The Generals Speak - 7 retired military leaders discuss what has gone

[hangloose]

Found in the Rollingstone Mag.

By PAUL ALEXANDER

The nineteen months since the war in Iraq began, some of the most outspoken critics of President Bush's plan of attack have come from a group that should have been the most supportive: retired senior military leaders. We spoke with a group of generals and admirals that included a former supreme Allied commander and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and they all agreed on one thing: Bush screwed up.

Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak
Air Force chief of staff, 1990-94
We have a force in Iraq that's much too small to stabilize the situation. It's about half the size, or maybe even a third, of what we need. As a consequence, the insurgency seems to be gathering momentum. We are losing people at a fairly steady rate of about two a day; wounded, about four or five times that, and perhaps half of these wounds are very serious. And we are also sustaining gunshot wounds, when, before, we'd mostly been seeing massive trauma from remotely detonated charges. This means the other side is standing and fighting in a way that describes a more dangerous phase of the conflict.

The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil. I blame Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the people behind him -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The vice president himself should probably be included; certainly his wife. These so-called neocons: These people have no real experience in life. They are utopian thinkers, idealists, very smart, and they have the courage of their convictions, so it makes them doubly dangerous.

The parallels between Iraq and Vietnam have been overblown, because we were in Vietnam for a decade and it cost us 58,000 troops. We've been in Iraq for nineteen months and we're still under 1,200 killed. But there is one sense in which the parallel with Vietnam is valid. The American people were told that to win the Cold War we had to win Vietnam. But we now know that Vietnam was not only a diversion from winning the Cold War but probably delayed our winning it and made it cost more to win. Iraq is a diversion to the war on terror in exactly the same way Vietnam was a diversion to the Cold War.

Go to the article there's plenty more...........


(http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story)

[PROGRESSIVE1]

1. kick

[puddycat]

2. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

This is what its all about. Our foreign policy has been dictated by the military/industrial complex since the end of World War II. Its like the scene at the end of Animal Farm, the huge businesses and our government ceasing to be indistinguishable.


Our troops should be here, at home, to help us in disaster, and to defend our soil if necessary. There is no reason to send our troops all over the world, except for the unending greed and power-lust of the fascists in power. And to ensure this power is perpetuated in their hands, they have created cultural myths that keep us blind. And so it goes. Until we break out of these cultural myths we are bound to repeat the same errors.

Does anyone remember the myth of Sisyphus? He toiled endlessly, pushing a rock up a mountain, but the rock would roll back to the bottom and he would start again. This is what we are making our troops do--toiling with their life towards goals that mean absolutely nothing. I think we should stop the myth and take a hammer and break the fucking rock up into pieces, so Sisyphus doesn't have to push it anymore.

Oh man, I'm done for tonight. Two literary allusions in one post is too much even for me! LOL

[hangloose]

3. If I were so Inspired.............