This entry was posted on 8/24/2007 7:13 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
Like an old boyfriend who has endearing ways even though I wanted to kill him when we were together, I have a love-hate relationship with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
When he first took the position of Chairman, I was elated. He was a combat grunt, one who knew what it meant to hump it on the battlefield and send buddies, or at least boys for whom he was responsible, home in body bags. He hadn't spent his entire military career onboard a giant ship at sea, or behind the joystick of a fighter jet, eight miles high above the war zone. (If you're too young to remember the old song by the Byrds, don't bother to try to understand that last comment.)
Even better, he was a Marine, which made my son happy.
But it didn't take very long for the love affair to sour. Whereas I had been certain that, at least with Pace, we had a man who would fight for the troops and have the guts to bitch-slap Donald Rumsfeld and the high horse he rode in on whenever necessary to ensure their safety, Pace quickly proved that he considered his primary responsibility to be, not to the soldiers and Marines he represented, but to the Bush administration, as he signed on to one outrage after another.
Not to mention coming out with a few notable bloopers of his own.
I understand what "chain of command" means, and I understand, too, what it means to fight the system from within while appearing to toe the line from without. I also understand what happens to soldiers and Marines who do NOT puppet the Bush line.
And maybe that's why I was quicker to forgive my spurned lover when he blew my socks off today by coming out with a statement that, according to the L.A. Times, said flat-out, that if the administration did not cut the American military presence IN HALF in Iraq over the course of the next year, the U.S. Army would be broken almost beyond repair.
I understand, as well, that Pace knows he no longer has to worry about his job.
I can be cynical, and hate him for that, or I can be damn glad that he said anything AT ALL, considering the flashpoint that flares into flame whenever anybody says anything these days that deviates from the company line that the so-called "Petraeus Report" will trumpet come September--and that is that we not only need to sustain this so-called surge, but keep it going at least until...oh...hmmmm...maybe...January of 2009???
In order to fully understand the meaning of this, it is important to realize the difference between Gen. Petraeus's job and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs' job.
It is Petraeus's job to implement the mission that has been ordered to him by his commander-in-chief. How he does it is pretty much up to him, but doing what he is commanded is his number-one priority. And his orders were to bring "stability" to Baghdad so that the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could pass three crucial "benchmarks" required of them in order for US to continue to keep their asses in office by the blood of our men and women.
The fact that Petraeus has had "mixed" results--which is not apparent from the massive media propaganda machine that the White House and the Pentagon has been pumping out trumpeting the "success of the surge"--the fact that he may or may not have restored order, but the GOVERNMENT has not done ITS job is irrelevent to Petraeus.
It's not his job to make the Iraqi Parliament stay in office in the month of August and get stuff done. It's not his job to make al-Maliki reach out to the Sunnis and so on and so on.
It's his job to do what The Boss has directed him to do.
Now, The Boss wants these big "successes" to last well into the presidential election cycle of 2008, because he knows that a massive failure in Iraq will all but hand the White House to the Democrats. He has no problem killing more boys and girls in uniform in Iraq if it means that his precious legacy might be preserved and/or that a successor will come in and continue his policies.
This is all that matters to him. It is all that EVER mattered to him. It is the reason he started this war in the first place.
Mission accomplished.
Petraeus has no small amount of ego tangled up in "success" as well, since Bush has mentioned his name no less than 150 times in the past couple of months, thus ensuring that, if we DO fail, why, it would be PETRAEUS's fault--NOT Bush's.
Just so we're clear on that.
Petraeus wrote the book this strategy is based on. He's got to prove a lot. So it behooves him to demand more and more troops to fulfill what he KNOWS is a growing requirement for this whole stack of plates not to fall down.
Years ago, on the Ed Sullivan Show, one of their most popular acts was to invite a guy on who would spin plates. He'd set up dozens of poles. At the top of each pole would be a regular dinner plate. He would spin the plate and the centrifugal force would keep the plate in the air. The excitement came when he had so many plates in the air at one time that if he didn't make it over to a plate that was slowing down, it would crash to the floor, so he'd have to dash around from plate to plate and keep it spinning, even as he added more plates.
Petraeus got the plates spinning in Baghdad, and then he had to rush off to the Diyala province to set that plate spinning, because insurgents fled Baghdad and started blowing up Baquba, but then he had to dash off to Basra to spin more plates, then off to Ramadi, and then off to Kirkuk--and now, he's got plates spinning madly all over Iraq and he can't keep them spinning without more troops to guard each plate.
But he has been ordered to stabilize Iraq, with about ten times few troops than it would actually take to do, and as he frantically spins, he goes to Congress and, on behalf of the White House, desperately explains that he CAN'T stop spinning, or the plates will ALL crash to the ground!!!
Peter Pace's job is different.
It is the job of the Joint Chiefs to look, not at just the old circus act of spinning plates--but at the entire United States military.
And what they see is alarming.
Men and women who have been sent back on stage over and over and over again to keep those plates spinning, month after month, year after year, are exhausted to the point of collapse.
A staggering article which appeared--of course--not in an American paper, but in the UK Observer, noted:
A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's International Airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust...
"The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in-theater who are exhausted," says a soldier working for the U.S. army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began...
"...We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here...Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that the army is exhausted?"...
...the U.S. army is about broken. Only a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years...The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 percent of the U.S. army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212 billion...
--"Fatigue Cripples U.S. Army in Iraq," by Peter Beaumont, The Observer UK, August 12, 2007
We have absolutely NO ready reserves at hand, should a sudden international crises require it for the security and protection of the United States. They are all engaged in Iraq because of this troop escalation.
Training time is being compressed in order to meet the demands of this escalation, sending raw recruits off to combat barely out of basic training.
Deployments have already been stretched from one year to fifteen months, and to maintain the current levels at the point Petraeus wants, the Pentagon would have no choice but to extend those same deployments all the way to EIGHTEEN MONTHS to TWO YEARS.
The psychic toll is excruciating. Suicides are at an all-time high in the Army, particularly of those deployed or soon to be deployed or just returned from multiple deployments. Alcoholism, drunk driving, domestic violence, child abuse, and desertion rates are sky-rocketing, along with divorce.
And if that weren't enough, if we maintain this war at current levels for the amount of time Petraeus and the White House are talking about--ten years or more--it will cost AT LEAST ONE TRILLION DOLLARS to the American taxpayers.
But mainly, Peter Pace and his buddies in the Joint Chiefs are having to look at the cost-right now--to the U.S. military in terms of combat readiness in sustaining Petraeus's plan and Bush's War at current levels.
It can't be done.
It. Can. Not. Be. Done.
If it is forced, the results to the American fighting machine would be catastrophic.
These are the conclusions that have been drawn by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They may be politicians, but in the long run, they are soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen.
They may respect what Gen. Petraeus is trying to do, may even support it, but when push comes to shove, ideologies, theories, and grand plans have GOT to take a back seat to stark reality.
Had Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney and all their little demons from hell who planned this Great Debacle listened to the military men in the FIRST PLACE, we would not be in this position now.
Petraeus is making some spotty progress. I do not for one moment detract from that. My son and nephew fought bravely to help bring this about, and I have a nephew there now who was a specific part of this whole "surge" plan and was deployed for that purpose. He, too, has fought to the point of breakdown to help make this a success.
But Bush chose to wait FOUR YEARS to listen to ANY generals, and now, it is too late. The American fighting men and women have been dashing around on that stage spinning plates for so long now that it won't have to be the plates that come crashing to the ground.
If somebody, somewhere, does not bring this circus act to an end, it will be the military itself that crashes and breaks into a thousand little pieces.
