Why President Obama Can't Let Himself Be Blackmailed by His Generals

By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet. Posted September 23, 2009.

Afghanistan policy has been under review by the Obama administration, and a classified recommendation written by Gen. Stanley McChrystal apparently was submitted to President Barack Obama on Aug. 3 recommending increasing troops in Afghanistan.

Two days ago, the report was leaked to the press.

This leak could not have been inadvertent, as the leaked copy had been heavily redacted, with classified materials deleted. It is hard to see this as anything but an attempt to box in Obama and put pressure on him to agree to more troops, whether any good strategy supports investing more troops, or not.

But before anyone, let alone Obama, starts bending to military pressure, let's ask how much deference U.S. generals deserve.

We all respect the commitment and sacrifice of American soldiers -- they are doing difficult and dangerous work few of us would want to do, and they do it under terrible conditions, tremendous pressure and great threat to life -- but should the military establishment and its misadventures be beyond criticism?

Georges Clemenceau, former French prime minister and the French war minister who negotiated the Versailles Treaty to end World War I, once said, "War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military."

He had watched Allied generals misperceive and misunderstand strategy and become bogged down in deadly trenches for four years, killing millions in the process. Do our generals deserve any more respect? Is their advice any better?

For most of the past 60 years, the American military mostly has been unprepared for the conflicts America has gotten into, starting with Korea.

Fifteen years after Korea, the military was planning to fight a land war with the Soviet Union, but not a jungle war in Vietnam; it lacked the training and equipment for jungle combat, and it had no clue either how to fight an insurgency or how to contest the political aspects of the war, which ultimately led to American defeat.

Thirty years later, after not anticipating 9/11, the military still was equipped mainly to fight a massive land war in Europe, not an insurgency, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, and again has failed to comprehend the political dimensions of those wars.

We have spent, and continue to spend, a gigantic (and unsustainable) portion of the nation's treasure on defense -- in the process crowding out important social services -- but has the national security state and overreliance on the military provided security?

It has built hugely expensive weapons systems that have little or no relevance to current threats, yet it failed to anticipate and avert 9/11; it has failed to bring to justice its chief architects; it has failed to devise an effective response to Islamic extremism; it has failed to provide security in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the expenditure of $3 trillion (when downstream costs are considered); and, it has abandoned America's reputation for being a just nation that adheres to law and ideals.

If this were a business, would anyone invest in it?

The competence level of the American military is not something to be emulated; it is closer to the level of General Motors and Wall Street. Gen. David Petraeus and McChrystal are no more worthy of admiration than the progression of incompetent CEOs who drove GM into the ground and the crooks who pilfered the public with exotic financial instruments for their short-term profit.

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Guy T. Saperstein is a past president of the Sierra Club Foundation; previously, he was one of the National Law Journal’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers in America."

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