Military Brass Distance Themselves From Iraq Choices

[RTFirefly]

@Mr. Moto

I think you ought to read your pocket Constitution, and remember who takes orders from whom in our setup here.

What - are you saying that it IS unconstitutional for the President to overrule his generals??

And you are telling me to re-read the Constitution?!

Good grief.

[RTFirefly]

BTW, John, pretty much all of post #18 after “Bush is, but the generals aren’t” is aimed at the arguments of Sam Stone and Mr. Moto rather than yours. I should have so indicated. My apologies for any confusion.

[John_Mace]

@RTFirefly

BTW, John, pretty much all of post #18 after “Bush is, but the generals aren’t” is aimed at the arguments of Sam Stone and Mr. Moto rather than yours. I should have so indicated. My apologies for any confusion.

OK. But I’m not so sure the generals have always just lined up, saluted, and kept their mouths shut. Isn’t that the reason Bush canned so many of them over the years? Remember General Shinseki?

[RTFirefly]

@John Mace

OK. But I’m not so sure the generals have always just lined up, saluted, and kept their mouths shut. Isn’t that the reason Bush canned so many of them over the years? Remember General Shinseki?

I certainly do. So, who’s he canned since?

[Voyager]

@Mr. Moto

Again, what consensus did our military commanders have in WWII? Or in any other war - remember how things changed in Vietnam after Abrams took over from Westmoreland.

Ultimately the decision has to be made on Pennsylvania Avenue. Both ends of it.

Do you think Marshall went to FDR with five generals backing five invasion options? I’m not talking tactics here, I’m talking about things that need presidential decisions. Do you think any president hears every possible option?

Why do you think I’m disputing that the ultimate decision lies with the President? Far from it - it sounds like in this case the president is going to be more deciding, from more options, than is usual. If you remember Hersh’s article on Iran, the military objected to a nuclear strike even being in the list of options. Their job is to winnow the possibilities down to those that are feasible and the best, with advantages and disadvantages of each. The President then decides among them. It sounds like the generals can’t do a lot of winnowing, or choose not to. Perhaps they think no option (besides business as usual) is satisfactory, so they’ll dump all of them on the table.

I’ve never been in the situation, so I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that if you’re for option D and your commanding officer chooses to present options A and B, you STFU and get with the program. That’s not a bad thing.

[BrainGlutton]

@ElvisL1ves

The “big deal” is that the Commander In Chief has *already * decided to let a general, and not even the highest ranking one, make his decision for him, whatever that may be.

Yeah, well, not long ago, the Commander in Chief “decided” to follow the advice of the Iraq Study Group, but when they told him things he didn’t want to hear . . .

[ElvisL1ves]

@RTFirefly

What - are you saying that it IS unconstitutional for the President to overrule his generals??

Or to overrule the Vice President, either.

@Gary Kumquat

Surely the president is meant to support the guy who he’s put in charge of the forces in Iraq?

Nope, not in a normally functioning world. It’s the other way around. See above.

@John Mace

So, who is making the decision here, Petraeus or Bush?

Petraeus. Other generals a level or so down from even the JCS have and are expressing other opinions, as the OP notes, but The Decided has very publicly delegated this most important decision to the highest level of the chain of command with any credibility remaining.

Yes, that could indeed be all for show, with the real decision process being something else, if in fact it wasn’t made years ago - but that’s how it appears.

Sam, here’s a hint: If your argument depends on *imagining * the facts supporting it, you’ve failed right from the start. And the further those imaginary facts differ from reality, the sadder will be the shakes of the heads of those reading it. M’kay, bro?

