ATTACK OF THE CHICKEN-HAWKS
How come the military is antiwar, and the policy wonks want blood? It's very simple….
Forget the Senate hearings on Iraq, ignore Congress, and never mind our laptop bombardiers. How many of these guys have ever been anywhere near a battlefield? Instead, listen to what the US military is saying about the prospect of Gulf War II….
Washington Post reports "an increasingly contentious debate … within the Bush administration" over the Iraq question, with the divide between gung-ho civilian leaders and top military officers who smell a rat:
"Much of the senior uniformed military, with the notable exception of some top Air Force and Marine generals, opposes going to war anytime soon, a stance that is provoking frustration among civilian officials in the Pentagon and in the White House."
The Post paints the same picture that we've been drawing here on Antiwar.com for the past few weeks: it's Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz versus Colin Powell and the Pentagon. Defense secretary Rumsfeld is cited as saying: "The discussions that take place, the process that's been established, have been working as well as I have ever seen," but Capitol Hill Blue portrays a qualitative escalation in the war of the Policy Wonks and the Generals:
"The differences over Iraq mark the sharpest disagreements among senior staff since the Bush administration took office with the Cheney and Rumsfeld calling those who oppose military actions 'cowards.'"
"'It's getting nasty,' says one White House source. 'Meetings over Iraq now turn into shouting matches.'"
What's the reason for the increasing acrimony? It's the attack of the chickenhawks on the Pentagon's prerogatives, the invasion by civilian policy wonks into the realm of military strategy. While the dialogue reported in the Capitol Hill Blue piece has a docu-dramatic feel to it, I have no doubt that there really is some shouting going on. A rather startling New York Times story about a purported "inside out" plan that would seize Baghdad right off the bat and proceed outward to take the rest of the country must have driven the decibel level even higher
The [UK] Guardian, far more informative than the Post, lets us in on the numbers:
"US contingency plans include: heavy air strikes combined with a relatively small invasion force of 5,000 troops; a force of some 50,000 troops which could be deployed quickly deep inside Iraq; and a massive ground force of 250,000 US troops supported by 25,000 British soldiers."
The Pentagon is for plan number three, The hawks oppose this because it seems to be a self-canceling proposition. To begin with, where will an invasion force of 250,000 be launched from – since most of the countries bordering Iraq, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, refuse to let us use their territory? Turkey may be pressured into hosting some, but surely not all 250,000. The Pentagon plan requires the cooperation of our Arab allies, who aren't about to give it.
The ultra-hawks are pushing plan number one: the "inside out" option, and it's no wonder they're having screaming fits over at the Pentagon. This hare-brained plan, involving what the Post describes as "minimal numbers of Americans on the ground," essentially consists of dropping five thousand of our elite troops in the middle of hostile territory, amid a firestorm of bombs.
Sending American kids off on suicide missions is especially galling coming from those popularly known as "chicken-hawks" – the largely civilian advocates of a war of conquest in the Middle East who never served a day in the military. As columnist Jack Mabley of the Chicago Daily Herald puts it:
"Many of the people in position to make war have never fought one."
With Bush and Cheney topping the list, virtually the entire government is without military experience: this includes not only the White House staff – chief of staff Andrew Card, political advisor Karl Rove, super-hawks Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle -- but also most of Bush's War Cabinet. Congress is similarly AWOL. Out of 535 members of Congress, only 167 served in the active, guard or reserve forces: 7 Senators served in World War II, 4 Republicans, 3 Democrats, and 9 members of the House of Representatives: 8 Republicans and a lone Democrat.
This lack of direct experience with the horrors and risks of war, far from restraining their militaristic impulses, seems to have precisely the opposite effect. The [UK] Guardian, reporting the dismay of military figures on both sides of the Atlantic, notes:
"Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and an advocate of an assault on Iraq, rejected the anxiety voiced as irrelevant. The decision to take on Saddam, he said, was 'a political judgment that these guys aren't competent to make'".
In the post-republican, post-9/11 era, which resembles the inverted madness of Bizarro World, Prince Perle, who never risked his life for anything, is privileged to sit in judgment over those who have. To add insult to injury, he also feels free to mock the American military in the foreign press, arrogantly disdaining them as a bunch of incompetents. I ask you: are we to be spared nothing?
