn't one of his true believers, but he's far more influential than he should be, so it is dangerous to ignore him.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/06/23.html#a8826

Hello, SJ

Nah, I don't like those guys either. I just don't froth as much when I complain about 'em.

_________________
"Vox populi? Vox humbug!"
- William Tecumseh Sherman

So, which part of the paragraph was "froth?"

"the crooked contractors" -- Every impartial report and study on this subject has detailed corruption and war profiteering on a scale not seen in American wars since the days of Simon Cameron (Secretary of War, of whom Lincoln said, "the only thing he won't steal is a red-hot stove.")

"The oil companies" -- The influence of the oil companies on American policy in the Middle East has been well documented over the years. The only question is how strong it has been.

I personally supported the first war in Iraq, and was not worried about oil company influence. President George H. Bush felt he could not let a cold blooded invasion of a friendly country go unanswered, but it also imperative that half the world's oil supply not fall under the control of a tin-pot dictator. Oil isn't just about corporate profits. As a fuel source, it is a life and death matter for a couple of billion people.

On the other hand, the Neocon plan to "democratize" the Middle East by military force was never practical or even plausible. It depended on all the "bad guys" folding up and not resisting, like cheap movie villains when American power smacked them done. Nationalism and religion were not taken into consideration. It was ridiculous, but the oil companies supported it, and advised Bush and Cheney, both former oil company executives, on both their energy and foreign policy plans, both of which involved invading Iraq from the first day of the administration. From Bush's point of view, why would he do anything else? These were his friends and people whose advice he trusted. He considered the policy establishment in Washington his enemies and still does, per recent accounts, in spite of Cheney's continuing purge off independent opinion.

"plenty of blood on their hands" -- When the Vietnam War went bad, Lyndon Johnson had the moral grace to lose sleep over it, and like Lady Macbeth, was known to walk through the White House muttering about all the men who had died because of his decisions. By the traditional moral beliefs of modern democracies, leaders are responsible for the lives of soldiers they send to war, and they are expected to make choices that minimize suffering and death. The people who advise these leaders are morally implicated. They are not free of guilt if war policy is foolish, self-serving, or based on greed rather than national interest.

"8 or 9 billion dollars of blood-stained money." -- This is the amount that we know is missing. The congress has more then once tried to send inspectors to find out what happened to it. President Bush has used signing statements and bureaucratic maneuver to prevent any investigation.

The only plausible way we could have prevented a nationalist reaction to our occupation of Iraq was to execute a successful rebuilding plan. Our policy in that regard was handicapped by stupid decisions (one foreign observer noted, "the Americans don't seem to know how to conquer a country," and that was before the situation really went south and the insurgency began.) Our badly executed policy was further crippled by corruption and waste. Again, every report created outside the administration and its network of supporters agrees on this. Therefore, everyone involved in corrupt practices has made the situation worse than it might have been, and Americans and Iraqis have died because of their actions.

“the blame for the entire fiasco still falls on Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.” – They made the decisions, they ordered the invasion, they issued the doctored intelligence to everyone else who might have argued against the war. They appear to have even fed bad information to the administration’s most devoted Republican followers in the congress.

“Their arrogance and simple-minded nationalism got us into Iraq” – Gary Kamiya in Salon, paraphrasing David Susskind, describes it this way:



This is the simplistic sort of nationalism that caused all those sophisticated European leaders to stumble into World War I. Since we’re better than everyone else, and they’re all cowards and weaklings, we’ll just hit them hard and they’ll fold up and do what we want.

“Cheney and Rumsfeld . . . they've botched every major strategic decision of the war.” – The initial operation against Saddam’s army went well. It is hard to find a policy decision since then that hasn’t done more harm than good. Possibly Bremer’s rushed creation of a provisional government help delay the onset of civil war, but the elections and the actions of the current government have squandered any advantage that might have been gained.

I was speaking of your posts in general. This thread obviously contains more bile than froth.

More name-calling.

This weekend, a friend of mine took his son around to visit various family members in the area. The son is eighteen, joined the Marines out of devout and naive patriotism, and was told he'd be in various schools for a year and a half before he would be sent on active duty. That was about nine months ago. He's visiting his relations on a quick leave before they ship him out to Iraq as a rifleman.

I expected that the recruiters were being disingenous about how long they would wait before sending him into combat. The occupation force is so short of manpower they have been routinely cannibalizing air force and navy support units to do jobs that should be handled by experienced army personnel with full infantry training. But I held my tongue at the time, as it wouldn't have done any good to speak up. The father is a nice guy, but also a dittohead. He lives in a different world.

I don't know where he'll wind up politically if his son gets killed or maimed fighting a badly chosen and badly executed war. It still won't be my business to tell him the truth he won't get from Limbaugh and O'Reilly.

I could be a lot more bilious than I have been. It's difficult to be lighthearted about some of these subjects.

Don't sweat Simon, Berken. He's developed the idea that his opinion is the only one worth airing and if you're not airing his opinion you're frothing, bileing or sloganing.

He hasn't always been this way. I'm assumimg he has had a bad relationship recently.

I like your posting (even when I disagree). You manage to state complex situations clearly.
Thats a skill I should learn.

If such is the case, then I learned it at your knee, Mr. Pot . . . er, Pronto.

Thank you.

It didn't help reading snark right after spending a half-hour cleaning dog crap off the carpet. But that's why they call them Shitzus.

But apparently never to the last General