The Athenaeum

What's the Chance...?

"In the memo sent to a superior officer seven days after Tillman's death, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that the evidence strongly pointed to friendly fire and the nation's leaders risked embarrassing themselves if they publicly said otherwise.

"I felt that it was essential that you received this information as soon as we detected it in order to preclude any unknowing statements by our country's leaders which might cause public embarrassment if the circumstances of Cpl. Tillman's death become public," McChrystal wrote.

The April 29, 2004, memo, was addressed to Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command, and was intended as a warning to Bush and acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee.

It is not clear whether Bush or Brownlee received the warning, but it raises new questions on how high up the chain of command the misinformation campaign extended. In speeches following the memo, Bush avoided any reference to the circumstances of Tillman's death."  Yahoo

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McChrystal sent this memo to three different officers above him in the operational chain of command.  Among them were the theater commander, General John Abizeid and General Brown, the commander of Special Operations Command.  Abizeid and Brown had only one superior in the Department of Defense.  That was Donald Rumsfeld.  What's the chance that Abizeid or Brown would not immediately have informed Rumsfeld of McChrystal's opinion on this potentially volatile matter?  What reason would Abizeid and Brown have had to not inform Rumsfeld?  The operational chain of command has nothing to do with recruiting.  The Department of the Army does that, not the operational chain of command.  Tillman's death by accidental shooting by another soldier would not have reflected on Abizeid or Brown. 

Logic tells me that one or the other must have reported this quickly to Rumsfeld.  The White House is now saying that McChrystal's memo never arrived there?  Does this mean that Rumsfeld did not inform the White House?  That doesn't make sense.

What happened here?  pl

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070331/ap_on_re_us/tillman_friendly_fire

"300" Alan Farrell

Download 300.doc

A review by Alan farrell

What is the fascination with..

The Tillman story?  Why is this a continuing story at all?  This soldier died in a skirmish in Afghanistan, killed by a comrade who could not see clearly in the gathering dusk that the man firing on the hillside above him was not an enemy.  Things like that happen frequently in combat.  They are in some measure inevitable.  In this case the parts of a small units were ambushed on a road in a ravine.  The first part of the line of vehicles came out of the ravine.  The troops dismounted and assaulted back up the the slope into the flank of the ambush.  That was the right thing to do.  The second part of the column was coming out of the ravine in their vehicles when they saw flashes and shapes on the slope to the right of them.  A man with a machine gum opened fire against the flashes and killed Tillman.  Tillman was unlucky.  He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I find no fault in the soldier who accidentally killed him.  None.

Now we have what looks a lot like a "witch hunt" on the part of the Army to try to satisfy the predatory press interest and the anger and loss of Tillman's parents. 

Would he be less dead if he had been killed by hostile fire?  Would Tillman be less dead if the "chain of command" had told his parents and the world that this man had died accidentally rather than at the hands of the Taliban?  There is no claim that he was shot deliberately by the other soldier.  The people who failed to clearly tell his parents that he had died for no good reason probably were trying to shield his family from that knowledge. 

Is the issue really that he used to throw a football around?  Is that it?  If it is, then all concerned should think about the implication that his life was more important than those of the men who served with him.  If that is the case, then the media should be ashamed of their role in this nonsense.  pl 

http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=214266058&p=zy4z66764

"Second Life"

This simulation of "life" has recently come to my attention.  I would be interested in your thoughts.  pl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

