THINKING FOR OURSELVES

Military Might

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, Sept. 9-15, 2007

President Bush is systematically shifting the debate over U.S. policy in Iraq to a question of military might. He insists that our Iraq policy is a military question and he is orchestrating the military to respond in ways that support this position.

At a time when almost everyone agrees that the solutions to Iraqi violence and chaos are political, not military, Bush claims that U.S. political processes have no place in determining military policy. This argument, like so much of Bush’s thinking, turns the U.S. Constitution upside down, placing the military above the civilian society it is to serve and protect.

Last Friday Bush met with Pentagon officials and said, “The stakes in Iraq are too high and the consequences too grave for our security here at home to allow politics to harm the mission of our men and women in uniform.”

Bush made this comment after meeting with the joint chiefs. He used them as a backdrop, summarizing their ideas as points of view he wanted to hear. This was necessary because virtually all of the chiefs of the armed services have expressed concerns about repeated and extended deployments. Both General George Casey of the Army and General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, are considering recommending steep reductions in troops by the end of the year. Just prior to the meeting with the President General Casey said, “Our force is stretched and out of balance. The tempo of our deployments are not sustainable, our equipment usage is five times the normal rate and continuously operating in harsh environments.”

These differing points were also presented in the scathing report of the General Accounting Office. It said that Iraq would meet only three of the 18 benchmarks for success set forth by Congress. The administration has called the report “unhelpful” because it portrays the situation in Iraq in “blacks and whites instead of considering the ‘grey’ areas of progress.” These grey areas and nuanced developments are what Bush hopes to establish through the report of General David H. Petraeus.

Many observers believe the GAO report was leaked because of fears that the Bush administration would attempt to blunt and distort its findings. The report clearly states that the military surge has not provided a context for political advancement in Iraq.

The leaked report came on the heels of the National Intelligence Estimate and the review of the Iraqi national police by a Congressional commission. Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, summed these up, saying, “What we’re hearing is a pretty consistent message of failure on the political front in Iraq.”

In order to shift attention away from the political disaster in Iraq and to undercut the escalating political conversation at home, Bush is dressing himself up as Commander-in-chief. Hence his unannounced surprise trip to the battlefront.

This propaganda effort, like so much of this war, will ultimately fail.

But in the meantime it is doing considerable damage to the military and to the public conversation we need to be holdiing about the proper relationship between the military and the civilian.

Bush is banking on the military report because he finally has a general he can count on. General Petraeus is not only an officer whose career depends on the success of the surge. He is a partisan supporter of Bush. Six weeks before the 2004 election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post claiming there had been “tangible progress” in Iraq and “momentum has gathered in recent months.”

In his willingness to distort information to serve his political master. Petraeus was wrong then. As he welcomes Bush for photo ops, he is just as wrong now.

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