Enough, once again, is enough. The raging hysteria of the opposition to President Trump’s decision to leave Syria comes not only from the AIPAC-bribed Congress, but from numerous retired generals and their former sycophants among retired lieutenant-colonels and colonels. All of this nonsense rhetoric, along with their pathetic war-fighting performance since the 9/11 attacks, shows why all the U.S. generals charged with defeating al-Qaeda (AQ) and the Islamic State (IS) ought to be required to have an “L” — for loser — tattooed across their foreheads.
AQ, IS, and other Islamist insurgent groups remain a threat because America’s generals are failures and moral cowards. They did not defeat the enemy, and they have led their men and women into combat in wars that they knew the president did not intend to win. Not a single one of these multi-starred cretins resigned to tell the American people about the lethal con game that was being played on them and the lives of their soldier-children. They preferred to remain silent; take their pay, housing, and other benefits; and patiently wait until they can retire and go directly to the cash-awash world of corporate directorships in the arms-making industry.
The American people have given these generals enormous amounts of tax money and great numbers of talented young people for their use in annihilating the republic’s enemies. That, after all, is the only goal of any war; if it is not, no war should be fought. U.S. generals dabble with war and get what their efforts richly merit; namely, failure, defeat, and humiliation. Given thoroughbreds by the citizenry, the generals have used them as plow horses, driving them ever deeper into the bloody mire and leaving them stuck there for decades at a time, while they pursued the idiocy of “small foot-print strategies” and swore undying allegiance to the moronic idea that wars can be won with special forces and air power, rather than main force.
The generals’ non-leadership and callous attitude toward their troops has produced precisely the disaster that General Douglas MacArthur saw coming during the Korean War, especially the doctrine of “limited warfare” that was being applied in that conflict. “[T]here are only three ways [to wage war],” MacArthur told a congressional committee,
“Either pursue it to victory; to surrender to the enemy and end it on his terms; or what I think is the worst of all choices – to go on indefinitely and indefinitely, neither win or lose, in that stalemate; because what we are doing is sacrificing thousands of men while we are doing it.” [1]
MacArthur somehow saw the exact nature of post-Korean War, American war-making, but he probably would not have believed that his successors as senior U.S. general officers invariably would follow what he called the “worst of all choices”. In so doing, America’s postwar general officers have not won a single war, and, in the case of Afghanistan, they have, in reality, been defeated by a vastly inferior enemy and have allowed thousands of U.S. troops to die or be maimed during two decades of ass-backward war-making that have allowed the ever-patient Islamists fighters to prevail.
In addition, these brain-dead generals – with the approval of presidents and Congresses that share their risk aversion and unconcern for U.S. interests – have been delighted to delegate the responsibility of defeating America’s enemies to third parties, including Kurds, Afghans, Pakistanis, and any other Third Worlder who comes along with an AK-47 in one hand; his other hand poised to dip into Uncle Sam’s pocket; and an ability to say “I want democracy” in broken English. The generals and politicians always label these mercenaries as “allies” and lavish them with arms and taxpayer cash, even though they share almost no common ground with the United States; are fighting –as they should — for their own and their country, clan, or tribal interests, not ours; and will turn and kill U.S. military personnel as the whim moves them.
If there is a potent enemy of the republic’s survival active in the field, presidents, Congresses, and generals must man-up and act as adults who are willing to do America’s dirty work and utterly destroy that enemy root and branch. They must never be allowed to delegate that job to a motley array of usually anti-U.S. foreigners who have never, in the last half-century, succeeded in doing the job for which they were paid.
The time has come for a decisive thinning of a general-officer corps that is the antithesis of praiseworthy, even in the simplest of things. Polybius, the great historian who authored the Rise of the Roman Empire, wrote that “it is the duty of the commander to know when he is beaten, no less than when he is victorious.” [1] Even this task is beyond our generals, who can only speak of “a light at the end of the tunnel”, or that there is “no military solution to this war”, or that “more troops and money are the road to victory”, or “this is a multi-generational war, so be patient”. Such phrases are meant only to obfuscate their continual failure: their studying-in-the-Ivy-League-produced effeminacy: and their resolute willingness to trade the lives and limbs of our soldier-children for a defeat they recognize but will not speak of. In the 17th and 18th centuries the rank-and-file of European and American armies were often assessed to be “the scum of the earth.” Currently, when contrasting American generals and their troops, that five-word assessment remains correct, but now applies to most of the general-officer corps.
The best way to understand what war requires is to recall what you saw and experienced in the schoolyard as a kid. That environment taught all who paid attention that when you are attacked you must respond in a way that spoke of fearlessness and reciprocal ill-intent. The schoolyard taught that only an immediate, fierce response both ended a confrontation and its potential for continuation.
War is the same in principle, but is much more deadly. War requires a readiness to wipe out the attacker and his war-making assets and supporters. But, just as in the schoolyard, if you are attacked and respond in a milquetoast manner – as did the U.S. government and its military in Afghanistan – the enemy, especially if he is weaker than the entity he attacked, will conclude that you are not serious and can be beaten.
In a book of rare incisiveness, Honor. A History, James Bowman makes the foregoing point about war brilliantly.
[T]he international order throughout human history has been founded on the playground hierarchy writ large. Dominant nations and their leaders are expected to give demonstrations of their dominance so as to avoid the necessity of having to establish it by fighting. When such demonstrations are ambiguous or unconvincing, fighting and all that it implies of heartbreak and misery ensues. It may not be a very good system of maintaining international order, but it is the only one we have got. And, I think interestingly, the only won we have ever had. (3)
Obviously, U.S. general officers have no conception of what Mr. Bowman is talking about in the foregoing comment. Americans are certainly lucky, however, that General Mattis and the Pentagon grumbled publicly and dragged their feet when President Trump asked them to help close the southern border. Their public slow-rolling of the President during a clear national emergency allowed the citizenry to learn that neither the lives of U.S. citizens nor those of U.S. troops matter much to the republic’s current crop of general officers.
–Endnotes:
–1.) Polybius. The Rise of the Roman Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 108.
–2.) General MacArthur is quoted in James Bowman. Honor. A History. New York: Encounter Books, 2006, p. 196
–3.) Ibid., p. 321
