This week has the real possibility of going down as the strangest week in American military history. It opened with President Obama going right up … to … the … edge of sending soldiers to Iraq, but more important were two other events that intellectually doomed any happy talk from the military.
– First was a most astonishing and brilliant documentary, “American War Generals,” on the National Geographic Channel last Sunday, which featured 11 of our highest-ranking, most admired generals since World War II. Each one spoke clearly and with admirable stoicism about how he had failed in the “small wars.”
Former secretary of state and all-around respected Gen. Colin Powell spoke of the Vietnam War. When “the boys” came home, he said, “we looked in the mirror and saw what we”d become.” The reflection showed men who had lost the traditional American virtues, he went on.
Gen. Wesley Clark recalled, as have many analysts, how the nation failed at Tora Bora, a scrum of mountains in southern Afghanistan, early in that war, when Osama bin Laden and his men most probably could have been captured. “In Afghanistan, it only took a few spotters on the ground and we were overthrowing the Taliban. But the big failure was Tora Bora. The CIA requested hundreds of rangers to finish the job, but the Pentagon refused.” Priority had been given to Iraq.
Retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey was one of the most critical. “I think taking down Saddam was actually the right thing to do,” he said. “Screwing up the military operation was not. So I have a permanent sense of hatred for what Secretary Rumsfeld, in particular, and these people that got in there and convinced themselves that they could do this with a minimalist approach of military power.”
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was head of the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan, a secret special-forces group working in the shadows, recalled how al-Qaida was fed by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in which American soldiers were filmed grotesquely torturing Iraqi prisoners.
“It was like a thunderclap,” McChrystal said. “It showed the world that Americans do all the things they are accused of.”
The 11 commanding generals in the documentary – which also included Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. Jack Keane and Maj. Gen. Herbert R. McMaster – seemed to agree on the oft-repeated idea that the U.S. had learned nothing from Vietnam and continued to fight Iraq and Afghanistan only in a traditional way (tanks against tanks) instead of learning guerrilla warfare from the South Asian experience.
Implicit in all of the brief expositions was the fear that the U.S. is losing war after war for lack of understanding the enemy and, perhaps, of understanding ourselves.
– Second, former secretary of state and renowned scholar Dr. Henry Kissinger, now 91, spoke on Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies about his new book, “Global Order.” But he was soon drawn into the same theme – the irrelevant “small wars” that are bleeding us dry.
“Since World War II, we have fought five wars,” he said at one point. “This cannot be a continued pattern of American policy. This is an overwhelming concern.
“The upheaval in the world today is unprecedented … It depends strongly on moral strengths and courage. And contemporary leadership in most parts of the world are not meeting the challenge.”
These are quite simply amazing statements. Generals have been extremely careful while fighting these wars to never criticize the civilian leadership. In fact, they would have had to resign had they done so. (A rule that should be immediately expunged.) But finally, after most of them have retired, we get the truth.
The American public has paid precious little attention to any of these wars, with the exception of Vietnam, but only after it was too late.
So, let us start attending to whom we send where and when – which reminds me of an old love song, but is a sad song sung in a minor key about a great country that can”t stop wasting itself.
Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