The civilians make the policy, and the grunts are sent to implement it – and die in the process. Now, dying for one's country is what soldiers do, but the vehement opposition of the American military leadership to the War Party's plans is being expressed in terms that show a widening gulf between the generals and the empire-builders. Capitol Hill Blue cites a Pentagon source as saying:
"It really is odd. We want to weigh our options carefully and the political types over at the White House want to go in and bomb Saddam out of existence."
But it isn't really so odd. As the military leaders of a formerly republican state now in transit to Empire, America's top Pentagon brass are being told to take on a task they know full well to be militarily impossible. Furthermore, they can envision the horrific results, and fully expect to be blamed when it goes sour. The Post article focuses on the aftermath of the war, which would surely be "won" by the US: but what then? How many years of a military occupation will it take before Iraq is transformed into a Jeffersonian republic?
I heard Morton Halperin say at the Senate hearings that it would take 20 years to implant a democratic government, but even that is optimistic. The seeds of liberalism, in the classical sense, that were planted and flourished in the West never did make it to Mesopotamia. It could be centuries more before the Iraqi Thomas Jefferson is born, if ever: and, even then, I doubt he would live beyond his early twenties.
Until then, the US military will be used to babysit Iraq's aspiring democrats, caught in the crossfire of competing clans and factions, an Afghanistan writ large. Not only that, but the US occupation force will be surrounded on all sides by enemies, active and potential: the Iranians, the Saudis, the nuclear-armed Pakistanis – and growing dissent on the home front. This is the Pentagon's biggest nightmare, a recurring dream of yet another ultimately unwinnable war on the Asian landmass. But the new "best and the brightest" are determined to override the best judgment of the military experts, in pursuit of their goal – enunciated in the infamous Wolfowitz memorandum – which demands US dominance of every continent, including Asia.
There is yet one great obstacle on the road to Empire, and that is – sorry, lefties! – the Pentagon. They have the power to obstruct the War Party, effectively counter all this war talk – and, ultimately, to put a stop to it in a lot less than seven days in May.
The Founding Fathers, especially Jefferson, opposed a standing army as a possible threat to our republican form of government, because they feared it would give rise to a professional officer class inherently warlike and therefore hostile to the idea of strictly limited government. It is one of the great ironies of history, however, that this Jeffersonian suspicion has been stood on its head, and, instead, it is the officer class that defends the last vestiges of our old Republic, while the civilians work ceaselessly to undermine it.
As the American military is increasingly expected to achieve the impossible, to risk the lives of American soldiers in pursuit of ever-more-grandiose delusions of grandeur, the conflict between the generals and the ideologues of American hegemony will come increasingly out into the open. In ancient Rome, the Emperors came to fear their own Praetorians, and with good reason. If I were a chick-hawk, I wouldn't be too contemptuous of our military leaders -- and I'd be awful careful whom I called a "coward." Never sneer at an armed man, unless you've already got him covered. In the war between the thinktanks and the barracks, the former hold the reins of power, but the latter are source of all power – and Richard Perle had better not forget it.
Justin Raimondo
Forget the Senate hearings on Iraq, ignore Congress, and never mind our laptop bombardiers. How many of these guys have ever been anywhere near a battlefield? Instead, listen to what the US military is saying about the prospect of Gulf War II….
Washington Post reports "an increasingly contentious debate … within the Bush administration" over the Iraq question, with the divide between gung-ho civilian leaders and top military officers who smell a rat:
"Much of the senior uniformed military, with the notable exception of some top Air Force and Marine generals, opposes going to war anytime soon, a stance that is provoking frustration among civilian officials in the Pentagon and in the White House."
The Post paints the same picture that we've been drawing here on Antiwar.com for the past few weeks: it's Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz versus Colin Powell and the Pentagon. Defense secretary Rumsfeld is cited as saying: "The discussions that take place, the process that's been established, have been working as well as I have ever seen," but Capitol Hill Blue portrays a qualitative escalation in the war of the Policy Wonks and the Generals:
"The differences over Iraq mark the sharpest disagreements among senior staff since the Bush administration took office with the Cheney and Rumsfeld calling those who oppose military actions 'cowards.'"
