[THS] Tom Engelhardt: Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26313.htm

Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?

The Military’s Media Megaphone and the U.S. Global Military Presence

By Tom Engelhardt

September 07, 2010 "Tomdispatch" -- The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine
features Fred Kaplan’s “The Transformer,” an article-cum-interview with Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates.  It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he
might leave his post “sometime in 2011.”  The most significant two lines in the piece,
however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering.
Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates’s views, they read: “He favors substantial
increases in the military budget... He opposes any slacking off in America's global
military presence.”

Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
such lines might have been throwaways, since a secretary of state is today little more
than a fancy facilitator, ever less central to what that magazine, with its outmoded
name, might still call “foreign policy.” Remind me: When was the last time you heard
anyone use that phrase -- part of a superannuated world in which “diplomats” and
“diplomacy” were considered important -- in a meaningful way?  These days “foreign
policy” and “global policy” are increasingly a single fused, militarized entity, at least
across what used to be called “the Greater Middle East,” where what’s at stake is
neither war nor peace, but that "military presence."

As a result, Gates’s message couldn’t be clearer: despite two disastrous wars and a
global war on terror now considered “multigenerational” by those in the know,
trillions of lost dollars, and staggering numbers of deaths (if you happen to include
Iraqi and Afghan ones), the U.S. military mustn’t in any way slack off.  The option of
reducing the global mission -- the one that’s never on the table when “all options are
on the table” -- should remain nowhere in sight.  That’s Gates’s bedrock conviction.
And when he opposes any diminution of the global mission, it matters.

Slicing Up the World Like a Pie

As we know from a Peter Baker front-page New York Times profile of Barack Obama
as commander-in-chief, the 49-year-old president “with no experience in uniform”
has “bonded” with Gates, the 66-year-old former spymaster, all-around-apparatchik,
and holdover from the last years of the Bush era.  Baker describes Gates as the
president’s “most important tutor,” and on matters military like the Afghan War, the
president has reportedly “deferred to him repeatedly.”

Let’s face it, though: deference has become the norm for the Pentagon and U.S.
military commanders, which is not so surprising.  After all, in terms of where our
money goes, the Pentagon is the 800-pound gorilla in just about any room.  It has,
for instance, left the State Department in the proverbial dust.  By now, it gets at least
$12 dollars for every dollar of funding that goes to the State Department, which in
critical areas of the world has become an adjunct of the military.

In addition, the Pentagon has taken under its pilotless predatory wing such previously
civilian tasks as delivering humanitarian aid and “nation-building.” As Secretary of
Defense Gates has pointed out, there are more Americans in U.S. military bands than
there are foreign service officers.

If it’s true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then you can gauge the
power of the Pentagon by the fact that, at least in Iraq after 2011, the State
Department is planning to become a mini-military -- an armed outfit using equipment
borrowed from the Pentagon and an “army” of mercenary guards formed into “quick
reaction forces,” all housed in a series of new billion-dollar “fortified compounds,” no
longer called “consulates” but “enduring presence posts” (as the Pentagon once
called its giant bases in Iraq “enduring camps”).  This level of militarization of what
might once have been considered the Department of Peaceful Solutions to Difficult
Problems is without precedent and an indicator of the degree to which the
government is being militarized.

Similarly, according to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has managed to take
control of more than two-thirds of the “intelligence programs” in the vast world of the
U.S. Intelligence Community, with its 17 major agencies and organizations.  Ever
since the mid-1980s, it has also divided much of the globe like a pie into slices called
“commands.” (Our own continent joined the crew as the U.S. Northern Command, or
Northcom, in 2002, and Africa, as Africom in 2007.)

Before stepping down a notch to become Afghan war commander, General David
Petraeus was U.S. Central Command (Centcom) commander, which meant military
viceroy for an especially heavily garrisoned expanse of the planet stretching from
Egypt to the Chinese border.  Increasingly, in fact, there is no space, including outer
space and virtual space, where our military is uninterested in maintaining or
establishing a “presence.”