[marshmallow]

Just to drive the point home, Bush has said on more than one occasion that we’re not leaving Iraq as long as he’s president. For example, take this August 2006 press conference (bolding mine):

The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and their dreams, which is a democratic society. That’s the strategy. The tactics – now, either you say, yes, its important we stay there and get it done, or we leave. We’re not leaving, so long as I’m the President. That would be a huge mistake. It would send an unbelievably terrible signal to reformers across the region. It would say we’ve abandoned our desire to change the conditions that create terror. It would give the terrorists a safe haven from which to launch attacks. It would embolden Iran. It would embolden extremists.

No, we’re not leaving. The strategic objective is to help this government succeed. That’s the strategic – and not only to help the government – the reformers in Iraq succeed, but to help the reformers across the region succeed to fight off the elements of extremism. The tactics are which change. Now, if you say, are you going to change your strategic objective, it means you’re leaving before the mission is complete. And we’re not going to leave before the mission is complete. I agree with General Abizaid: We leave before the mission is done, the terrorists will follow us here.

And so we have changed tactics. Our commanders have got the flexibility necessary to change tactics on the ground, starting with Plan Baghdad. And that’s when we moved troops from Mosul into Baghdad and replaced them with the Stryker Brigade, so we increased troops during this time of instability.

It’ll be interesting to see if a “viable tactic” for President Bush would be bringing home, say, 80,000 soldiers. That might smell a little bit like emboldening talk. I guess it all depends on how much of a true believer he really is, deep down, versus how much he wants to help the GOP electoral chances in '08.

[Gary_Kumquat]

@ElvisL1ves

@Gary Kumquat

Surely the president is meant to support the guy who he’s put in charge of the forces in Iraq?

Nope, not in a normally functioning world. It’s the other way around.

The hell it is. How crap a boss would you be to put someone in charge of a project, then not support the guys decisions? Sorry but that’s just not a convincing argument at all. With all the shit you could validly attack Bush with for this farce, “he’s not micro-managing and over-riding his generals” really does not seem a winner.

[RTFirefly]

The clusterfuck continues:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 — An independent commission established by Congress to assess Iraq’s security forces will recommend remaking the 26,000-member national police force to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings, administration and military officials said Thursday.

The commission, headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top United States commander in Europe, concludes that the rampant sectarianism that has existed since the formation of the police force requires that its current units “be scrapped” and reshaped into a smaller, more elite organization, according to one senior official familiar with the findings. The recommendation is that “we should start over,” the official said.

The report, which will be presented to Congress next week, is among a number of new Iraq assessments — including a national intelligence estimate and a Government Accountability Office report — that await lawmakers when they return from summer recess. But the Jones commission’s assessment is likely to receive particular attention as the work of a highly regarded team that was alone in focusing directly on the worthiness of Iraq’s army and police force.

<snip>

National police units were designated earlier this year to play a major role securing neighborhoods after United States and Iraqi Army units cleared the areas of insurgents. But the police have proven to be a tenuous element of that strategy. Rampant sectarianism as well as supply and equipment problems have led to frequent complaints by the American military that the national police have been ineffective or openly allied with Shiite militants in many neighborhoods.

American commanders on the ground in Shiite-controlled areas of Baghdad say that the local police actively subvert efforts to loosen the grip of militias, and in some cases, attack Americans directly. One commander in northwest Baghdad said most bomb attacks against American patrols in the area this spring occurred close to police checkpoints.

<snip>

American officers have been trying to fix the police force since before 2006, which the military labeled “the year of the police,” a slogan meant to show their determination to fix what were, even then, longstanding sectarian problems.

The problem isn’t that the police are being trained well or poorly; the problem is Iraq. It had sectarian divisions before we arrived, whose effects were blunted by Saddam’s dictatorial rule. The past four and a half years have greatly exacerbated those divisions. The likelihood of finding a nonsectarian anything in Iraq is pretty small these days.

One of the recurring features of the occupation is the whole “sure, we made a bunch of mistakes earlier, but this time we’re finally getting it right” claims. There are some in the parts of the article that I didn’t quote. If we’re still trying to stabilize Iraq in 2010, we’ll hear them then, I’m sure.