War and civil war

It's hard to stop thinking about the coming tragedy in Iran.

At this point, you don't need psychic powers to see it: Nuclear war. The very concept has a surreal clarity, as though it has already happened. Everyone reading these words has had at least one bad dream about The Bomb -- and Bush, in his messianic madness, will soon make the nightmare real.

I was thinking about the current crisis while watching the 1997 thriller Murder at 1600 last night. It's not a bad genre piece: Wesley Snipes kicks butt, Diane Lane kicks butt and looks gorgeous, and Dennis Miller gets shot. But the film, less than a decade old, seems a relic from another age. The story exists within the old cinematic tradition (Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove) of militarists mounting a coup against a president considered insufficently bellicose. That tradition derived from history: MacArthur, LeMay, Willoughby, the JFK assassination, the Moorer/Radford affair, etc.

Things are different now. I see signs of the opposite reaction -- professional military men flirting with insubordination because the sitting president is too bellicose, too reckless. We already knew that a sector of the CIA (at least, of the pre-Goss CIA) had set its face against Bush. Now, evidence suggests that a segment of the military may feel likewise.

Note the pattern...

Seymour Hersh, in his instantly-famous New Yorker piece, writes that

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. “This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war,” he said.

Damn straight. But this is not the message Bush wants conveyed right now. Which means that, whoever this Pentagon adviser may be, he's no team player. The same can be said of any Hersh military or intelligence source who spoke to him about an American nuclear strike.

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. “There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries,” the adviser told me. “This goes to high levels.” The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. “The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks,” the adviser said. “And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen.”

Giving this information to Hersh was an act of patriotic insubordination -- and let's hope we see more "leaks" undertaken in that spirit.

Zarqawi the scarecrow. Take another look at a story you've probably already seen -- the revelation that the threat posed by terrorist "mastermind" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is, to at least some degree, a fiction, or at least a hyperbole. Many bloggers noted the fishy scent perfuming the Zarqawi stories floating in and out of our newspapers, and suspicions of fakery have now been proven valid.

But how did this classified documentation reach the Washington Post and other news sources? Nobody knows who passed the documents to the reporters, but one of their sources was Colonel Derek Harvey, a military intelligence officer in Iraq. His information was verified by other "intelligence officials."

The Bush administration cannot be happy to see this sort of story get ink. "Intelligence officials" are not, by nature, a wide-mouthed bunch, so why the sudden chattiness?

Officers against Bush. Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, "the three-star Marine Corps general who was the military's top operations officer" until his reitrement in 2002, has called for the replacement of Donald Rumsfeld. His critique of the Iraq war is devastating. In his view, the decision to go "was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions — or bury the results." Newbold was a key source for the book Cobra II, in which he characterizes the Iraq war as a blunder.

On March 19, Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton (who commanded the training of Iraq's new security forces) also called for the removal of Donald Rumsfeld in a New York Times editorial. General Anthony Zinni also made the same public request.

The officer class is bailing. Retention numbers for young Army officers keep getting worse:

Last year, more than a third of the West Point class of 2000 left active duty at the earliest possible moment, after completing their five-year obligation.

Captains command the companies doing the actual fighting, and they obviously are losing the stomach for Mr. Bush's war in Iraq. Who will do the fighting in the next war (presuming ground troops are involved)?

The bottom line:

In the comments section of an earlier post, I told a reader that it takes a Stalingrad to make a von Stauffenberg. Any leader who makes a sufficiently hideous waste of his military resources will create a rebellious warrior class. We all know what happened to Caligula.

Is Iraq enough of a Stalingrad-style disaster to provoke such a reaction? Can our officers find it within themselves to be not just warriors, but heroes?

I am not suggesting that the military conduct a full-scale coup. But every leak, every interview, every public criticism that exposes the insanity of our Commander-in-Chief constitutes a quiet coup -- a subtle act of rebellion -- a volley in a "cold" civil war.