Generals speak out on Iraq in North Carolina

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/9802

Generals speak out on Iraq in North Carolina
by Travis Sharp | Sep 8 2007




I was in North Carolina this week with Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, Senior Military Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, and Brig. Gen. John Johns (some of his writing is here), a Council for a Livable World board member. The Generals were speaking out to local media, non-profit organizations, and college students about current and future security challenges facing the United States, especially the war in Iraq.

I served as aide-de-camp, which means I was basically in charge of getting us lost everywhere we went. Mission accomplished!

Our trip was part of the Center's ongoing Outreach Program, which aims to reach out to communities throughout the country and raise awareness on defense issues. So far we have been to Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and North Carolina, and we are headed later this year to Florida, New Mexico, San Diego, and Virginia.

While the thrust of our Outreach Program isn't explicitly political, it should be obvious from the list of destinations that some of the communities we travel to are in swing states. While in North Carolina, former Maine Rep. Tom Andrews of Win Without War (you know, the one who cleaned Richard Perle's clock on Meet the Press in March) set up a meeting with the Daily Reflector, the hometown newspaper of Representative Walter Jones (R-NC). Scott Batchelor at the Reflector wrote about our meeting yesterday. Here's the bulk of Batchelor's report:

Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns decried President George W. Bush's committing the nation's military in Iraq, saying the president was fulfilling a deep-seated impulse to use American military might to spread democracy.

Now, the situation there is untenable, which mirrors the Vietnam experience, Johns said. He said he warned policy makers and generals in the early 1960s: "Do not get United States combat forces involved in counterinsurgency ...." Ratcheting up the number of troops on the ground is futile, he said.

The "surge thing, in my view, is far too little too late," said Johns, who served as a combat arms officer in the Army for more than 26 years, retiring in 1978. He served four years as a deputy assistant secretary of defense before becoming a professor of political science at the National Defense University.

"I'm sorry," he said of the current strategy in Iraq, "but all this is doing is buying time."

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