The Pesky Question of Just Who Decides What

It was that day: 

 

The nation’s largest fireworks display exploded in a spectrum of color over the East River, temporarily stealing the spotlight from New York’s world-famous skyline and helping to create a brilliant end to a day of July Fourth celebrations nationwide.

 

The rest of this Associated Press item is an account of what happened across the nation, with the usual collection of wonderful AP photographs. Out here fireworks are severely limited – no one can remember when it last rained and Southern California is a tinderbox. Big Sur is burning, as is much of the north of the state, so out here we all know Los Angeles is next. Our governor, that former movie star of quite limited talent, Arnold Schwarzenegger, spent the week before the Fourth telling everyone to just not do any home fireworks – too damned dangerous. The key word this Fourth of July – “limited” – unfortunately. But the day wasn’t bad at the beach.

 

And there was good news, regarding that old gift from the French – the big statue designed by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi with its interior structure by Gustave Eiffel, the fellow who built the famous tower in Paris. You know – the Statue of Liberty. We may hate the French now, but it was a nice gesture. And they did help out with our Revolution – Lafayette and all – even if theirs, a few years later, got a bit out of hand, what with that Robespierre fellow and his buddies. The statue in the harbor across from Manhattan was a centennial gift – but 1876 didn’t work out and it opened 1886, a few years late. And now it may get back to normal:

 

The National Park Service is considering reopening Lady Liberty’s crown for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to documents a congressman released on July Fourth.

 

The park service requested bids last month to study what it would take to safely open the Statue of Liberty’s iconic headpiece to the public…

 

So the terrorists didn’t win, really. Liberty Island was closed after the terrorist attacks, but reopened in August 2004, new and improved. And soon you may once again be able to get up to the crown and its interior observation deck – high over the harbor with a great view of the city. But don’t make any plans – there are safety issues. It seems the narrow spiral staircase that leads up to the crown doesn’t comply with fire and building codes. They’re working on that, but it’s tricky, and the House has appropriated funds but the Senate hasn’t. And this:

 

The Park Service said the staircase to the observation deck was installed for maintenance workers, not for sightseers. When it was open, rangers responded to emergencies almost daily, especially in summer heat.

 

Sightseers suffered heat exhaustion, shortness of breath, panic attacks, claustrophobia and fear of heights, the service said.

 

Heck – that’s a reaction may of us have to our own government these days. The last eight years of the Bush administration have been quite a ride – claustrophobic in what we are allowed to do and say, and not do or say, and, as planned, full of decisions and directives intended to induce mild but constant low-level panic. Climbing those spiral stairs for the view of the harbor is no big deal now. It’s just more of the same.

 

But that will change next January, or not. It will be Obama or McCain running things – and the issue is whether the military man, the former fighter pilot and war hero, should be in charge. That worries some people – more war and being afraid at some level, all the time. That’s seems to be how he sees the world. He sees conflict and turmoil everywhere, and we must stand tall and respond – and win. It’s the soldier in him.

 

As discussed previously, former four-star general Wesley Clark suggested that there is no necessary connection between heroic war service and effective high-level policy making and executive ability. The two just aren’t related, or so he argued. That didn’t go over well – people thought he was mocking McCain’s rather amazing service to the country. But that wasn’t the point. It was a matter of who makes decisions on what basis, and a military approach has its limitations.

 

In a comment to the previous discussion, Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, explained:

 

Wesley Clark was right, of course, but to my thinking, probably understated the problem, that the more military experience a man has, the less suited he likely is for the position of commander-in-chief, which (we tend to forget) is not a military job at all, it’s a civilian one. After all, at least in this country and unlike some others, there’s a long-honored principle that the military falls under civilian authority. But as much as our veterans tend to honor and respect this principle in principle, it’s still hard for some of them to completely wrap their minds around it.

 

It’s counterintuitive, but true! Soldiers and sailors and marines all go through rigorous training, tantamount to “programming,” to toughen up their will for the demands of the battlefield — being ready to faithfully follow orders that will place oneself “in harm’s way,” ready to kill and maybe to die, no questions asked.

 

And too often, because of this experience, military men running for elective office in this country find it difficult, if not impossible, to steer their brains onto the civilian track.

 

This is why I wasn’t crazy about Wesley Clark himself, putting all his command experience aside, as a candidate for president. Probably because all that experience of running things took place in the context of a military “command structure,” Clark never looked comfortable in a coat and tie — speaking about the economy, for example.

