BRASS TO BUSH: TAKE THIS WAR AND SHOVE IT

I can’t believe I am writing this. As a former military officer, the notion of not following an order is something I never considered personally. Even on my most uncertain days during the Vietnam War, I never asked myself, “Is this order the right thing to do?” Today’s top brass may not be so lucky. If the Bush White House orders a military strike on Iran, our most senior military commanders may threaten to resign en masse rather than carry out the order.

The fate of Admiral William Fallon, the CENTCOM commander who “resigned” abruptly on March 11, 2008, is a preview of the big showdown. For months, Fallon annoyed the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney) because he made frequent comments to the press about how an attack on Iran would make the U.S. military mission a lot harder. On more than one occasion, he said life in Iraq and Afghanistan was tough enough without starting a third war. Then Esquire published a long flattering profile of Fallon—and that was the last straw. Within hours, Fallon was fired. His replacement: Bush White House lapdog General David Petraeus.

Thomas P.M. Barnett of Esquire writes:

And so Fallon, the good cop, may soon be unemployed because he's doing what a generation of young officers in the U.S. military are now openly complaining that their leaders didn't do on their behalf in the run-up to the war in Iraq: He's standing up to the commander in chief, whom he thinks is contemplating a strategically unsound war.

As you can tell from the quote, clearly the writer and Admiral Fallon himself anticipated that the White House would pull the plug on Fallon. The White House got its way, but Fallon sent an important message to the White House and the world. Not every senior commander is willing to buy into stupid policies and execute stupid orders—just because that is what the White House wants.

Yesterday, I referred to the latest article by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker. I hope you take the time to read the whole thing. Hersh has an extended riff about the predicament of Admiral Fallon:

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”

The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

In the minds of many of our senior military commanders, it would be stupid to attack Iran. There is no article in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that says one has the right to disobey a stupid order. Ordinarily, one follows orders, period—even stupid orders.

While the Nuremberg Defense (Befehl ist Befehl = "Only following orders") does not excuse war crimes, how does the military deal with civilian stupidity on a global scale? They do what they are doing now—dig in their heels and try to shape policy from within the system. They speak truth to power, as Admiral Fallon did. Thanks to Fallon, others are showing more courage now. Eventually, speaking truth to power may become the norm.

If and when Bush finally gets around to ordering an attack on Iran, the brass might just say, "Take this war and shove it." It could happen. Resistence against Bush White House stupidity is reaching critical mass among our top military commanders. Mass resignations? Just the threat of mass resignations would be mortifying to the Bush administration. There is not enough time left for Bush and Cheney to punish the mutineers. Since Bush is the short-timer, the military has time on its side. Stay tuned.