Reserve your excuses now, it's CYA time

Our road into the Iraq War was paved with bad Second World War analogies. Our road out looks like it will be paved with bad Vietnam War analogies.

There are a lot of people looking for excuses. Including the military brass. William Arkin in Threads that lead to a Turkey Washington Post 11/22/06 puts it this way:

While Baker's Iraq Study Group eyes grand options to craft an eventual American withdrawal from Iraq, the Joint Chiefs of Staff is pushing its own passive aggressive strategy. Tom Ricks reported this week that the "options" were "Go Big," "Go Home" and "Go Long." A friend who watches the Pentagon closely calls it the "Goldilocks" approach: We can't go big, can't go home, so voila, we have to do exactly what we are doing!

"Our troops' posture needs to stay where it is as we move to enhance the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces," theater commander Gen. John Abizaid told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. Just right.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine Gen. Peter Pace - perfect Peter as they call him - doesn't have a different idea about what to do. What is at play here in all of the "studying" is not some post-Rumsfeld release to finally produce the hidden silver bullet or come up with some good ideas heretofore suppressed. No instead, this is the military looking out for their own interests at the corporate level: We, they say, are not going to be blamed for the failure. We stand with the mission, with American honor and the President and we just need more time. When the political forces and the American people command us to leave, we will be positioned to say 'if they had only given us more time, we could have won.' Get ready for the Vietnam argument all over: We won every battle; it was just the American people - and the media! - that failed us.

The Goldilocks gambit is all the more reason to reiterate that the military needs strong civilian control. Sure Rumsfeld was autocratic and tone deaf, but what I detect in a more felicitous Pentagon these days is a circling of the wagons by a bunch of competing institutions to protect their equities and reputations. The most stark observation here is that the military - at least at the Pentagon level where the desk jockeys and the perfumed princes reside - doesn't seem to be motivated by the mission itself; no one is arguing that America should spare no resource, make any sacrifice to defeat the enemy. Sure the military wants to win, but as it senses that it can't or won't achieve victory, it is looking out for itself. Each of the services is already looking beyond Iraq to likely missions, budgets, and power struggles. (my emphasis)

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