By PLS
A half dozen generals (ret.) call for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the grounds that Rummy and his team had plenty of good advice which they ignored in order to mismanage the Iraq war according to some fantastic ideological version of ground realities. Rummy retorts he doesn’t have to jump every time some “retired person” tells him to.
George Bush responds, “That’s my boy!”
Rummy (with the aid of the Bush administration’s Brainless and Heartless Trust) promotes torture. A few low ranking reservists are punished; their superiors clear up to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General protest, just a little incredibly, they knew nothing about it. Meanwhile, the US reputation in the human rights arena has become so tarnished that the US dare not aspire to membership on the reconstituted UN Human Rights Council. Rummy plays dumb.
“Hey! No problem! He’s a member of my team,” says George Bush.
Rummy’s Iraq strategy miscarries on most every level. There are no WMD, what’s his name—oh yes! Osama bin Laden—is still at large, Americans are dying in Iraq every day and God only knows how many Iraqi civilians have been killed to achieve a regime change from Sunni dictatorship to Shiite theocracy.
George Bush snorts, “So what! He’s a member of my team.”
The noble word for backing your buddies is “loyalty.” Depending on who your buddies are and how they behave, it’s not a bad policy. In the present case, however, “circling the wagons” is a better way to describe the President’s refusal to listen to the ever louder chorus of dissenting voices. Bush Inc. is in very deep kimchi.
Meanwhile, one or more members of the Duke University lacrosse team may or may not have raped a young woman putting herself though a less prestigious state college by exotic dancing. No doubt the girl was selling a look at most (if not all) of a good body, but she wasn’t a prostitute. Even if the rape charge turns out to be unsustainable, the girl was brutalized and humiliated, for the perverse sexual pleasure of some depraved products of elite private schools enjoying special residential privileges because they are coddled athletes at an expensive university. (Note to parents unable to afford “elite” education at the high school or college level. You can feel better now. You don’t really want your sons to turn out like these guys, do you?)
The lacrosse team members, needless to say, do not rat on one another. I can hear the lacrosse guys muttering, “Well, she asked for it.”
Right. So does every girl who ever had a couple of beers at a fraternity party or looked good in her clothes or smiled or walked down the wrong street at the wrong time or disobeyed her man. Whatever! There’s always a good reason to rape a woman, it seems.
All the dead Iraqis asked for it, too, I suppose. The bombs, the boot on the door, the blasted family van—with the family in it.
The Mafia had a word for this kind of loyalty. Omerta. The code of silence. Break it and you end up standing on the bottom of the ocean in concrete boots. The Amish had a less dire mechanism to keep people in line. It worked nearly as well as bullets.. It’s called shunning. Squeal and no one will ever talk to you again. You’ll be a non-person, which hurts like hell.
Rumsfeld is doing something like this to the six outspoken retired generals, who have (1) presumed to tell us what went wrong with the planning and the execution of the Iraq war and (2) called for his resignation. They’re mere “retired people” now, says Rummy, as if nothing they say could possibly have authority or relevance. The administration desperately wants to prevent us from taking what they say seriously.
On count (1), I will be eternally grateful if these retired generals will continue to lay out what they know of the flawed and duplicitous decision-making process that got us into this war. On this they are not merely experts. They are witnesses. Citizens of a democracy need accurate information if they are to make wise decisions about choosing or retaining a leadership corps.
However, on count (2), I think I am with Rummy. I do not want generals, as generals, calling for the resignation of elected or appointed civilian officials, however much I myself wish to be rid of them. Civilians make the decisions in a democracy, which means Cabinet secretaries have the right to make terrible decisions without being pulled down by generals or colonels or any other uniformed individuals.
I was shocked and frightened this week when someone whose judgment I have always respected intimated that it might not be so bad for a sensible general to oust a reprehensible Secretary of Defense. And two weeks ago someone else who ought to know better declared that a dictatorship would be preferable to our recent run of presidents. I asked him to name one dictator in history under whom he could imagine living a decent life. One he'd want to live under. He couldn’t name any—unless Hammurabi counts. That “lawgiver,” by the way, lived a few millenia ago.
Plato gave us the pernicious idea of the philosopher-king, whose very close cousin is the benevolent military dictator. Benevolent. Ha! Think of Chile. Think of Argentina. Think of Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar. Think of Pakistan, again and again. Think of Samual Doe in Liberia. Think—of Iraq under Saddam! Unchecked power is never benevolent. Which is why Bush II deserves to be censured, if not impeached, for his systematic usurpation of power in the guise of commander-in-chief.
So generals—colonels, too—have a habit of getting uppity, even American generals. Billy Mitchell had to be court marshaled. Douglas MacArthur had to be relieved of command. The military leadership were, to my mind, culpably seditious under Bill Clinton, who made the very bad mistake of not strongly asserting civilian control when he was first scorned as a “draft dodger.” At least Rummy, whom I despise in every other way, is willing to put overweening generals in their place.
Generals may give advice to presidents. They may give orders to their subordinates. But generals are subordinate to the American president, who has the right to choose his executive team.
An election is coming up. President Bush may continue to back his unprincipled jocks unconditionally, but if we elect the right people to Congress, we can limit their freedom of action.