"'It's getting nasty,' says one White House source. 'Meetings over Iraq now turn into shouting matches.'"
What's the reason for the increasing acrimony? It's the attack of the chickenhawks on the Pentagon's prerogatives, the invasion by civilian policy wonks into the realm of military strategy. While the dialogue reported in the Capitol Hill Blue piece has a docu-dramatic feel to it, I have no doubt that there really is some shouting going on. A rather startling New York Times story about a purported "inside out" plan that would seize Baghdad right off the bat and proceed outward to take the rest of the country must have driven the decibel level even higher
The [UK] Guardian, far more informative than the Post, lets us in on the numbers:
"US contingency plans include: heavy air strikes combined with a relatively small invasion force of 5,000 troops; a force of some 50,000 troops which could be deployed quickly deep inside Iraq; and a massive ground force of 250,000 US troops supported by 25,000 British soldiers."
The Pentagon is for plan number three, The hawks oppose this because it seems to be a self-canceling proposition. To begin with, where will an invasion force of 250,000 be launched from – since most of the countries bordering Iraq, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, refuse to let us use their territory? Turkey may be pressured into hosting some, but surely not all 250,000. The Pentagon plan requires the cooperation of our Arab allies, who aren't about to give it.
The ultra-hawks are pushing plan number one: the "inside out" option, and it's no wonder they're having screaming fits over at the Pentagon. This hare-brained plan, involving what the Post describes as "minimal numbers of Americans on the ground," essentially consists of dropping five thousand of our elite troops in the middle of hostile territory, amid a firestorm of bombs.
Sending American kids off on suicide missions is especially galling coming from those popularly known as "chicken-hawks" – the largely civilian advocates of a war of conquest in the Middle East who never served a day in the military. As columnist Jack Mabley of the Chicago Daily Herald puts it:
"Many of the people in position to make war have never fought one."
With Bush and Cheney topping the list, virtually the entire government is without military experience: this includes not only the White House staff – chief of staff Andrew Card, political advisor Karl Rove, super-hawks Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle -- but also most of Bush's War Cabinet. Congress is similarly AWOL. Out of 535 members of Congress, only 167 served in the active, guard or reserve forces: 7 Senators served in World War II, 4 Republicans, 3 Democrats, and 9 members of the House of Representatives: 8 Republicans and a lone Democrat.
This lack of direct experience with the horrors and risks of war, far from restraining their militaristic impulses, seems to have precisely the opposite effect. The [UK] Guardian, reporting the dismay of military figures on both sides of the Atlantic, notes:
"Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and an advocate of an assault on Iraq, rejected the anxiety voiced as irrelevant. The decision to take on Saddam, he said, was 'a political judgment that these guys aren't competent to make'".
In the post-republican, post-9/11 era, which resembles the inverted madness of Bizarro World, Prince Perle, who never risked his life for anything, is privileged to sit in judgment over those who have. To add insult to injury, he also feels free to mock the American military in the foreign press, arrogantly disdaining them as a bunch of incompetents. I ask you: are we to be spared nothing?
The civilians make the policy, and the grunts are sent to implement it – and die in the process. Now, dying for one's country is what soldiers do, but the vehement opposition of the American military leadership to the War Party's plans is being expressed in terms that show a widening gulf between the generals and the empire-builders. Capitol Hill Blue cites a Pentagon source as saying:
"It really is odd. We want to weigh our options carefully and the political types over at the White House want to go in and bomb Saddam out of existence."
But it isn't really so odd. As the military leaders of a formerly republican state now in transit to Empire, America's top Pentagon brass are being told to take on a task they know full well to be militarily impossible. Furthermore, they can envision the horrific results, and fully expect to be blamed when it goes sour. The Post article focuses on the aftermath of the war, which would surely be "won" by the US: but what then? How many years of a military occupation will it take before Iraq is transformed into a Jeffersonian republic?
