Geodog

"It’s all about Rummy and the truth"

The Seymour Hersh New Yorker article, that everyone has been talking about, Offense And Defense, The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, is finally online. And it says loudly what a lot of people had been saying quietly before the war -- many of America's professional soldiers have been very unhappy with the way that Bush's War on Iraq was planned and is being run. It is clear from the article that the many in the military fear another Vietnam, in the sense that during the Vietnam war the officer corps was corrupted by the Johnson and Nixon administrations requirements that the officer corps adhere to the official US administration message, even when it contradicted the observed facts. That brought us "body counts", "the credibility gap", "we had to destroy the village to save it", and landed a blow on the integrity of the US military that it took a generation to recover from. I guess a lot of career army officers and pretty determined not to let that happen again. I hope so.

The article is well worth reading. Recommended. A few samples:

Rumsfeld’s personal contempt for many of the senior generals and admirals who were promoted to top jobs during the Clinton Administration is widely known. He was especially critical of the Army, with its insistence on maintaining costly mechanized divisions. In his off-the-cuff memoranda, or “snowflakes,” as they’re called in the Pentagon, he chafed about generals having “the slows”—a reference to Lincoln’s characterization of General George McClellan. “In those conditions—an atmosphere of derision and challenge—the senior officers do not offer their best advice,” a high-ranking general who served for more than a year under Rumsfeld said. ...

Gradually, Rumsfeld succeeded in replacing those officers in senior Joint Staff positions who challenged his view. “All the Joint Staff people now are handpicked, and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy,” the planner said. “They don’t make military judgments—they just respond to his snowflakes.”

In the months leading up to the war, a split developed inside the military, with the planners and their immediate superiors warning that the war plan was dangerously thin on troops and matériel, and the top generals—including General Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—supporting Rumsfeld. After Turkey’s parliament astonished the war planners in early March by denying the United States permission to land the 4th Infantry Division in Turkey, Franks initially argued that the war ought to be delayed until the troops could be brought in by another route, a former intelligence official said. “Rummy overruled him.”

...

Rumsfeld, during a question-and-answer session, was asked about his personal involvement in the deployment of combat units, in some cases with only five or six days’ notice. To the astonishment and anger of the generals, Rumsfeld denied responsibility. “He said, ‘I wasn’t involved,’” the official said. “‘It was the Joint Staff.’” “We thought it would be fence-mending, but it was a disaster,” the official said of the dinner. “Everybody knew he was looking at these deployment orders. And for him to blame it on the Joint Staff—” The official hesitated a moment, and then said, “It’s all about Rummy and the truth.”

Congratulations to Seymour Herch, journalist extraordinaire.