 

And as much as I thought John Kerry might make a good president (especially after hearing him, virtually alone, have the courage soon after 9/11 to criticize the Bush administration for letting Osama bin Laden get away), I still thought Democrats were choosing him for the wrong reason — the assumption that his military record would, by contrast, make President Bush’s look like that of a draft dodger. That obviously went nowhere.

 

But something we all seemed not to realize at the time is that Kerry’s military history would actually be held in disdain by many of his fellow veterans. After all, a soldier who complains about the war he is sent to fight will often be seen as a weakling by those who served their country faithfully, no questions asked. Kerry’s record, in fact, was not a campaign advantage, it was a campaign liability, because he made the fatal error of being a military guy who jumped the fence and joined the civilian realm. You’re not allowed to do that.

 

But having a military viewpoint should also help us understand John McCain’s automatically falling back on Islamo-fascism when asked by Fortune Magazine what he thinks will be the next major threat to the American economy. As he himself admits, he doesn’t know much about the economy, since much of his career had been spent, after all, preoccupied with more important matters.

 

And it may also help explain his prickliness when he’s faced with questions about Clark’s comment. He comes, after all, from a world of “no questions asked.”

 

Not wanting to be a swiftboater here, but it seems to me there are more than enough questions not being asked about his military record, a record that McCain hints speaks to his character — and also something he is willing to run on — but only as long as not too many questions are asked about all those crashed planes, for example. But the truth is, just as Clark says, I think McCain’s military past is not very relevant to the job he’s applying for anyway.

 

I’m pretty sure the Democrats have learned the lesson — that trying to leverage anything military to advantage in an election year may just backfire — and maybe the Republicans will learn that lesson this year, too. I certainly hope so.

 

Those are good points, and to complement them, Joe Conason on July 4, in Salon, offered What John McCain Didn’t Learn in Vietnam – with the subhead, “In spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the former POW insists we could have won. No wonder he talks of occupying Iraq for a century.”

 

He thinks like a military man:

 

The most pertinent issue is not what McCain did or didn’t do during the war in Vietnam, but what he learned from that searing, incredibly bloody and wholly unnecessary failure of U.S. policy. Clearly he learned that torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive, and he has spoken with great moral authority on that issue. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake - and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.

 

Indeed, what is most striking about McCain’s attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won - that we should have won - with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. “Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable,” he said. “I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed.” Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. “We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal.”

 

But very few military historians agree with McCain’s view – a ground invasion and more and more destructive bombing would have won the thing. Conason suggests it’s personal:

 

But perhaps because he is obsessed by the humiliation of defeat - which fell directly on his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., who served as the commander in chief of Pacific forces during the Vietnam conflict - the former prisoner of war seemingly can formulate neither a rational assessment of that war’s enormous costs nor of its flawed premises and purposes.

 

But Conason says to look at the statistics:

 

More than 58,000 Americans were killed in action between 1965 and 1973. More than a million and a half Vietnamese died during that same period, including hundreds of thousands killed by American bombs like those dropped by McCain during the mission that led to his capture, imprisonment and torture. Prosecution of the war diminished American prestige, as did our eventual defeat - and the price paid by our armed forces and the returning veterans is still painful to recall. The economic cost of the war, calculated in current dollars, may have been as high as $1.7 trillion.

 

But McCain say it was a “noble cause.” It may not have been:

 

Presumably he believes that we were seeking to preserve the freedom of the South Vietnamese from North Vietnamese communist oppression. But the politics of Vietnam and the geopolitics of the war were at once more complicated and simpler. Complicated because South Vietnam was a corrupt dictatorship that had forfeited the loyalty of most of its citizens, who regarded the United States not as a liberator but as the latest invader in a long procession that dated back centuries and included the French and the Chinese as well.

 

What vital American interests required so many deaths and so much suffering? There were none, but presumably, again, McCain thinks that we were forced to push back against communist expansion in Asia. That too was an awful misconception, based on cultural ignorance, since the Vietnamese accepted Russian and Chinese assistance only to expel the American occupation. Within the decade that followed the American defeat in Indochina, our diplomats were opening a new relationship with China while the Soviet Union, along with communism as an ideological threat, was on the verge of disintegration.

