George Bush has been saying for months that “our strategy in Iraq will be determined by conditions on the ground; I’ll be listening to the Generals.�
And here I thought the military took its orders from our elected officials – not the other way around!
Rather than listen to the overwhelming voice of the American people for whom he works, Bush is relying on General Petraeus, who works for him, thereby reorganizing the government’s management structure by putting a general in charge of the critical decision of what to do in Iraq!
David Petraeus may have a Ph.D from Princeton, but he is not an elected official.
Our Founders recognized the danger of letting the military make decisions about waging war, and wisely gave the power to declare war to Congress, and the power to conduct it to the President, as Commander in Chief.
Bush’s passing of the buck to Petraeus is just his latest attempt to re-write our Constitution
Your analysis here is a bit far fetched. It certainly does not rise to the level of your prior offerings.
Your observations in the next to the last paragraph are, of course, correct. However, in this miliatry action, a state of war has not existed between the United States and the government of Irag. Congress has not passed such a an act. Perhaps it should have when it chose to move into the area militarily. It might have changed the rules of the game, particularly with respect to the level of aggressiveness with which we would have felt justified in bringing to bear.
But that’s certainly not the whole picture here. Cheney’s 1994 commentary above is simply one aspect of the overall critique as to why this operation turned out the way it did. Their in-depth analysis and long range planning was a failure. They thought it would be a cake walk and it turned into a slog in the mud. Personally, I predicted this civil war and factional fractionization happening right from the get-go. It was only Hussein’s foot which kept the lid on.
However, I digress. Your assertations regarding the chain of command are difficult to accept. That the executive branch takes counsel from it’s commanders in the field as part of the decision making process in military operations does not, by fiat, give the military the charge of critical decisions.
In Korea, MacArthur advocated launching a nuclear strike against our adversaries and Truman strongly disagreed. MacArthur was ultimately replaced because of his intransigence.
In an interview with General William Westmoreland on the matter of his tactics in Vietnam, the general revisited a key moment with President Johnson.
At that point the North Vietnamse were in retreat, and we were, militarily, in a position of advantage. Westmoreland asked Johnson what was to be next. Johnson told Westmoreland that he wanted him to win the war. In order to do that Westmoreland had advocated “crossing the river” and taking out Hanoi. Westmoreland contended that such an action would have wrapped it all up.
Remembering and fearing a Chinese response, similar to that in Korea, Johnson rejected the idea outright.
The rest is history.
…and….it was Truman who made the final decision to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese…not his generals. This was arrived at after an analysis of the estimates of American casualties to be sustained in a full invasion of the Japanese homeland. These figures were provided by his military advisors.
I think this is very important. Thanks a lot.