"Wild Hogs" a Review by Alan Farrell

Alan is right.  This IS funny.  pl

Download wild_hogs.doc

Bonsai and Chinese Folk Drama - Stan Henning

I understand that there are a number of readers of Pat's Blog who remember the Bonsai tree I contributed a year ago about this time, and there are some among you who would like to see? more. I must admit that Bonsai trees are more soothing to the eye and mind than the sad state of affairs that gave rise to the Blog. I thought about this for a while and it occurred to? me that, in China, where most of my focus has been since graduating with Pat from VMI, the affairs of heaven, earth, and man are seen as intertwined and that there are lessons to be learned from this interaction. I then thought of another beautiful scene in the same location as the Bonsai, the Memorial Hall to Three Kingdoms Strategist Zhuge Liang in Chengdu, Sichuan - a twisted peach tree and stone tablet that combine nature, history, and lessons to ponder. The stone tablet is engraved with the Chinese calligraphy for "peach orchard" and, to Chinese, the scene evokes both natural beauty and thoughts of the heroic personages on the stage of history during tumultuous Three kingdoms Period (220-265 CE).? A peach orchard is said to be where three key figures, the future emperor of the State of Shuhan (now Sichuan Province), Liu Bei, and? his trusted lieutenants, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei swore a blood oath of loyalty. And this symbol of the peach orchard oath is? located in the memorial hall to Zhuge Liang, whom the three sought out and persuaded to act as Liu Bei's strategic advisor. My first photo, then, symbolizes the "Peach Orchard Oath of Three", while the second photo, taken near Xiangfan City, Hubei Province, is where Liu Bei and his two lieutenants are said to have made three trips to persuade Zhuge Liang of their sincerity and to have finally coaxed him to serve as Liu Bei's strategist. The scene is from a folk opera depicting Liu Bei and his two lieutenants meeting Zhuge Liang in front of a building on the alleged location of the latter's "straw hut", where he avoided the madding crowd for a time. The Chinese characters above the entrance read, "Hall of Three Visits". Overall,? this short description symbolizes the considerable effort taken to find the right man to act as strategist, not a "yes man" nor a bully, but someone knowledgeable and able to balance plus and minus factors and secure a meaningful "victory" for their cause. Zhuge Liang was just such a man and, as I mentioned in a Military Review article in May 1979 ("Chinese Defense Strategy: A Historical Approach"), it was he around 200+ CE, not J.F.C. Fuller in 1920, who coined the term "psychological warfare".? It seems to me that we could learn a hell of a lot from the Chinese, and was it not Sunzi who said, "know yourself, know your opponent [not necessarily enemy], fight a hundred battles without encountering disaster"?  Stan Henning

Lecture on Islam - Lang

I gave this public lecture on Islam at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas on 7 February, 2007.  St. Mary's University owns the copyright but have agreed that I can make it available on this site.  The file is 201 Megabytes in size.

This was the second of two lectures.  The first had been on such "profane" subjects as nationalism, politics, etc.  Unfortunately, the technical people there failed to "capture" it.  pl

http://www.turcopolier.com/video/w_patrick_lang.wmv

"Eliot Cohen and Democratic Responsibility" Anatol Lieven

I have posted these remarks by Professor Lieven with his permission. I fully support his position and that of Ms. Ortiz. Eliot Cohen is a neocon's neocon and the sort of man who tries to shout his opponents down. I appeared on several news programs with him. Immediately after one of these events he made a public statement that anyone (meaning me) who used the word "neocon" was an "anti-Semite" because the word was code for "foreign policy Jew." It is indicative of the continuing power of the neocons that this arch neocon should be appointed to be Counselor to Rice, pl

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The following has been published by the National Interest Online. It was written in support of a previous comment on Cohen’s appointment by Ximena Ortiz. This and the attack on Ortiz by Ruth Wedgwood, mentioned below, can be found at http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=13840

Anatol Lieven

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Eliot Cohen and Democratic Responsibility

Anatol Lieven

Ximena Ortiz’s critique of Eliot Cohen’s appointment to the State Department, and Ruth Wedgwood’s response, go to the heart of the question of intellectual and political accountability in a democratic system. In this debate, I must emphatically endorse Ms Ortiz’s position with regard both to Dr Cohen personally, and on the wider points of principle involved.

Dr Cohen’s radical failings extend beyond the Iraq War to much of his intellectual record as a military historian and analyst in recent years. They are not open to serious question, since they are amply documented in his own published writings and recorded interviews.

The first is that Dr Cohen was a leading advocate of the US invasion of Iraq; and that in this role he reproduced what has since proved to be baseless propaganda from the Bush administration concerning the Iraqi regime’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda (see for example his oped “The Reluctant Warrior”, Wall Street Journal February 6th 2003, and his interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on January 23rd 2002). He also, albeit less than some other neo-conservatives, held out the promise that the overthrow of Saddam Hussain would not only lead to a “far, far better life for the Iraqi people”, but might “begin a transformation of the Middle East” (“Iraq can’t Resist Us”, Wall Street Journal, December 23rd 2001)

In the process, Dr Cohen was guilty of two major errors with the gravest long term consequences: While he occasionally mentioned possible problems for the US in Iraq after the overthrow of the Baath regime, at no point that I have been able to discover did he devote any serious, concentrated attention to what these problems might be, how the US should deal with them, and indeed what the whole US strategy for the postwar administration of Iraq should be. Or if he did, then – in sharp contrast to his approach to other issues – he never wrote or spoke on them in detail in public. Dr Cohen thereby shares intellectual and moral co-responsibility for the very failures of US postwar strategy that he himself now denounces.