On October 1st, for instance, a new Cyber Command headed by a four-star general
and staffed by 1,000 “elite military hackers and spies” is to hit the keyboards typing.
And there will be nothing shy about its particular version of “presence” either.  The
Bush-era concept of “preventive war” (that is, a war of aggression) may have been
discarded by the Obama administration, but the wizards of the new Cyber Command
are boldly trying to go where the Bush administration once went.  They are
reportedly eager to establish a virtual war-fighting principle (labeled “active defense”)
under which they could preemptively attack and knock out the computer networks of
adversaries.

And the White House and environs haven’t been immune to creeping militarization
either.  As presidents are now obliged to praise American troops to the skies in any
“foreign policy” speech -- “Our troops are the steel in our ship of state” -- they also
turn ever more regularly to military figures in civilian life and for civilian posts.
President Obama’s National Security Adviser, James Jones, is a retired Marine four-
star general, and from the Bush years the president kept on Army Lieutenant General
Douglas Lute as “war czar,” just as he appointed retired Army Lieutenant General
Karl Eikenberry as our ambassador to Afghanistan, and recently replaced retired
admiral Dennis Blair with retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper as the
Director of National Intelligence.  (He also kept on David Petraeus, George W. Bush’s
favorite general, and hiked the already staggering Pentagon budget in Bushian
fashion.)

And this merely skims the surface of the nonstop growth of the Pentagon and its
influence.  One irony of that process: even as the U.S. military has failed repeatedly
to win wars, its budgets have grown ever more gargantuan, its sway in Washington
ever greater, and its power at home ever more obvious.

Generals and Admirals Mouthing Off

To grasp the changing nature of military influence domestically, consider the
military’s relationship to the media.  Its media megaphone offers a measure of the
reach and influence of that behemoth, what kinds of pressures it can apply in
support of its own version of foreign policy, and just how, under its weight, the
relationship between the civilian and military high commands is changing.

It’s true that, in June, the president relieved Afghan War commander General
Stanley McChrystal of duty after his war-frustrated associates drank and mouthed off
about administration officials in an inanely derogatory manner in his presence -- and
the presence of a Rolling Stone magazine reporter. ("Biden?... Did you say: Bite
Me?")  But think of that as the exception that proves the rule.

It’s seldom noted that less obvious but more serious -- and egregious -- breaches of
civilian/military protocol are becoming the norm, and increasingly no one blinks or
acts. To take just a few recent examples, in late August commandant of the Marine
Corps General James Conway, due to retire this fall, publicly attacked the president’s
“conditions-based” July 2011 drawdown date in Afghanistan, saying, "In some ways,
we think right now it is probably giving our enemy sustenance."

Or consider that, while the Obama administration has moved fiercely against
government and military leaking of every sort, when it came to the strategic leaking
(assumedly by someone in, or close to, the military) of the “McChrystal plan” for
Afghanistan in the fall of 2009, nothing at all happened even though the president
was backed into a policy-making corner.  And yet, as Andrew Bacevich pointed out,
“The McChrystal leaker provid[ed] Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leadership a
detailed blueprint of exactly how the United States and its allies were going to
prosecute their war.”

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, on a three-day
cross-country “tour” of Midwestern business venues (grandiloquently labeled
“Conversations with the Country”), attacked the national debt as “the most significant
threat to our national security.”  Anodyne as this might sound, with election 2010
approaching, the national debt couldn’t be a more political issue.

There should be, but no longer is, something startling about all this.  Generals and
admirals now mouth off regularly on a wide range of policy issues, appealing to the
American public both directly and via deferential (sometimes fawning) reporters,
pundits, and commentators.  They and their underlings clearly leak news repeatedly
for tactical advantage in policy-making situations.  They organize what are essentially
political-style barnstorming campaigns for what once would have been “foreign
policy” positions, and increasingly this is just the way the game is played.

>From Combat to Commentary

There’s a history still to be written about how our highest military commanders came
to never shut up.