 

If the Vietnam War was premised on strategic misconceptions and cultural stupidity, it was also based on plain old lies, as the true history of the Tonkin Gulf incident has long since revealed. There was no reason for the United States to enter a colonial war that the French had abandoned. Ultimately there was no basis for American hostility toward Vietnam, as McCain wisely acknowledged when he led the effort to normalize our diplomatic and trade relations with the government that defeated us. Now that we live in peace and reconciliation with that same regime, what justifies the war that led to more than a million deaths?

 

But McCain says we should learn from this:

 

We should not send troops into foreign conflict unless there is a vital American interest at stake, and once we go to war, we must deploy sufficient force to win. It is difficult to see how McCain has applied that logic to Iraq, which we invaded on a fraudulent excuse and where the definition of “winning” remains murky five years later.

 

But winning is all – that’s how he thinks. It’s a military thing.

 

Rick in Atlanta, in an email, reproduced here by permission, responds:

 

Conason hits the nail on the head.

 

Furthermore, McCain seems, at least, to be incapable of answering some of the big questions about our involvement in wars, simply because so many of us assume his answer will reflect his military background, and therefore we might even give him a free ride, discounting it and going on to some other subject. But we shouldn’t.

 

For example, instead of answering the question about Vietnam that hardly anyone is asking, “Could we have won the Vietnam war?”, McCain should try answering a more important question, and one more pertinent to his role as potential president: “Why should we have wanted to win that war?” Coming from a background where folks were discouraged from even asking such questions, he might not have given that one enough thought. “We should want to win wars that we have decided to fight,” he might even be tempted to say.

 

But was Vietnam one of the wars we should have chosen to fight? And is McCain even in a position to discuss this?

 

By the way, McCain could easily argue that it was the stated policy of the United States, through “containment”, to stop communism wherever it reared its ugly head, but that argument would be at odds with the thoughts of George Kennan, the guy who invented the original “Containment” policy in 1947, when he worked for the State Department under Harry Truman. I know this because I myself, with a tiny group of other students, chatted about this with him in the student union of Denison University back in February of 1966, a day or so after he testified in the Senate Vietnam hearings.

 

“I know many think the policy I formulated concerned the ‘containment of communism,’” he said, although I’m paraphrasing, “but it wasn’t. It was about [and this part is a direct quote] the ‘containment of Soviet expansionism.’”

 

And this, he said, was one of the reasons why he told the Senate committee he opposed the Vietnam War. What was happening in Vietnam, he said, was not a case of “Soviet expansionism,” since the Soviets were not trying to make Vietnam part of their empire, it was merely a case of civil war. Kennan also made it known that, in any event, his containment policy did not call for military intervention, but argued that the Soviets could be contained with diplomacy alone.

 

Don’t agree with him? Try this simple quiz, one you can safely do in the privacy of your own home: (a) About how many American soldiers were found to have died in the Vietnam War? (b) About how many soldiers from the Soviet Union were found to have died in the Vietnam War? ANSWERS: (You can turn these answers upside down, but if you do, they’ll be much harder to read): (a) Approximately 58,000. (b) Approximately none.

 

As I imply in my comment, we sometimes need to be reminded that the commander-in-chief is not the top job in this country, the president is. One would be tempted to think — and all too often, we have been — that we need a president who thinks like a military man, but in truth, we need a president who thinks like a president - someone whose approach to military matters and wars is that of someone who is the leader of a country, not an armed force.

 

That dovetails with my own two days with the Army folks at Fort Bliss – none of the officers, from the lowest level second lieutenant to the generals, ever uttered a peep about politics, or even implied anything. That doesn’t seem to be their concern - they do what is asked, as well as it can be done, and look after their people. It’s all “give us the mission and we will succeed.” They don’t bitch. They do the job at hand.

 

All the political stuff came from the civilian visitors. You know the young men of this type - they laugh at Democrats, love McCain’s blind militarism, and say they would favor a military coup, so the country could be run by people who want to win - whatever that means. Elections get us nowhere. And they don’t consider Democrats actual Americans - Democrats forfeited that, with stupid questions. Perhaps they were just trying to impress the young officers.

 

One new commander talked a bit about his job – his folks were charged with testing all those new gizmos for the kind of wars we have now, as opposed to the big wars we never did ever fight. But the civilians jumped in and said things would be a lot better if we just killed every damned Iraqi, and their children, and all the Iranians too - then there’d be no problem. The commander gave his measured response - that sort of decision sort of depends on your strategic goals, your geopolitical aims. They just looked at him funny. Now they worry about him. But he knew his role – they didn’t.