I would nonetheless be prepared to find excuses for Dr Cohen if his advocacy of war with Iraq had followed US success in the primary goals of US strategy after 9/11, in the name of which the Bush administration had rallied support from the American people and the international community: the fight to kill or capture the leadership of Al Qaeda and its Taleban supporters.

What is unforgivable is that Dr Cohen and others began to beat the drums for war with Iraq while these monstrous figures were still at large, and while Afghanistan was obviously very far from stabilized. His first major article that I have found advocating war with Iraq appeared on November 20th 2001 – and also, by the way, helped lay the background for Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech by advocating regime change in Iran (“World War IV”, the Wall Street Journal, November 20 2001). The results are now clear. The diversion of US special forces, economic aid and political attention from Afghanistan to Iraq began at the start of 2002, and did not cease even after the battle of Shahikot in March 2002 had revealed the extent to which the Taleban and Al Qaeda remained a serious threat. Cohen faced this possibility – and explicitly dismissed it (interview with CNN, above).

Five years later, Osama bin Laden, Aiman al Zawahiri and Mullah Omar are still free, and the Taleban has returned as a very threat not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan as well. When we remember the thousands of US and allied soldiers who have died unnecessarily in Iraq, we should also remember that many of the US lives lost in Afghanistan could have been saved – and some of our greatest enemies killed or captured - if the US had continued to concentrate on that country after 2001.

This failure on Dr Cohen’s part is linked to a central failure as a military historian and analyst: his gross underestimation for many years of the contemporary importance of guerrilla, terrorist and urban warfare. It is true that his books, articles and essays do generally mention these issues, but they do so briefly and formally, in box-ticking fashion; for example, in his essay, “A Revolution in Warfare” (Foreign Affairs, March/April 1996), which in 18 pages mentions these threats in one paragraph. They are dwarfed in his work by the attention paid by him to the “Revolution in Military Affairs” and how this can supposedly ensure absolute US battlefield dominance.

This indifference was extremely widespread in US military and military-bureaucratic circles before 9/11 (as I found in the response to a policy brief that I published on the subject in the spring of 2001, entitled “Soldiers Before Missiles: Meeting the Challenge from the World’s Streets”, Carnegie Endowment Policy Brief no.4, 2001). But given what should have been the searing lessons of Vietnam, Beirut, Mogadishu, the Israeli experience in South Lebanon, and the Russian experience in Chechnya, that does not make it any the less intellectually culpable on Dr Cohen’s part.

Finally, in the years before and immediately after the US invasion of Iraq, Dr Cohen used one aspect of his historical “scholarship” to drive a particular contemporary agenda: namely, his argument that on several occasions in modern history, dynamic and visionary political leaders have been correct in intervening directly in the control of military operations, overruling their professional militaries (“Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime”, Free Press, 2002). Dr Cohen mentions in this regard Lincoln, Clemenceau, Ben-Gurion and Churchill, though not oddly enough Hitler or Stalin.

From 2001-2003, this historical material was clearly intended by Dr Cohen to bolster support for the Bush administration’s drive for war with Iraq, against the cautious, eminently well-founded advice of military figures like General Eric Shinseki. Dr Cohen dismissed as illegitimate “whingeing” the military’s attempts to influence the public debate by leaking this advice to the media – something which should be their right and duty in a democracy, or at least one where the public has a right to full information about the basis for critical government decisions (“Generals, Politicians and Iraq”, Wall Street Journal, August 14 2002)

