Phillips: The Iraq disaster is the generals’ fault, not Bush’s

Some odd statements by Melanie Phillips in her January 5th Diary:

Encouragingly, there are signs that Bush may have now accepted what has long been apparent – that he has been ill-served by his top brass in Iraq. The US commander–in-chief wants to win – but has realised that his generals merely want to manage a retreat. Now there’s been a shake-up.

Did anyone ever have the impression that Bush wanted one thing in Iraq and his generals wanted another, and, further, that the generals were not doing what he wanted them to do? My impression all along has been that the military leaders have been dutifully carrying out his policy, in constant consultation with him and his top officials. What is the evidence to the contrary?

Phillips then argues, not without some plausibility, that one reason we have failed in Iraq is that we have not recognized Iran’s role as leader of global jihad since 1979 and as a main fomenter of the Iraqi insurgency. Any success in Iraq, she says, requires striking back at Iran. She then continues:

The problem has been, however, that the American generals have been resistant to such a strategic analysis. They have refused both to extend the war in Iraq to Iran and to reconceive their tactics away from the use of conventional to unconventional forces. [Emphasis added.]

The generals have refused to extend the war to Iran? Like, the president ordered them to extend the war to Iran, and they just upped and said, “Mr. President, we won’t do it”? Phillips seems to think that in America the president’s power is limited to requesting that generals do things and hoping they say yes.

She quotes an article by Ralph Peters about the new commander in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus:

Gen. Petraeus truly is a brilliant talent. Faced with the reality of Iraq, he may be able to shake off the Pollyanna thinking in which our government and military have become mired. God knows, we all want the general to succeed…Of course, even three- or four-star generals can only do what our civilian leaders order and allow. Half of Petraeus’ struggle is going to be with Washington’s obsolete view of the world, with our persistent illusions about the Middle East and mankind.

She then continues:

There, in that last sentence, lies the rub. All depends on whether Bush has finally got it, or whether he will continue to be influenced by people who clearly haven’t got a clue.

That last sentence seems to have the exact opposite import from her first paragraph quoted at the beginning of this blog entry. There, Philips said that for the last four years Bush has had the right idea and has wanted victory, but his generals have had different ideas and have been disloyally undercutting him. Now she appears to be saying that Bush has been under the influence of his wrong-headed generals, meaning that he has the same views that they have. However, the meaning of passage is ambiguous. Maybe she means that Bush has been under the influence of wrong-headed officials in the administration. But even if that’s what she means, she’s still saying that Bush has had the wrong views all along, whereas earlier she said that he has had the right views all along. Also, either way, Bush’s wrong views are not his fault but that of the unspecified people who have him under their sway. According to Phillips, then, Bush either has the right ideas, and is disobeyed by his generals, or he has the wrong ideas, because he’s under the influence of unnamed others. Whatever goes wrong, is not George’s fault.

Phillips, who is no mental slouch, is doing something I’ve never seen her do before—making off-the-wall statements (the generals “refused” to extend the war into Iran), and incoherent arguments. Perhaps it is because, departing from her usual “beat” on the danger of Islam in the West, she has turned to defending at all costs Bush’s Iraq policy. And, after all, you know what we say at VFR:

“This is your brain….This is your brain on Dubya.”

- end of initial entry -

Simon N. writes from England:

You write: “Phillips, who is no mental slouch, is doing something I’ve never seen her do before-making off-the-wall statements (the generals “refused” to extend the war into Iran), and incoherent arguments…”

I did find this article by Phillips particularly disappointing & below her usual standard. I think it was intended purely as a polemic, to help whip up support for the intended attack on Iran. I’m not sure why the Israelis & Phillips see Iran as so much greater a threat to Israel than the Wahabbis; there seems to be some idea that attacking Iran will cause a desirable ‘regime change’, Iran becomes a liberal democracy no longer hostile to Israel, and Iraq becomes calm & orderly because its problems are apparently due to those pesky Shia militias, not Sunni Ba’athists, al Qaeda et al. I can’t see how this makes any sense to anyone except the Saudis, who have a vested interest in seeing US/Israel attack Iran, but it seems to be an idee fixe with the Israeli right.

Personally I think the best approach would be to not attack anyone, leave Iraq and let the Shias have their state, but the Saudis won’t allow that.

LA replies:

Yes, I was also going to comment on her strange argument for conquering Iraq—not to stop nukes, but to “win” in Iraq, but it made the blog entry too long.

