[A-List] US military: seriously unhappy with Bush administration

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

America's military coup

Donald Rumsfeld has a new war on his hands - the US officer corps has turned
on the government

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 13, 2004
The Guardian

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, told George Bush in February
about torture at Abu Ghraib prison. From the limited detail Rumsfeld
recalled of that meeting, it can be deduced that Bush gave no orders,
insisted on no responsibility, did not ask to see the already commissioned
Taguba report. If there are exculpatory facts, Rumsfeld has failed to
mention them.

For decades, Rumsfeld has had a reputation as a great white shark of the
bureaucratic seas: sleek, fast-moving and voracious. As counsellor to
Richard Nixon during the impeachment crisis, his deputy was the young Dick
Cheney, and together they helped to right the ship of state under Gerald
Ford.

Here they were given a misleading gloss as moderates; competence at handling
power was confused with pragmatism. Cheney became the most hardline of
congressmen, and Rumsfeld informed acquaintances that he was always more
conservative than they imagined. One lesson they seem to have learned from
the Nixon debacle was ruthlessness. His collapse confirmed in them a belief
in the imperial presidency based on executive secrecy. One gets the
impression that, unlike Nixon, they would have burned the White House tapes.

Under Bush, the team of Cheney and Rumsfeld spread across the top rungs of
government, drawing staff from the neoconservative cabal and infusing their
rightwing temperaments with ideological imperatives. The unvarnished will to
power took on a veneer of ideas and idealism. Iraq was not a case of
vengeance or power, but the cause of democracy and human rights.

The fate of the neoconservative project depends on Rumsfeld's job. If he
were to go, so would his deputy, the neoconservative Robespierre, Paul
Wolfowitz. Also threatened would be the cadres who stovepiped the
disinformation that neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi used to manipulate
public opinion before the war. In his Senate testimony last week, Rumsfeld
explained that the government asking the press not to report Abu Ghraib "is
not against our principles. It is not suppression of the news." War is
peace.

Six National Guard soldiers from a West Virginia unit who treated Abu Ghraib
as a playpen of pornographic torture have been designated as scapegoats.
Will the show trials of these working-class antiheroes put an end to any
inquiries about the chain of command? In an extraordinary editorial, the
Army Times, which had not previously ventured into such controversy,
declared that "the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons
... This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level.
This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountabilty here is
essential - even if that means relieving leaders from duty in a time of
war."

William Odom, a retired general and former member of the National Security
Council who is now at the Hudson Institute, a conservative thinktank,
reflects a wide swath of opinion in the upper ranks of the military. "It was
never in our interest to go into Iraq," he told me. It is a "diversion" from
the war on terrorism; the rationale for the Iraq war (finding WMD) is
"phoney"; the US army is overstretched and being driven "into the ground";
and the prospect of building a democracy is "zero". In Iraqi politics, he
says, "legitimacy is going to be tied to expelling us. Wisdom in military
affairs dictates withdrawal in this situation. We can't afford to fail,
that's mindless. The issue is how we stop failing more. I am arguing a
strategic decision."

One high-level military strategist told me that Rumsfeld is "detested", and
that "if there's a sentiment in the army it is: Support Our Troops, Impeach
Rumsfeld".
The Council on Foreign Relations has been showing old movies with renewed
relevance to its members. The Battle of Algiers, depicting the nature and
costs of a struggle with terrorism, is the latest feature. The seething in
the military against Bush and Rumsfeld might prompt a showing of Seven Days
in May, about a coup staged by a rightwing general against a weak liberal
president, an artefact of the conservative hatred directed at President
Kennedy in the early 60s.

In 1992, General Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs, awarded the
prize for his strategy essay competition at the National Defence University
to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap for The Origins of the American
Military Coup of 2012. His cautionary tale imagined an incapable civilian
government creating a vacuum that drew a competent military into a coup
disastrous for democracy. The military, of course, is bound to uphold the
constitution. But Dunlap wrote: "The catastrophe that occurred on our watch
took place because we failed to speak out against policies we knew were
wrong. It's too late for me to do any more. But it's not for you."

The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 is today circulating among
top US military strategists.