In the process, Dr Cohen is guilty of some very bad historiography. This applies especially to his suggestion that Churchill was not just a great leader whose rhetoric and example inspired British resistance to Hitler, but that he was a successful strategist. In fact, an overwhelming mass of open material has long existed to demonstrate that this was far from the case (from the naval point of view, see for example Correlli Barnett’s “Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War”, W.W.Norton, 1991). The great majority of Churchill’s personal military decisions, often forced through against the advice of his military commanders, ranged from the bad to the disastrous. This was true of the decision to employ fleet aircraft carriers in anti-submarine sweeps in 1939, leading to the loss of HMS Courageous; the failure properly to plan the British intervention in Norway in 1940, which was Churchill’s personal responsibility as First Lord of the Admiralty; the decision to divert British forces from North Africa to Greece early in 1941; the dispatch of a hopelessly outnumbered British naval squadron to face the Japanese in November 1941; the decision to defend Singapore rather than evacuating it in the face of the successful Japanese offensive in Malaya; and backing from 1940-42 for the RAF’s obsession with bombing Germany at the expense of aerial protection for British convoys.

Churchill should have stuck to inspiring the people, gaining international allies, and managing the war effort as a whole – and left the planning and conduct of operations to the professionals. As a result of his failures, by the time of the planning of the Normandy Invasion of 1944, he had in effect been sidelined by the US military leadership, with the enthusiastic concurrence of the British admirals and generals. Cohen quotes one incident of Churchill encouraging a criticism of his arguments by a military subordinate; the memoirs of Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Wavell, Admiral Tovey and others are replete with examples of exactly the opposite tendency.

Manipulating historical “scholarship” in this way for the purpose of contemporary politics is of course a common sin. However, if you do engage in this kind of behavior, then you should at least be exposed to the ultimate test of every policy advocate: that of success. In Dr Cohen’s case, he used these arguments to help defeat and silence objections by sections of the US uniformed military to the planning of the Iraq War which have since been proved beyond doubt to have been entirely correct.

And by contributing in this way to a hasty, poorly-planned military operation, it must be repeated that Dr Cohen took on himself a share of the moral, intellectual and political responsibility for precisely those US administration mistakes in Iraq which he now denounces, and which have cost so many American lives. It is disappointing – though not surprising – that Dr Cohen himself does not realize that this record demands from him, as an honorable man, a lengthy period of quiet, private reflection on his mistakes and the reasons for them.

If no personal price at all is to be paid in terms of careers for errors on this scale, which contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans, then the long-term consequences for US government and US democracy could be dire. If being proved obviously, dreadfully wrong brings no long-term consequences, and being proved right brings no long-term rewards, then why in future should any US analyst, adviser, commentator or public figure ever take a public stand in favor of what he or she believes to be right and correct, if this is going to lead to short-term unpopularity and career damage?

The result will be a further accentuation of an already dangerous trend: the silence of large areas of US public life on critical but controversial issues; and the growing domination of the think-tank, media and bureaucratic worlds by gutless time-serving hacks. At this point, the quality of much of the advice reaching both the US government and the US sovereign people will in the end be no better, and certainly no more independent, than that in many dictatorships.

Closely related, and even more important, is the health of the US democratic system. The American people’s ability to throw out a US administration by elections every four years is of course vitally important, but it is not sufficient if the only result is to replace them with a different sub-set of a basically unaccountable, irresponsible policy elite; and if in any case the defeated elements, however disastrous their record, simply retire to well-paid jobs in academia, business or lobbying, and then return to government again after a few years. We have seen this kind of system in many democracies in Latin America and elsewhere. The eventual result is to corrode the faith of the people in democracy itself.

In his poem “Mesopotamia”, Rudyard Kipling reflected savagely on the way in which members of the British elites whose monstrous incompetence and arrogance had led to the British military disaster in what is now Iraq in 1915-16 escaped paying any price for their failures. Part of it reads as follows:

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide—
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?

Ruth Wedgwood ends her response to Ximena Ortiz’s critique with a sentence that has nothing to do with an intellectual defense of Dr Cohen, or a discussion of moral and political responsibility, but which reads very like a threat: “More than one member of the National Interest family favored the intervention in Iraq. Ms. Ortiz may wish to shoot her flaming arrows with greater care, lest they land in some unexpected places.” I’m afraid that the only appropriate democratic response to that is: Let them fall.

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and co-author, with John Hulsman, of “Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World” (Pantheon, 2006). His previous book, “America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism” (Oxford University Press, US, and Harper Collins, UK, 2004) examines part of the background to the Iraq War and the response to 9/11 in old traditions of US political culture.

