Bush has fired another of his generals. This time it's Marine General Peter Pace, head of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff (our nation's top military officer).
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he will not re-appoint Pace to a second term as head of the Joint Chiefs. Instead, he will nominate Navy Admiral Mike Mullen to replace him. The Bush administration believed that re-appointing Pace would give rise to a contentious debate in Congress about the conduct of the war in Iraq.
This was a silly reason to replace Pace. Either he was doing a good job or he was not, but to replace him to avoid an argument with Congress is just wrong. It also won't work.
I don't think Congress will be fooled by this move. They know that Pace is not the one to be blamed for the failures in Iraq (or any of our other military leaders for that matter).
The Iraq war should never have happened, but since it's inception it has been grossly mishandled. But it wasn't the military that mishandled it -- it was Bush and Cheney. They totally misread the situation, they didn't send nearly enough troops to handle the situation, and they bungled the effort to rebuild Iraq.
Bush and Cheney must accept ALL of the blame for the blunder in Iraq. It is time they stopped firing and scapegoating our top military officers in an attempt to shift the blame. Both Congress and the American people know the administration is to blame.
Appointing a new head of the Joint Chiefs will do nothing to improve the disastrous Iraqi occupation. At this point, there is only one thing that will make the situation in Iraq better for America, and that is to bring our troops home -- immediately.
What worries me is that we are eliminating from high position in the military anyone who have ever seen battle. To say it in an interesting, intriguing way, we are miniaturizing the Military from high military positions.
ReplyDeletePetraeus excelled academically, but outside the ivy towers has had no real experience or achievement I can see.
Mullen, too excelled academically. Harvard Business School. But we aren't running a Fortune 500 company here and even if we were practical experience also accounts for a lot in the business world.
So what I see in this two men are that they are Military in Name Only. Sure they went through the military to get there academic achievement but in the end that's all they got through the military. The didn't get a real world military experience of what it is like to be in battle.
Now, I don't totally dismiss those who are educated (you can be smart but still not educated). Most of our generals were very educated, but they also came from the military background and had practical experiences necessary for them to understand the nature of war. There are just stuff you can't get from a book regardless of how smart you are and the mistake I have seen many smart people make is that the have developed all these complex high minded philosophies without even considering the real world practicalities of their ideas. Yeah, they outsmart themselves, and the troops suffer whereas someone with "street smarts" can quickly tell if a plan of action just might not work, even if it got a lot of accolades when presented as a PhD dissertation.
I understand that the constitution puts the ultimate control of the military in the hands of a civilian. That is most likely a very good idea. But surely they expected that the President would surround himself when making decisions on military manners with good military leaders who could give him a perspective from a military point of view. But when the military leaders themselves are nothing but de-facto business managers, professors, bureaucrats, politicians, where will future presidents go to get the point of view of the Soldier? Where will they go to get the point of view of the warrior.
Bush has made it quite clear. He doesn't want any soldier, any warrior in a leadership position in our military!