Debating the Iraq War in the military

These days, you really have to pay attention to the reporter's byline on a news article, even for our "quality" press like the New York Times. This article, At an Army School for Officers, Blunt Talk About Iraq New York Times 10/14/07, is an excellent example.

In the first few paragraphs, we hear an account of discussions among military officers at the Combined Arms Center at Ft. Leavenworth KS. The reporter seems to be astonished that critical opinions are being debated by serving officers in classroom settings. Even though the discussion described in the first couple of paragraphs sounds like a routine recitation of two sets of entirely conventional if not hackneyed ideas.

By the time I had made it through the first six paragraphs, I thought, there's something odd here. Anyone who's looked at some of the military's own serious military journals available online, like Parameters or Military Review or the papers from the Army's Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) (to name just a few), would know that a wide range of views about military affairs including the Iraq War are debated in those publications, a much wider range than we typically see in our mainstream press.

I cite all those publications fairly frequently. Not that I always agree with the articles I'm citing. But who would be surprised that a wide range of opinions are debated within military classrooms?

Elisabeth Bumiller, apparently. Bumiller is one of the worst Bush-friendly hacks in the Establishment press, who mainly specializes in disseminating White House spin. When I glanced up and so her byline, then I understood why the article read so oddly.

I should clarify something here. There is a radical difference in the quality of discussions at sites like the ones I linked above and the happy-face press-release sites like those run by CENTCOM and the Air Force. Many of those are almost caricatures of the genre. I mean, we're talking FOX News level of hackery there.

But even there, if you know what you're reading, you can extract some actual bits of information. The Air Force site, for instance, runs daily reports on the air war in Afghanistan and Iraq, something almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. I'm guessing they do that because they want to get credit for playing an important role in those counterinsurgency operations. (The role of interservice rivalry is something to always keep in mind when dealing with military analyses.) But as a result, they provide one of the few regular measures of the pace of the air war, though it would be silly to assume they are providing comprehensive reports.

Bumiller's pathetic Times article highlights two sides in the "Who lost Iraq?" debate, both of them stock talking positions. One side says it's the civilian officials fault. That's the basic stab-in-the-back alibi stance. The other is a favorite variation on the basic stab-in-the-back theme that says, sure, the civilians are the ones who screwed everything up, but the generals should have laid down the law to the civilian officials more forcefully. The latter is a favorite military alibi for their failures in the Vietnam War. The most famous version of that is contained in the book Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (1997) by H.R. McMaster, which I reviewed last December in H.R. McMaster and the "lessons of Vietnam".

Later in the article, we see some substantial discussion points that some of Bumiller's interview subjects raised to her. But she didn't follow up on them, or, more likely, had no clue about the issues they were raising. For instance:

Col. Gregory Fontenot, a Leavenworth instructor, said it was typical of young officers to feel that the senior commanders had not spoken up for their interests, and that he had felt the same way when he was their age. But Colonel Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf war and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president of a nation where civilians control the armed forces.

For the sake of argument, a question was posed: If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?

"Yeah, we’d call it a coup d’etat," Colonel Fontenot said. "Do you want to have a coup d’etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you’re willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be O.K.? I don’t think so."

For a hack like Bumiller, tossing in a phrase like "coup d'etat" no doubt adds a touch of a thrill to the article.

But it's actually a substantial question with lots of implications, one which Andrew Bacevich among others have explored in various writings.

There really is a substantive question about civilian control of the military, which is not just a legal matter but also a question of culture. It's clear that if an officer is given a clearly illegal order, they are obligated to disobey it. And if they don't disobey it, legally they are also liable for the crime. "I was just following orders" is no more valid an alibi legally than for a corporate executive following orders who helps his boss steal money from the company. (Whether the military adequately enforces legal accountability is another question.)

But a question of whether to publicly protest or resign in protest over an order or mission that an officer considers a matter of poor judgment but not a legal violation is something very different. Would it be appropriate for a general or admiral to resign rather than participate in a Presidential order to attack Iran? For the Joint Chiefs of Staff to resign in protest because they disapproved of an arms control treaty? In theory and, as I understand, explicitly in the law, the Joint Chiefs are military advisers to both the Executive and the Congress. Theoretically, that means that they should deliver their unvarnished opinion to Congress even if it differs from administration policy. As appealing as that might sound at the moment over the Iraq War, do we really want serving senior military officials out there publicly denouncing the President's military policies?

I suspect that Col. Fontenot was trying to get her to think about that kind of complicated questions. If he succeeded, I couldn't tell so from her article.

Tags: elisabeth bumiller, iraq war, stab-in-the-back