"No Credit" Cohen And Dubya's Disconnect

This morning’s pundit convolutions come to us courtesy of Roger Cohen of the New York Times, in a column that initially starts off as a profile of Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli…

The dread (that Chiarelli felt about his return to this country from Baghdad) related to the loss of 160 men and women from his division. A sign outside his headquarters read: “Complacency kills — don’t become a statistic.” Chiarelli knew he’d carry the cruel statistics back to Fort Hood, Tex., and face the bereaved.

“The hardest thing is going home and facing those parents and wives and loved ones,” he said, looking me in the eye with tears in his. Chiarelli, now the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is a thoughtful, decent officer who has absorbed his share of the military’s post-9/11 hurt.

All well and good so far, but…

“Much of our government and interagency seem to be in a state of denial about the requirements needed to adapt to modern warfare,” Chiarelli says, adding that even today some believe “that all we have to do to win our modern wars is kill and capture enough of the enemy.”

Nonsense, Chiarelli argues in a piece written with Maj. Stephen Smith (for Military Review). Shadowy modern wars are less about overwhelming force than mastering instantaneous communication to win hearts and minds, adapting rapidly, flattening ponderous military hierarchies, understanding nation-building, and bringing to bear U.S. abilities in fields as diverse as engineering and agronomy.

“If we are unable to do a better job than our enemies of influencing the world’s perception, then even the most brilliant campaign plan will be unlikely to succeed,” he writes. Unreadiness for the real-time reactions of an interconnected globe has often allowed a video-camera-wielding enemy “to run circles around us, especially in the information environment.”

I mean no disrespect to Lt. Gen. Chiarelli and Maj. Smith when I say this, but I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to read columns like this and come away with the impression that our military somehow didn’t know or suspect what was involved in fighting terrorism until we got involved in this war (and whose fault is it that we “broke” Iraq and failed to provide even the basics in services for the people of that country, thus feeding into terrorism and setting us back in the “information war”?).

Yes, it’s important to continually relearn the lessons Chiarelli and Smith mention because it is necessary due to the lack of civilian leadership in particular in this horrific mess (including their marginalizing and ridicule of individuals in our services who knew what would happen – Don “The Defense Secretary You Ha(d)” Rumsfeld, come on down!). But get a load of where Cohen goes with the following quote from Chiarelli…

“The U.S. as a nation — and indeed most of the U.S. government — has not gone to war since 9/11,” he observes. While the military is fighting, “the American people and most of the other institutions of national power have largely gone about their business.”

Rarely, if ever, has daily death in combat been accompanied on such a scale by the maxing out of credit cards at the mall. President Bush likes to call himself a “war president.” More accurately he has been the war-and-shop, conflict-and-home-equity-credit president.

You know, the time has long since passed for Cohen or anyone else (including your humble narrator) to try and be cute about describing the colossal mis(non?)management in Iraq from the individual residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the point where he expects Gen. David Petraeus to assume responsibility for his disaster, serving a similar role as Colin Powell did prior to the firing of the first shot on or about March 19, 2003 (the Times noted this very well yesterday).

And if you want to give yourself a headache, try figuring out this construction in the very next paragraph…

Now those two worlds, eerily remote from each other, have come together in simultaneous Iraq and credit crises. While Bush considers lowering troop levels, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke considers lowering interest rates. The overseas and home fronts, the dropping and the shopping, are not unrelated after all.

For the purposes of this supposed argument, I can’t see the connection.

However, that tells you that Dubya isn’t even the real target in this screed, Cohen’s scolding love tap of a remark notwithstanding.

“Our current problems raise the legitimate question of whether the U.S., or any democracy, can successfully prosecute an extended war without a true national commitment,” (Chiarelli) writes.

With all dues respect again to Chiarelli, I understand his concern about the entire country “being on the same page.” However, no war ever prosecuted by this country has been waged through tax cuts (remember Bradley Whitford here?). And a direct military sacrifice had been endured by a family member of someone in civilian leadership during wartime until now (Lyndon Johnson sent his two sons-in-law off to Vietnam along with everyone else).

Unless you believe the United States can simply withdraw from the world, a popular but naïve view, that essential strategic question needs addressing beyond the Iraq tactics before Congress this week.

Is that some kind of a slap at Democrats like Joe Biden and the rest of us who want to see, at long, loooong last, the beginning of a phased redeployment of our people out of Iraq? If it is, Cohen should say so, and thus merit further scorn (I have issues with Biden, and we’ll see if his bite matches his bark, but he was dead-on here).

An answer is the minimum the now overstretched shopping nation owes the long overstretched fighting nation it seldom notices.

Oh, you bad Americans you! How can you even imagine shopping for anything while our troops fight, suffer, struggle, and die?

Boy, am I sick of reading that garbage! Again, it would be nice to see an acknowledgement of reality and the will of the vast majority of this country from our “pay no price, bear no burden” administration.

And this leads to the inevitable question, “can the ‘d’ word be far behind?”

If anyone thinks I, for one, will EVER choose to do nothing while a senator, congressperson or anyone else decides that they’re going to try and reinstitute the draft as a punishment to our young men and women because of Bushco’s bungling in Iraq, they are very much mistaken. This is partly because our cabal of crooks in the executive branch has made it abundantly clear that the only thing they know about the military is how to slowly destroy it.

Update: I have a bad feeling about all of this (as Darcy Burner so correctly stated, we need more and better Democrats).