Certainly, in 1990 as Gulf War I was approaching, Americans experienced the first full
flowering of a new form of militarized “journalism” in which, among other things,
retired high military officers, like so many play-by-play analysts on Monday Night
Football, became regular TV news consultants.  They were called upon to narrate
and analyze the upcoming battle (“showdown in the Gulf”), the brief offensive that
followed, and the aftermath in something close to real time.  Amid nifty logos,
dazzling Star Wars-style graphics, theme music, and instant-replay nose-cone snuff
films of “precision” weapons wiping out the enemy, they offered a running
commentary on the progress of battle as well as on the work of commanders in the
field, some of whom they might have once served with.

And that was just the beginning of the way, after years of post-Vietnam War
planning, the Pentagon took control of the media battlefield and so the popular
portrayal of American-style war.  In the past, the reporting of war had often been
successfully controlled by governments, while generals had polished their images
with the press or -- like Omar Bradley and Douglas MacArthur -- even employed
public relations staffs to do it for them.  But never had generals and war planners
gone before the public as actors, supported by all the means a studio could muster
on their behalf and determined to produce a program that would fill the day across
the dial for the full time of a war.  The military even had a version of a network
Standards and Practices department with its guidelines for on-air acceptability.
Military handlers made decisions -- like refusing to clear for publication the fact that
Stealth pilots viewed X-rated movies before missions -- reminiscent of network show-
vetting practices.

When it came time for Gulf War II, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military had
added the practice of putting reporters through pre-war weeklong “boot camps” and
then “embedding” them with the troops (a Stockholm Syndrome-type experience
that many American reporters grew to love).  It also built itself a quarter-million-dollar
stage set for nonstop war briefings at Centcom headquarters in Doha, Qatar.  All of
this was still remarkably new in the history of relations between the Pentagon and the
media, but it meant that the military could address the public more or less directly
both through those embedded reporters and over the shoulders of that assembled
gaggle of media types in Doha.

As long as war took its traditional form, this approach worked well, but once it turned
into a protracted and inchoate guerrilla struggle, and “war” and “wartime” became
the endless (often dismal) norm, something new was needed.  In the Bush years, the
Pentagon responded to endless war in part by sending out an endless stream of well-
coached, well-choreographed retired military “experts” to fill the gaping maw of cable
news.  In the meantime, something quite new has developed.

Today, you no longer need to be a retired military officer to offer play-by-play
commentary on and analysis of our wars.  Now, at certain moments, the main
narrators of those wars turn out to be none other than the generals running, or
overseeing, them.  They regularly get major airtime to explain to the American public
how those wars are going, as well as to expound on their views on more general
issues.

This is something new.  Among the American commanders of World War II and the
Korean War, only Douglas MacArthur did anything faintly like this, which made him
an outlier (or perhaps an omen) and in a sense that's why President Harry Truman
fired him.  Generals Eisenhower, Patton, Ridgeway, et al., did not think to go on
media tours touting their own political lines while in uniform.

Admittedly, Vietnam War commander General William Westmoreland was an early
pioneer of the form.  He had, however, been pushed onto the stage to put a public
face on the American war effort by President Lyndon Johnson, who was desperate to
buck up public opinion.  Westmoreland returned from Vietnam in 1968 just before
the disastrous Tet Offensive for a “whirlwind tour” of the country and uplifting
testimony before Congress.  In a speech at the National Press Club, he spoke of
reaching “an important point where the end begins to come into view,” and later in a
televised press conference, even more infamously used the phrase “the light at the
end of tunnel.”  Events would soon discredit his optimism.

Still, we’ve reached quite a different level of military/media confluence today.  Take
the two generals now fighting our Afghan and Iraq wars: General Petraeus and
General Ray Odierno -- one arriving, the other leaving.