"If certain Democrats and sympathetic Republicans "

If certain Democrats and sympathetic Republicans ever were to succeed in passing legislation actually tying the hands of President Bush with respect to the operational conduct of the Iraq War that impinged on his powers as Commander-in-Chief, the Supreme Court might well strike down such legislation (and everyone knows who holds sway on the current high court as a result of two key appointments earlier in the President's term of office).

That said, and I am by no means a constitutional lawyer, firm and unambiguous legislation aimed at compelling the President, before initiating any offensive (vice defensive) military action against Iran, to seek formal Congressional approval could be the reverse:  reducing the President's ability to overstep his powers as Commander-in-Chief.  This is an area very much worth debating since what he and past presidents have done militarily without declarations of war since 1950 falls into a huge gray area that has not been properly examined, despite the more than 30 years that have elapsed since the end of the Vietnam War.  I might also have added Korea and the 1991 Gulf War in this context, but both were conducted as part of a United Nations Security Council-sanctioned execution of a UN Chapter VII mandate.

Since December 1941, U.S. Presidents have engaged in two major conflicts of choice (Vietnam and the 2003 Iraq War) without formal declarations of war or even any explicit Chapter VII authorization on the part of the UN Security Council, actions largely unknown in the American pre-World War II experience.  Ironically, although Korea ended in a highly unpopular stalemate, the Vietnam conflict and the current Iraq War have been the only truly disastrous major military actions since the Second World War.

Perhaps, with respect to risk, the ultimate potential exercise in Congressionally unregulated Presidential power as Commander-in-Chief (in terms of consequences for this nation and the world had there been resort to military force) was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  Had President Kennedy exercised military options beyond reconnaissance and blockade, and Premier Khruschev responded in kind, "disastrous" might not have been anywhere near an appropriate description for the results of any resultant escalation .

In this discussion, I have not, of course, mentioned lesser cases such as the U.S. invasions of the Dominican Republic (1965), Grenada (1983) or Panama (1989) because in the decades prior to WWII the U.S. already had engaged in a number of highly controversial "interventions" in Latin America, and in that earlier era also without any real warmaking authority--not even the OAS support that accompanied some U.S. actions in the post-WWII era.

I am fully aware of some of the frequently-stated and sometimes awkward aspects (legal and otherwise) related to formal declarations of war, but perhaps even these considerations might give a President pause before asking for a declaration of war, as well as for the Congress to ponder before voting in favor or against one.

For those not yet aware, under the aegis of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, a National War Powers Commission has been established to explore these very issues from the perspective of both the Presidency and the Congress, led by none other than former Secretary of State James Baker (along with former Secretary Warren Christopher), with 10 other commission members, among them former Representative Lee Hamilton.  This is reminiscent of the largely-ignored Iraq Study Group findings of last December, but let us hope sage advice or recommendations emanating from this new quarter will not meet the same fate as the bulk of the ISG's 79 recommendations.

Wayne White

Middle East Institute

Middle East Policy Council

Washington, DC

"A Field Marshal's Baton in Every Knapsack"

I agree with Henry Allen, the writer of this letter to the editor in the Washington Post.  Legend has it that the social distinction between officers and enlisted in the US armed forces originated in the training imparted by Von Steuben at Valley Forge and that it was maintained over the past centuries on the basis pf an actual social difference in the origins of the two groups.

Be that as it may, there is no longer any significant social distance in the backgrounds of the people who make up the two groups in the armed forces.  The officers and "men" of the volunteer and reserve forces of the United States are recruited from the same strata of society, are similar in education and in motivation and the maintenance of any sort of distinction in privilege between the two segments of military society is simply unjustifiable.

That is not to say that there should not be officers and enlisted ranks.  There should be such distinctions in rank.  They are necessary to the functioning of any military force, but the artificial social distinction between enlisted and officer ranks should be abolished.

It should be possible for any soldier to progress up the ranks of the armed forces and to make a smooth transition from the top enlisted rank to commissioned status without the artificial barriers now placed in path of such promotion.  To make this "jump" now requires the passage of a host of artificial impediments and a good deal of luck.  That should not be.

Officers like David Hackworth, Audie Murphy and John Vessey had all come from the ranks.  There should have been more like them.  pl

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/08/AR2007030801500.html