 

That’s the problem, as the reaction to the Wesley Clark comments show – people get confused. At Talking Point Memo, Josh Marshall tries to straighten it out:

 

I’ve watched this campaign unfold pretty closely. And I’ve listened to Obama’s position on Iraq. He’s been very clear through this year and last on the distinction between strategy and tactics. Presidents set the strategy — which in this context means the goal or the policy. And if the policy is a military one, a President will consult closely with his military advisors on the tactics used to execute the policy.

 

This is an elementary distinction the current occupant in the White House has continually tried to confuse by claiming that his policies are driven and constrained by the advice he’s given by his commanders on the ground. There’s nothing odd or contradictory about Obama saying that he’ll change the policy to one of withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq, with a specific timetable, but that he will consult with his military advisors about how best to execute that policy.

 

There simply are distinctions:

 

The simple truth is that this campaign offers a very clear cut choice on Iraq. One candidate believes that the US occupation of Iraq is the solution; the other thinks it’s the problem. John McCain supports the permanent deployment of US troops in Iraq. That is why his hundred years remark isn’t some gotcha line. It’s a clear statement of his policy. Obama supports a deliberate and orderly withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It’s a completely different view of America’s role in the world and future in the Middle East. Reporters who can’t grasp what Obama is saying seem simply to have been permanently befuddled by George W. Bush’s game-playing over delegating policy to commanders.

 

It comes down to who should make the decisions.

 

A friend in upstate New York commented on that via email:

 

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, we have a military that immediately forgets or just disregards the notion that they took an oath of loyalty to the country and constitution, not to the military and their commanding officers - not much different to police being loyal to the “thin blue line” rather than the citizenry they are supposed to protect.

 

Rick in Atlanta responded:

 

Yeah, the fact that the concept seems to work quite well of engendering loyalty toward their buddies in the squad first, followed by to their country and God (although I keep forgetting in which order), may have to be the price we pay. But I think that what may work in, and for, the armed forces is not necessarily going to translate to elective government. I have no problem if a veteran is able to get the big picture, but so often, it just doesn’t happen.

 

Actually it’s “Duty, Honor, Country” - in that order. There’s no God stuff anywhere - never has been. It’s the oddballs, like General Boykin, who throw that in:

 

We as believers have been promised that we will spend an eternity with God. Last Saturday I was doing a men’s conference in Fredericksburg, Virginia and I was praying during the worship service and something dawned on me and it was the Holy Spirit speaking to me. And the Holy Spirit said, “This is what I want you to share with my men today”, and I’m going to share it with you and this is what it is: One day, we’re going to stand before the gates of Heaven. Some of us want to be able to walk up there in a white robe and we want to sing Abba Father and Amazing Grace and we want to say to the Lord, “I worshiped You.” But I want you to think about this: Here’s the way I want to enter the gates of Heaven. I want to come skidding in there on all fours. I want to be slipping and sliding and I want to hit the gates of heaven with a bang. And when I stand up and I stand before Christ, I want there to be blood on my knees and my elbows. I want to be covered with mud. And I want to be standing there with a ragged breast plate of righteousness. And a spear in my hand. And I want to say, “Look at me, Jesus. I’ve been in the battle. I’ve been fighting for you.” Ladies and gentlemen, put your armor on and get into battle. God bless you.

 

He got in a lot of trouble for saying such things, official reprimands and all that – but didn’t lose his job as United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, although he’s now retired. He was just eccentric – and also useful. The Pentagon and White House were always apologizing for him, but he did his job. He was an outlier.

 

And on a personal note, there was West Point, 1990, when my nephew graduated. Every single one of those cadets seemed far more than polite - they were extraordinarily decent and you knew would always do the right thing, no matter what. That was what they really learned. It was damned impressive. Duty, Honor, Country – that meant everything to them.

 

But yes, when things get hot, it works out that your buddies come first, then the mission, and the rest is for later. That “Band of Brothers” thing runs deep.

 

And that doesn’t translate well to civilian leadership and doesn’t have one whit to do with policy making, or executive decision-making, or what a legislator does. That people think it does is nutty. The military does not let anyone, at any rank, determine policy. That’s what the civilian leadership is supposed to do, no matter what Bush says.

 

Who decides things, the major policies, matters – and they should have some experience with that, and a track record of making rather good judgments. That’s why McCain seems the wrong guy for the job. Steely resolve and unflinching patriotism and honor are wonderful. They just happen to be outside the job requirements.