Having spent six weeks assessing the Afghan situation and convinced that he needed
to buy more time for his war from the American public, in mid-August Petraeus
launched a full-blown, well-organized media tour from his headquarters in Kabul.  In
it, he touted “progress” in Afghanistan, offered comments subtly but visibly at odds
with the president’s promised July 2011 drawdown date, and generally evangelized
for his war.  He began with an hour-long interview with Dexter Filkins of the New
York Times and another with Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post.  These
were timed to be released on August 15th, the morning he appeared on NBC’s
Sunday political show “Meet the Press.”  (Moderator David Gregory traveled to the
Afghan capital to toss softball questions at Washington’s greatest general and watch
him do push-ups in a “special edition” of the show.)  Petraeus then followed up with
a Katie Couric interview on CBS Evening News, as part of an all-fronts “media blitz”
that would include Fox News, AP, Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, and in a bow
to the allies, the BBC and even NATO TV, among other places.

At almost the same moment, General Odierno was ending his tour of duty as Iraq
war commander by launching a goodbye media blitz of his own from Baghdad, which
included interviews with ABC’s “This Week,” Bob Schieffer of CBS’s “Face the Nation,”
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, CNN’s “State of the Union,” PBS Newshour, and the New
York Times, among others.   He, too, had a policy line to promote and he, too,
expressed himself in ways subtly but visibly at odds with an official Obama position,
emphasizing the possibility that some number of U.S. troops might need to stay in
Iraq beyond the 2011 departure deadline.  As he said to Schieffer, "If [the Iraqis] ask
us that they might want us to stay longer, we certainly would consider that.”
Offering another scenario as well, he also suggested that, as Reuters put it, “U.S.
troops... could move back to a combat role if there was ‘a complete failure of the
security forces’ or if political divisions split Iraqi security forces.”  (He then covered his
flanks by adding, “but we don’t see that happening.”)

This urge to stay represents one long-term strain of thinking in the military and
among Pentagon civilians, and it will undoubtedly prove a powerful force for the
president to deal with or defer to in 2011.  In February 2009, less than a month after
Obama took office, Odierno was already broadcasting his desire to have up to 35,000
troops remain in Iraq after 2011, and at the end of 2009, Gates was already
suggesting that a new round of negotiations with a future Iraqi government might
extend our stay for years.  All this, of course, could qualify as part of a more general
campaign to maintain the Pentagon’s 800-pound status, the military’s clout, and that
global military presence.

A Chorus of Military Intellectuals

Pentagon foreign policy is regularly seconded by a growing cadre of what might be
called military intellectuals at think tanks scattered around Washington.  Such figures,
many of them qualifying as “warrior pundits” and “warrior journalists,” include:
Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; retired Lieutenant
Colonel John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and Petraeus
adviser; former U.S. Army officer Andrew Exum, fellow at the Center for a New
American Security, founder of the Abu Muqawama website, and a McChrystal
advisor; former Australian infantry officer and Petraeus adviser David Kilcullen, non-
resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security; Thomas Ricks,
formerly of the Washington Post, author of the bestselling Iraq War books Fiasco and
The Gamble, Petraeus admirer, and senior fellow at the same center; Frederick
Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the man Gates credits with turning
around his thinking on Afghanistan and a recent Petraeus hiree in Afghanistan;
Kimberley Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War, an adviser to both Petraeus
and McChrystal; Kenneth Pollack, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy
at the Brookings Institution; and Stephen Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at
the Council on Foreign Relations and another Petraeus as well as McChrystal adviser.
These figures, and numerous others like them, are repeatedly invited to U.S. war
zones by the military, flattered, toured, given face time with commanders, sometimes
hired by them, and sometimes even given the sense that they are the ones planning
our wars.  They then return to Washington to offer sophisticated, “objective” versions
of the military line.

Toss into this mix the former neocons who caused so much of the damage in the
early Bush years and who regularly return at key moments as esteemed media
“experts” (not the fools and knaves they were), including former Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) L.
Paul Bremer III, and former senior advisor to the CPA Noah Feldman, among others.
For them, being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry.  And, of course, they
and their thoughts are dealt with remarkably respectfully, while those who were
against the Iraq War from the beginning remain scarce commodities on op-ed pages,
as sources in news articles, and on the national radio and TV news.

