McCain as Military Imbecile

[babylonsister]

http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2008/01/mccain-as-milit.html

McCain as Military Imbecile (Or At Least That's How the True Military Giants Would Have Seen It)
P.M. Carpenter


Bipartisanship in these contentious primary days has come to mean only that Republicans can indeed cut each other up as expertly as Democrats. It's a fascinating spectacle of political sociology: the once-orderly party of heirs apparent devolving -- or evolving, depending on one's view -- into a kind of bloody, Klingon-style right of ascension.

snip//

It so happened that when I read that I had just put down a marvelous new work on military history: Mark Perry's Partners in Command, an investigation into the working relationship between Generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the meticulously driven subtext of Perry's work is that both of these incisive military minds and, later, shapers of America's foreign policy, would have been appalled -- absolutely aghast -- at the United States' entry into Iraq.

Both would have left aside the question of apologies, because both, quite simply, would have found the intervention utterly inexcusable -- a betrayal of America's political culture, societal way of thinking, and even common sense.

Marshall and Eisenhower thought alike because in the 1920s they had both studied at the feet of a certain General Fox Conner, a military genius of unusual sociopolitical insight as well. And what Conner taught them -- what he hammered away at with singular emphasis -- was that, as Perry succinctly worded it, we were "Never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and never fight for long." (It was these lessons that Eisenhower had in mind, as president, when he pulled our sorry butts out of Korea's human meat-grinder.)

And Perry himself hammered the point, clearly with a certain contemporaneity in mind: "Conner's simple axioms were based on what he knew about the American people and what he believed about democracies. He knew that Americans didn't like war and that, in truth, they weren't very good at it. The solution for this was for America never to agree to fight unless there was no other choice ... and then to do so quickly, before people got tired of spilling their children's blood."

John McCain -- as that rare political creature, a Republican pol who actually served -- now presents himself as a thoughtful student of military history as well, and therefore as exceptionally qualified to be commander in chief. But Mr. McCain, in rooting for this idiotic war at the start and now advocating an interminable presence, understands nothing of what the true giants of yesteryear understood.

It is John McCain who owes an apology to "the young men and women serving this nation in uniform," for having helped, that is, to spearhead their voiceless entanglement in a lonely and endless war of choice -- one that would have appalled those far deeper thinkers of how and when military means should be used, and how they should not.

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[indepat]

1. The litany of military and fiscal imbeciles shaping this administration's

destructive initiatives is indeed mind-boggling, mind-numbing and incomprehensible. :9

[dominicoyandor]

2. Expect this kind of analysis to appear only in blogs

Not in the mainstream corporate media.

[marlonjose]

3. Unfortunately, Americans often elect imbeciles n/t