COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
"Broken, Worn Out" and "Living Hand to Mouth"
ALEXANDER COCKBURN, Counterpunch
December 3/4, 2005
The
immense significance of Rep John Murtha's November 17 speech calling
for immediate withdrawal from Iraq is that it signals mutiny in the US
senior officer corps, seeing the institution they lead as "broken, worn
out" and "living hand to mouth", to use the biting words of their
spokesman, John Murtha, as he reiterated on December his denunciation
of Bush's destruction of the Army.
A CounterPuncher with nearly 40 years experience working in and around
the Pentagon told me this week that "The Four Star Generals picked
Murtha to make this speech because he has maximum credibility." It's
true. Even in the US Senate there's no one with quite Murtha's standing
to deliver the message, except maybe for Byrd, but the venerable
senator from West Virginia was a vehement opponent of the war from the
outset , whereas Murtha voted for it and only recently has turned
around.
So the Four-Star Generals briefed Murtha and gave him the
state-of-the-art data which made his speech so deadly, stinging the
White House into panic-stricken and foolish denunciations of Murtha as
a clone of Michael Moore.
It cannot have taken vice president Cheney, a former US Defense
Secretary, more than a moment to scan Murtha's speech and realize the
import of Murtha's speech as an announcement that the generals have had
enough.
Listen once more to what the generals want the country to know:
"The future of our military is at risk. Our military and our families
are stretched thin. Many say the Army is broken. Some of our troops are
on a third deployment. Recruitment is down even as the military has
lowered its standards. They expect to take 20 percent category 4, which
is the lowest category, which they said they'd never take. They have
been forced to do that to try to meet a reduced quota.
"Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing,
particularly in health care. Choices will have to be made. We cannot
allow promises we have made to our military families in terms of
service benefits, in terms of their health care to be negotiated away.
Procurement programs that ensure our military dominance cannot be
negotiated away. We must be prepared.
"The war in Iraq has caused huge shortfalls in our bases at home. I've
been to three bases in the United States, and each one of them were
short of things they need to train the people going to Iraq.
"Much of our ground equipment is worn out.
"Most importantly -- this is the most important point -- incidents have
increased from 150 a week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of
attacks going down over a time when we had additional more troops,
attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revolution at Abu Ghraib,
American casualties have doubled."
What happened on the heels of this speech is very instructive. The
Democrats fell over themselves distancing themselves from Murtha,
emboldening the White House to go one the attack.
From Bush's presidential plane, touring Asia, came the derisive comment
that Murtha was of "endorsing the policies of Michael Moore and the
extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party."
It took the traveling White House about 48 hours to realize that this
was a dumb thing to have said. Murtha's not the kind of guy you can
slime, the way Bush and Co did the glass-jawed Kerry in 2004. The much
decorated vet Murtha snapped back publicly that he hadn't much time for
smears from people like Cheney who'd got five deferments from military
service in Vietnam.
By the weekend Bush was speaking of Murtha respectfully. On Monday,
gritting his teeth, Cheney told a Washington audience that though he
disagreed with Murtha ihe's a good man, a Marine, a patriot, and he's
taking a clear stand in an entirely legitimate discussion."
One day later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News, ``I do
not think that American forces need to be there in the numbers that
they are now because -- for very much longer -- because Iraqis are
stepping up.'' A week later Bush was preparing a speech laying heavy
emphasis on US withdrawals as the Iraqi armed forces take up the burden.
Are there US-trained Iraqi detachments ready in the wings? Not if you
believe reports from Iraq, but they could be nonagenarians armed with
bows and arrows and the Bush high command would still be invoking their
superb training and readiness for the great mission.
Ten days after Murtha's speech commentators on the tv Sunday talk shows
were clambering aboard the Bring eem home bandwagon. Voices calling for
America to istay the course" in Iraq were few and far between. On
December 1 Murtha returned to the attack in Latrobe, Pennsylvania,
telling a civic group there that he was wrong to have voted for the war
and that most U.S. troops will leave Iraq within a year because the
Army is "broken, worn out" and "living hand to mouth".
The stench of panic in Washington that hangs like a winter fog over
Capitol Hill intensified. The panic stems from the core concern of
every politician in the nation's capital: survival. The people sweating
are Republicans and the source of their terror is the deadly message
spelled out in every current poll: Bush's war on Iraq spells disaster
for the Republican Party in next year's midterm elections.
