31 August 2007
| Challenging the Generals Why didn’t Colin Powell follow the conscience-led model of Dwight Eisenhower when the Bush Administration entered the Iraq war with less than the needed resources? But, of course, he was only Secretary of State, and not directly responsible for the military effort. Nevertheless, he clearly realized that even if the invasion of Iraq was a correct policy decision (for which he did have some direct responsibility), that the method to be pursued was inadequate. Some model for the generals that Lt. Col. Yingling decried in the journal article described by Paul Kaplan in the NYT Magazine of August 26, 2007! In imitation of Condoleeza Rice, George Tenet, Alberto Gonzales, Paul Bremer, Scooter Libby, and other Bush-Cheney-Rove sycophants, the top military have been inspired by General Powell’s example to not challenge their civilian leadership by refusing to undertake the impossible. You can’t rescue a misguided warfare policy, adopted for political survival, with a high technology show campaign. Moreover, that campaign has awful personal consequences for the enlisted military personnel who sacrifice their welfare and lives to fight it, and for the civilians whose community it destroys. |
| Pleasing the Principal In a perceptive analysis of the origin and operation of the CIA’s Black Sites (The New Yorker, August 13, 2007), Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA operative, concludes that the real reason for its establishment of extralegal detention and interrogation locations was the impulse of its director to please his boss. That was the mindset of George Tenet, who came out of the culture of Capital Hill, where he was a staffer for a senior Senator on the Intelligence Committee. His attitude towards security information was to find pieces that served the political agendas of Congressional Committee members and, ultimately, Presidents. It wasn’t to obtain information as close to the truth as possible, for the use of his principals; Drumheller apparently believes that political agendas do not commonly have much use for truth. Of course, Tenet had originally been drafted for the CIA job by a Democratic President who was in need of compliant agency heads who could sail through Congressional confirmation hearings. He was exactly the kind of intelligence chief that suited the succeeding President and Vice President who were more interested in tweaking the institutions of government for sustaining political power than in finding solutions to underlying problems. |