This combined crew of former warriors, war-zone bureaucrats, and warrior pundits
are, like Odierno, now plunking for a sizeable residual U.S. military force to stay in
Iraq until hell freezes over.  They regularly compare Iraq to post-war South Korea,
where U.S. troops are still garrisoned nearly 60 years after the Korean War and
which, after decades of U.S.-supported dictators, now has a flourishing democracy.

Combine the military intellectuals, the former neocons, the war commanders, the
retired military-officer-commentators, the Secretary of Defense and other Pentagon
civilians and you have an impressive array of firepower of a sort that no Eisenhower,
Ridgeway, or even MacArthur could have imagined.  They may disagree fiercely with
each other on tactical matters when it comes to pursuing American-style war, and
they certainly don’t represent the views of a monolithic military.  There are
undoubtedly generals who have quite a different view of what the defense of the
United States entails.  As a crew, though, civilian and military, in and out of uniform,
in the Pentagon or in a war zone, they agree forcefully on the need to maintain that
American global military presence over the long term.

Producing War

Other than Gates, the key figure of the moment is clearly Petraeus, who might be
thought of as our Teflon general.  He could represent a genuine challenge to the
fading tradition of civilian control of the military.  Treated as a demi-god and genius
of battle on both sides of the aisle in Washington, he would be hard for any
president, especially this one, to remove from office.  As a four-star who would have
to throw a punch at Michelle Obama on national television to get fired, he minimally
has significant latitude to pursue the war policies of his choice in Afghanistan.  He
also has -- should he care to exercise it -- the potential and the opening to pursue
much more.  It’s not completely farfetched to imagine him as the first mini-Caesar-in-
waiting of our American times.

As of yet, he and other top figures may plan their individual media blitzes, but they
are not consciously planning a media strategy for a coherent Pentagon foreign policy.
The result is all the more chilling for not being fully coordinated, and for being so
little noticed or attended to by the media that play such a role in promoting it.
What’s at stake here goes well beyond the specific issue of military insubordination
that usually comes up when military-civilian relations are discussed.  After all, we
could be seeing, in however inchoate form, the beginning of a genuine
Pentagon/military production in support of Pentagon timing (as in the new bases now
being built in Afghanistan that won’t even be completed until late 2011), our global
military presence, and the global mission that goes with it.

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, you can see that Pentagon version of an
American foreign policy straining to be born.  In the end, of course, it could be
stillborn, but it could also become an all-enveloping system offering Americans a
strange, skewed vision of a world constantly at war and of the importance of
planning for more of the same.

To the extent that it now exists, it is dominated by the vision of figures who, judging
from the last near decade, have a particularly constrained sense of American
priorities, have been deeply immersed in the imperial mayhem that our wars have
created, have left us armed to the teeth and flailing at ghosts and demons, and are
still enmeshed in the process by which American treasure has been squandered to
worse than no purpose in distant lands.

Nothing in the record indicates that anyone should listen to what these men have to
say.  Nothing in the record indicates that Washington won’t be all ears, the media
won’t remain an enthusiastic conduit, and Americans won’t follow their lead.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation
Institute's TomDispatch.com.  His latest book, The American Way of War:  How
Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has just been published. You can
catch him discussing the new military/media landscape in a Timothy MacBain
TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

[Source note: For a basic source on the decline of the State Department, Stephen
Glain’s 2009 Nation piece “The American Leviathan” is still the place to start.  For
those of you who would like more on the history of how the Pentagon organized war
in the post-Vietnam era and the tumultuous Bush years, consider getting your hands
on the revised, updated version of my book, The End of Victory Culture, and
checking out the sections entitled “Afterlife” and “Victory Culture, the Sequel.”
Among the recent “all options on the table” statements, this one from Petraeus's
Washington Post interview caught my attention: “One policy [General Petraeus] has
opted not to continue, however, is his predecessor's asceticism. He suggested that
the fast-food restaurants McChrystal ordered closed on bases probably will reopen
soon.  ‘With respect to Burger Kings, all options are on the table,’ he said.”]