Military Courage

Truth be told cowardice has killed millions and will continue to do so.

I could not agree more. The Bush war is a great example of that. Because of the cowards in the Bush administration, we entered into an unnecessary war. I hold in particular people such as former Secretary of State General Colin Powell or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, people that at the time had the crediability and prestige to make a difference instead of acting like compliant stooges of the neocons.

I think also of those military brass that appeared before a congressional committee investigating the Pat Tilman friendly fire death and coverup. In the C-SPAN broadcast, I heard nothing but evasiveness and excuses from JCS chairman General Michael Myers, General John P. Abizaid, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command, General Bryan Douglas Brown, former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command. and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Especially reprehensible to me was the one man who didn' t have the guts to even show his pathetic face to the camera: three-star general Philip Kensinger, who led Army special operations forces after the Sept. 11 attacks and then received a censure from the army for his lies and "failure of leadership."

None of these people are cowards in the physical sense. They have all seen death and have shown awesome bravery under fire. Yet, when it mattered most, they turned to jelly. At West Point, if a plebe cheats on his chemistry exam, if he is not expelled, he is shunned by the rest of his classmates. And yet it is more than clear that dishonesty-- moral cowardice-- is not the exception in the military but the rule from the PFCs to SOD. And why is that? It is because the military penalizes those who ask the hard questions and rewards careerists-- those who do not rock the boat, those who act irrespetive of whether or not they should act. They are sheep. Given the quality of officers that the military creates today, perhaps the highest and best use of West Point is to level it with bulldozers and erect condominums, perhaps calling it Trump Hudson.

An axiom in politics is that armies do not enter wars; countries enter wars. And when confidence in our civilian and military leadership wanes, it can only be a matter of time before the military capitulates to the enemy. And, more than anything, it has been the administration's inability to level with the public that has caused this erosion of trust.

Haditha and Abu Ghurab didn't happen in isolation. They rather are the very flower of the US military culture-- a culture that relies on loyalty up and loyalty down, unquestioning obedience to the chain of command, and unit group cohesion. It is the exceptional individual who is willing to defy the chain of command, his buddies, and his allegiences to tradition that have drilled into him since boot camp and do the hard right rather than the easy wrong.

But, frankly, I cannot trust anyone in the military to do the hard right anymore.

Well said! Authoritarianism is fatally flawed. A system that worships Bush is no more viable than a system that worships Hitler.

The civilian leadership has swallowed its own propaganda: It has repeated certain lies so often that it now treats those lies as truth. As a result, the actions of the system are divorced from reality. As the delusions become more compelling, the system comes to treat reality with arrogant contempt.

Eventually the system starts a war, and then its delusions collide with reality. In Iraq, this collision has killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. But the politicians back home who harbor the delusions remain secure, comfortable and unfazed. They don't have to hear the screams.

As the downwards chain of command becomes more rigid amd mechanical, insane orders passing smoothly downwards, the upwards chain of feedback breaks: Information about the situation on the ground, information that refuses to fit into the ideology, plan, or grand vision, fails to reach the top.

Generals may EVENTUALLY find the courage to spill the beans to the "media", but only when it is years too late to do any good.

Thus the system self-destructs. It happened in Germany, and it is happening here.

( General Sanchez said he was convinced that the American effort in Iraq was failing the day after he took command, in June 2003. Asked why he waited until nearly a year after his retirement to voice his concerns publicly, he responded that it was not the place of active-duty officers to challenge lawful orders from the civilian authorities.)+-- David S. Cloud, "Ex-Commander Says Iraq Effort Is 'A Nightmare'", NYT, 13 Oct 2007
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http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5150

+(The Wonderful Wizard of Washington
If ever a Wiz there was -- our fantasy-based foreign policyJustin Raimondo / 11 Mar 2005 ....Our penchant for asking too many inconvenient questions reveals our pathetically archaic insistence on belonging to **"the reality-based community,"** as one top White House advisor famously put it to reporter Ron Suskind:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"....)+
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+(Rundstedt put it bluntly to Allied interrogators after the war: "I realized," he said "soon after the attack was begun that everything that had been written about Russia was nonsense." )+-- William L. Shirer, /The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich/, p. 1119