I heard Morton Halperin say at the Senate hearings that it would take 20 years to implant a democratic government, but even that is optimistic. The seeds of liberalism, in the classical sense, that were planted and flourished in the West never did make it to Mesopotamia. It could be centuries more before the Iraqi Thomas Jefferson is born, if ever: and, even then, I doubt he would live beyond his early twenties.
Until then, the US military will be used to babysit Iraq's aspiring democrats, caught in the crossfire of competing clans and factions, an Afghanistan writ large. Not only that, but the US occupation force will be surrounded on all sides by enemies, active and potential: the Iranians, the Saudis, the nuclear-armed Pakistanis – and growing dissent on the home front. This is the Pentagon's biggest nightmare, a recurring dream of yet another ultimately unwinnable war on the Asian landmass. But the new "best and the brightest" are determined to override the best judgment of the military experts, in pursuit of their goal – enunciated in the infamous Wolfowitz memorandum – which demands US dominance of every continent, including Asia.
There is yet one great obstacle on the road to Empire, and that is – sorry, lefties! – the Pentagon. They have the power to obstruct the War Party, effectively counter all this war talk – and, ultimately, to put a stop to it in a lot less than seven days in May.
The Founding Fathers, especially Jefferson, opposed a standing army as a possible threat to our republican form of government, because they feared it would give rise to a professional officer class inherently warlike and therefore hostile to the idea of strictly limited government. It is one of the great ironies of history, however, that this Jeffersonian suspicion has been stood on its head, and, instead, it is the officer class that defends the last vestiges of our old Republic, while the civilians work ceaselessly to undermine it.
As the American military is increasingly expected to achieve the impossible, to risk the lives of American soldiers in pursuit of ever-more-grandiose delusions of grandeur, the conflict between the generals and the ideologues of American hegemony will come increasingly out into the open. In ancient Rome, the Emperors came to fear their own Praetorians, and with good reason. If I were a chick-hawk, I wouldn't be too contemptuous of our military leaders -- and I'd be awful careful whom I called a "coward." Never sneer at an armed man, unless you've already got him covered. In the war between the thinktanks and the barracks, the former hold the reins of power, but the latter are source of all power – and Richard Perle had better not forget it.
Justin Raimondo
posted by R7 | 9/15/2004 09:58:00 AM
1 Comments:
Scoop Jackson's protégés shaping Bush's foreign policy
By Alex Fryer
Seattle Times Washington bureau
WASHINGTON — As legacies go, few elected officials from the state cast a longer shadow than the late Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who served 31 years in the Senate and launched two unsuccessful presidential campaigns.
But exactly how the popular Democratic senator from Everett is remembered depends on which part of his career you focus on: his passion for conservation or his reputation as one of the most strident Cold Warriors of either political party.
These days, it's mostly the latter, to the chagrin of some of Jackson's more liberal supporters.
But it's easy to understand why Jackson's hawkish views are suddenly in vogue: Many of the young aides who were drawn to work for Jackson in the 1970s because of his unwavering opposition to the Soviet Union now help shape the Bush administration's foreign policy.
At one time, these Jackson Democrats advocated building more nuclear weapons in an effort to hobble world communism. Many have since joined the Republican Party and rally around new foreign-policy buzzwords: "regime change."
"There is no question in my mind that the people who supported Iraq are supporting Henry Jackson's instincts," said Jackson biographer Robert Kaufman, a political scientist at the University of Vermont.
Peter Jackson, the senator's son, said some admirers of his father's position on foreign policy forget Jackson's efforts to preserve wilderness and enact environmental policies.
And tying the senator's vision too closely with the war in Iraq makes his son uneasy.
"It doesn't make me feel comfortable if it (the Iraq war) is being cast as the natural extension of that legacy," Peter Jackson said.
The list of former Jackson staff members reads like a who's who of foreign-policy experts.
• Richard Perle is an adviser to the Defense Department and considered a major influence on Bush administration foreign policy.
• Doug Feith is undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon.
• Elliott Abrams, special assistant to the president focusing on Middle East affairs, worked as special counsel to Jackson.
