Post by Islamic Revival on Apr 13, 2006 23:22:55 GMT -5
· Fourth retired officer calls on defence chief to resign
· Rift between military and civilian leaders deepens
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday April 14, 2006
The Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1753854,00.html
The Pentagon yesterday faced a deepening rift between its civilian and military leadership over the war on Iraq after a fourth retired general called for the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to stand down.
In the latest in a torrent of criticism centred on the Pentagon chief, Major General John Batiste, who led a division in Iraq, said Mr Rumsfeld's authoritarian leadership style had made it more difficult for professional soldiers. "We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork," he told CNN on Wednesday.
Gen Batiste's comments were especially startling because he is so closely associated with the civilian leadership, having served as an aide to one of the architects of the war, the former deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz.
The ferocity of the attacks and calls for serving officers to go public with their dissent was starting to cause concern among military analysts yesterday. "If this opens up so we have more and more officers speaking up and blaming Rumsfeld and blaming senior civilians, then it is possibly heading towards a fairly dangerous civilian-military crisis," said Andrew Bacevich, a military historian at Boston University.
Earlier this week Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, the former director of operations for the joint chiefs of staff, published a scathing critique of the planning for the war in an essay for Time magazine. Gen Newbold said he regretted not objecting more forcefully to the invasion of Iraq while he was still in uniform.
He went on to call on those still in service to speak up. "I offer a challenge to those still in uniform: a leader's responsibility is to give voice to those who can't -or don't have the opportunity to - speak."
Last month Major General Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops until 2004, also went public with his criticism of the civilian leadership, writing in the New York Times that: "Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his Cold Warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower."
Retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, the former head of US Central Command and a long-standing critic of the war, has also been criticising Mr Rumsfeld while on tour to promote his new book.
The attacks on Mr Rumsfeld come at a time of increasing debate within the military on the obligation of professional soldiers to voice their criticism of policy, and a revival of an influential military history, Dereliction of Duty, which criticised the joint chiefs of staff during the Vietnam war. But the professional military's resentment of Mr Rumsfeld dates to the run-up to the Iraq war when the army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, was sidelined.
"It's a bursting of the dam in some ways of the frustration and anger, not only with the policies but with the way that Mr Rumsfeld has interacted with people, the disrespect he has shown to the military," said Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina.
Although most analysts believe that only a small number of retired military officers would go public with their misgivings, growing public doubts about Iraq are encouraging others to speak out.
"You have a group now that is looking back and saying: 'Wow. I should have said something earlier.' I think as time goes on it is natural that more and more generals after agonising over what they have seen over the last three years might voice their concerns," said Robert Work, a retired Marine colonel and an analyst at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
But some in the military are anxious to avoid blame for the Iraq war. "The senior civilian leadership is going to do everything it possibly can to avoid having responsibility for the war fixed on them, and the senior military leadership is equally determined to have them left holding the bag," Mr Bacevich said.