Take a mid-November poll by SurveyUSA: in only seven states did Bush's
current approval rating exceed 50 per <cent.These> consisted of
the thinly populated states of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska,
Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi. In twelve states, including
California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Michigan, his rating
was under 35.
You have to go back to the early 1970s, when a scandal-stained Nixon
was on the verge of resignation, to find numbers lower than Bush's.
Like Bush, Nixon had swept to triumphant reelection in 1972. Less than
two years later he turned the White House over to vice president Ford
and flew off into exile.
No one expects Bush to resign, or even to be impeached (though vice
president Cheney's future is less assured) and his second term has more
than three years to run.
But right now, to use a famous phrase from the Nixon era, a cancer is
gnawing at his presidency and that cancer is the war in Iraq. The
American people are now 60 per cent against it and 40 per cent think
Bush lied to get them to back it.
Hence the panic. Even though the seats in the House of Representatives
are now so gerrymandered that less than 50 out of 435 districts are
reckoned as ever being likely to change hands, Republicans worry that
few seats, however gerrymandered, can withstand a Force 5 political
hurricane.
What they get from current polls is a simple message. If the US has not
withdrawn substantial numbers of its troops from Iraq by the fall of
next year, a Force 5 storm surge might very well wash them away.
Amid this potential debacle, the Republicans' only source of comfort is
the truly incredible conduct of the Democrats. First came the
Democrats' terrified reaction to Murtha, symbolized by Democratic
minority leader Nancy Pelosi's cancellation of a press conference
supporting Murtha. This prompted the Republicans to realize that the
Democrats were ready to have their bluff called by the Republican-
sponsored resolution calling for immediate withdrawal, for which only
three Democrats voted, while so-called progressives like Kucinich and
Sanders and Conyers ran for cover.
Listen to any prominent Democrat senator , like Kerry or Clinton or
Feingold or Obama and you get the same adamant refusal to go beyond the
savage characterization by Glenn Ford and Peter Gamble of the Black
Commentator, of Obama's address to the Council on Foreign Relations:
U.S. Senator Barack Obama has planted his feet deeply inside the Iraq
war-prolongation camp of the Democratic Party, the great swamp that, if
not drained, will swallow up any hope of victory over the GOP in next
year's congressional elections. In a masterpiece of double-speak before
the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, November 22, the Black
Illinois lawmaker managed to out-mush-mouth Sen. John Kerry - a
prodigious feat, indeed.
In essence, all Obama wants from the Bush regime is that it fess up to
having launched the war based on false information, and to henceforth
come clean with the Senate on how it plans to proceed in the future.
Those Democrats who want to dwell on the past - the actual genesis and
rationale for the war, and the real reasons for its continuation -
should be quiet.
"Withdrawal" and "timetables" are bad words, and Obama will have nothing to do with them.
Of course, the "insurgents" are not a "faction," and must therefore be
defeated. On this point, Obama and the Bush men agree: "In sum, we have
to focus, methodically and without partisanship, on those steps that
will: one, stabilize Iraq, avoid all out civil war, and give the
factions within Iraq the space they need to forge a political
settlement; two, contain and ultimately extinguish the insurgency in
Iraq; and three, bring our troops safely home."
Nobody in the White House would argue with any of these points. Point
number two in Obama's "pragmatic" baseline is, the containment and
elimination of the "insurgency." Of course, one can only do that by
continuing the war. Indeed, it appears that Obama and many of his
colleagues are more intent on consulting the Bush men on the best ways
to "win" the war than in effecting an American withdrawal at any
foreseeable time.
They want "victory" just as much as the White House; they just don't want the word shouted at every press conference.
The Black Commentator concludes its excoriation of Obama and his fellow Democrats with these words:
By late summer of 2006, when voters are deciding what they want their
Senate and House to look like, if the Democrats have not caught up to
public opinion to offer a tangible and quick exit from Iraq, the
Republicans will retain control of both chambers of congress.
All that will be left in November is mush from Kerry, Hillary, Biden, Edwards - and Obama's - mouths.
Here at CounterPunch we heartily endorse this sentiment.
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