“I think it was intended purely as a polemic, to help whip up support for the intended attack on Iran.”

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s what I pointed to with my joke about how once a person becomes a Bush champion, he automatically becomes stupid. The American center-right has become unable to engage in rational argument as a result of their championing of Bush—it’s been a disaster for conservatism.

So it was striking that the moment Phillips began to write a polemic of this nature, she made unintelligent and contradictory statements of a kind that one would normally not see coming from her.

Simon N. replies:

Yup, agree 100 percent. Once they commit to supporting Bush, they commit to self-contradiction. In retrospect the period pre-2001 looks like a golden age of rationality and good sense!

Howard Sutherland writes:

Whether you look at it militarily or politically, President Bush is the man ultimately responsible for what we have done, and how well it is working, in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the military side, to belabor the obvious, the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces ….

Equally, the political decisions (probably the strategic and operational ones, too) were not made by any general or admiral. Melanie Phillips betrays a misunderstanding of how the U.S. chain of command works and how American flag and general officers perceive their political role. Maybe this is because, as a Briton, she is accustomed to senior serving officers from time to time expressing political judgments in public. British officers can get away with that every now and then. For American officers (except for women in the 1990s lobbying in Congress to eliminate the combat exclusion) it is the ultimate Not-Done – an immediate career-killer. American officers do not believe they have any political role – at least not while on active duty.

From the first day of officer training, in any service, the concept of civilian control of the armed forces – embodied by the president as commander in chief – is drilled into our heads. The last prominent officer I can think of who bucked his commander in chief in public was Douglas MacArthur, who publicly criticized President Truman’s strategic direction of the Korean War while MacArthur was the UN supreme commander there. By 1951 MacArthur enjoyed five stars and an iconic status no American officer since has remotely approached (he had been the American proconsul of both the Philippines and Japan, in addition to his senior service in both World Wars and Korea and as Chief of Staff of the Army). Come to think of it, MacArthur was probably the most elevated officer after Washington himself – a much more prominent figure at the time than Eisenhower, who got himself elected president less than two years later. Even so, Truman handled MacArthur’s public dissent with ease. He fired him, on the advice of the Joint Chiefs.

I think this political—maybe it’s better to say policy—suppression of senior officers has gone too far. In the context of giving advice to the political leadership, they should freely (confidentially, to be sure) express policy views about what they know. I think they very rarely do. As far as I can tell, our senior officers don’t object to any bad ideas. With very few exceptions, they put up no resistance to our getting mired in Vietnam, and no resistance to the rampant feminizing of the armed forces despite all the deleterious effects for combat readiness everyone knew would follow. There is no perceptible resistance to opening the armed forces to open homosexuals (indeed, Gen. Shalikashvili, Pres. Clinton’s immigrant JCS Chairman, just declared himself for it), and no objections whatever to turning the armed forces into an alien mercenary force by recruiting abroad and granting instant citizenship to alien GIs, with the myriad opportunities for security breaches that invites. Our senior officers are useless, and not only on the battlefield. At the same time that today’s officers are more and more careful about not doing anything that might be perceived as political, the senior officers are ever more political in a careerist sense. That was already largely true by Vietnam; it is far more so today. Getting that next star is far more important than ensuring that your service is ready to win a war. Even those who have that most-coveted fourth star don’t rock the boat because the corporate directorships and jobs with major contractors that sweeten so many an admiral and general’s retirement do not go to those who were troublesome on active duty.

The newly appointed commander in Iraq, Lt.Gen. David Petraeus, is actually a good example. What the media love about him is not that he might have some fighting ability (he commanded the 101st Airborne in the Iraq Attack, but against rather nominal opposition), but that he has a Ph.D. from Princeton. In other words, Petraeus is a safe, domesticated officer who has jumped through the right career-enhancing hoops. There are too many senior officers today who have been properly indoctrinated at Harvard’s Kennedy School and Princeton’s Wilson School and not enough officers who know how to fight. They weren’t becoming better fighters at those policy palaces; they were having the transnational progressivism of our policy elites inculcated into them. I suspect George Patton could never get an appointment to West Point today – he would be far too bellicose for today’s U.S. Army. God forbid the United States gets pulled into a war against heavyweight opposition (like China) anytime soon. HRS

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 08, 2007 11:41 PM | Send