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense and one of Bush's Iraq policy experts, never served directly under Jackson. But they had a long relationship that began when Wolfowitz, then a 29-year-old graduate student, helped Jackson prepare charts when the senator wanted to persuade fellow lawmakers to fund an antiballistic-missile program in 1969.
Elected to Senate in '52
Born in Everett in 1912, Jackson was elected county prosecutor before winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 1940.
A visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp after World War II cemented his lifelong advocacy of Israel and other Jewish causes. In 1949, he argued for the development of the H-bomb.
He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952, and supported the troop buildup in Vietnam. In 1978, he fought President Carter's decision to forgo deployment of the neutron weapon, which could kill people while causing little damage to buildings and other structures.
By the 1970s, Jackson was one of the last Democratic Party standard-bearers of a get-tough approach to the Soviet Union.
When President Ford announced he would not invite dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House in 1975 for fear of angering the Soviet Union, Jackson and a group of other senators asked Solzhenitsyn to speak at an office in the Capitol.
Such positions often placed Jackson at odds with members of his own party.
After the war in Vietnam, many prominent Democrats said the country's troubles abroad were caused by American belligerence and paranoia. Throughout the 1970s, Republicans wanted to control the Soviet Union through détente.
But Jackson opposed détente, never wavering from his belief that communism was inherently evil and needed to be confronted by American power. He attracted a group of like-minded people to work for him.
"I wanted to work for Scoop Jackson. He was the last Democrat who embodied the high tradition of internationalism," said Charles Horner, a former aide who is now a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
"Bush is the embodiment of that tradition," Horner added.
Jackson ran for president in 1972 and 1976 but didn't make it past the primaries.
Many former Jackson staff members became disillusioned with the Democratic Party during the Carter administration and later supported President Reagan. As a group, they were known as the "neoconservatives," or neocons.
When Reagan presented Jackson's widow, Helen, with a posthumous Medal of Freedom in 1984, he said: "I am deeply proud — as he would have been — to have Jackson Democrats serve in my administration. I am proud some of them have found a home here."
Twenty years later, many of those Jackson Democrats are credited with helping devise Bush's war on terrorism and invasion of Iraq.
"The Rumsfeld Defense Department is as close to Jackson as any publicly identifiable group," biographer Kaufman said. He remembers a Henry M. Jackson Foundation dinner in Washington, D.C., three years ago attended by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Perle, Abrams and Wolfowitz.
Perle and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former U.N. ambassador under Reagan, serve on the board of the Seattle-based Jackson Foundation, which provides grants to nonprofits and educational institutes.
Former House Speaker Tom Foley, who also worked for Jackson, and longtime civic leader Jim Ellis are also board members, as are Peter Jackson and his mother.
The official biography on the foundation's Web site notes Sen. Jackson was "an expert on nuclear weapons and strategic issues." But it devotes more attention to his conservation legislation and efforts to preserve wilderness areas including the North Cascades Park, Olympic National Park and the Alpine Lakes Wilderness.
Peter Jackson said Kaufman's biography, "Henry M. Jackson — A Life in Politics" (University of Washington Press, 2000), gave short shrift to his father's environmental record and emphasized his foreign policy almost exclusively.
When reading early drafts of Kaufman's book, Peter Jackson said, he bristled at Kaufman's repeated use of the phrase "evil empire" to describe the senator's attitude toward the Soviet Union. The words belonged to Reagan, not to his father, Peter Jackson said.
But Peter Jackson said he supported the war to oust Saddam Hussein and often defends Perle to those in liberal circles who consider him "the Prince of Darkness" — a warmonger and profiteer.
What legacy?
Scoop Jackson's greatest legacy, said his son, may be his steady convictions and his belief that, in foreign policy, the best politics is no politics.
Trying to guess what Jackson would say today is useless, he said. But he added: "My father would never grandstand or question someone's patriotism. Since he died, the debate has become shriller."
After thinking about his father's legacy for a few days, Jackson, a former speechwriter for Gov. Gary Locke, e-mailed a final thought:
"Intellectually, neocons are children of a common father, but what can the father do after a lowly few race off and elope with Republicans? Most Dads would sigh, lament their kids' poor taste, but love them anyway."
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