Tarnished Stars

 How much is that doggie in the window
The one with the waggly tail
How much is that doggie in the window
I do hope that doggie's for sale 
--Doggy in the Window, Patti Page 

The dame made a curtsey,
The dog made a bow;
The dame said, "Your servant,"
The dog said, "Bow-wow"
 --Old Mother Hubbard 

Say, a doggy is nuttin'
 if he don' have a bone 
All doggy, hold ya' bone, 
all doggy, hold it 
--Who Let the Dogs Out? 
Baha Men
 ________________

The image is from the cover of this week's The Week magazine, "Intelligence Failure: How Could CIA Chief David Petraeus Be So Dumb?", the implication being, Petraeus should have been more circumspect either in his choice of mistress or his execution of the affair.  To ask how he failed (how was he so DUMB) implies the CIA head conducted himself with aplomb in other matters -- that he was not ordinarily such a dim, nitwit doofus.

However, the question should be, "How could David Petraeus be so immature?", and the answer can be found in the cosseted cult of higher echelon military corps.  The elect "have spent much of their professional lives in cloistered military bubbles," and may have a sense of infallibility not the privilege of the average soldier (Petraeus Scandal puts four-star General Lifestyle under scrutiny).  Maturity, not intelligence, is what is found wanting. The same lack was found in General Stanley McChrystal and now General Allen, et. al.

These Generals exhibited the maturity of a green 0-1 rather than an 0-10, a fault built into our immature soldier state of existence.  The selection criteria for admittance to our service academies, like West Point, rewards immature behavior.  Independent or rebellious thinkers are quickly eliminated. The cadet mentality is carried through many a West Point officer's career -- a mindset of entitlement and privilege.

Our selection and reward system need examination and review.  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced an ethics review Thursday, something said to be in the pipeline prior to Petraeus's resignation, due to a number of recent ethical lapses among other General Officers.

Since the military has now re-branded itself as warriors, this sacred cow will be hard to attack.  However, the arrested development which allows for such poor behavior must be tackled lest we continue to be shocked over such predictable disappointments.

Out on the OP-LP: Someone's Coming!

I've been waiting for someone new
to make me feel alive
Yeah, waiting for a girl like you
to come into my life 
--Waiting for a Girl Like You, Foreigner

 ___________________

Better late than never. Your agony Aunt is in: Qualms, concerns, insights ... tell us something we don't know, about anything on your mind.  This is your free-fire zone.

Meantime, we at RangerAgainstWar are pleased to be finding more fellow travelers in the media.  For the longest time it was just us and Newt who called Game Up ("Newt's Aboard"). In 2008 the news reported that Mr. Gingrich said the war on terror was "phony". We at RAW had been calling the recent U.S. military efforts the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) since '06, but we were delighted for the company; they say beggars can't be choosers. 

Well, that was four years ago. This week the New York Times ran an editorial, "A Phony Hero for a Phony War":

"The genius of General Petraeus was to recognize early on that the war he had been sent to fight in Iraq wasn’t a real war at all. This is what the public and the news media — lamenting the fall of the brilliant hero undone by a tawdry affair — have failed to see. He wasn’t the military magician portrayed in the press; he was a self-constructed hologram, emitting an aura of preening heroism for the ever eager cameras."

Of course it is not Petraeus alone -- he is just a cog in the voracious military-industrial complex.  But the General's fall, for this moment, allows a few more to peek behind the curtain.

Arabian Knights

  
If you're down and confused 
And you don't remember who you're talking to 
Concentration slips away 
Because your baby is so far away 
--Love the One You're With, 
Crosby, Stills and Nash

Well, what am I supposed to do? 
You won't answer my calls,
 you change your number.
 I mean, I'm not gonna be ignored, Dan!   
--Fatal Attraction (1987)
_______________________ 

Military leadership is not always about success:

• The March of the 10,000
• Thermopylae
• Little Big Horn
• The Confederates at Petersburg
• The Lost Battalion of World War I
• Wainwright at Corregidor
• The U.S. Marines at the Chosin (with U.S. Army support ☺)
• The U.S Special Forces at Lang Vei
• Lt. Murphy in Afghanistan

We are taught that physical courage is the factor that makes us soldiers (err, New Age Warriors), but this only part of the equation. A recent discussion about Shackleton's fraught Antarctic expedition motivated this thinking.

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton led his crew with fierce loyalty after the loss of their ship (The Endurance).  He set up Camp Optimism in the most unhospiaible climate, and tirelessly motivated his crew to labor and to keep hope alive. Shackleton believed that character and temperament were as important as technical ability, and lived by the motto, "Optimism is true moral courage." 

While physical courage is the hallmark of soldiering, it is not the gold standard for leadership.  Moral courage is supreme, and it the U.S. Army seems weak in this area.  We accepted General MacArthur's vacating his command, leaving General Wainwright and his Army in the lurch.  Contrast this with the loyalty of Luftwaffe Group Commander Erich Hartmann who refused a direct order to avoid Soviet capture by flying to safety in the British sector, as it would have meant the abandonment of his men.

After capture and spending 10 1/2 years in a Soviet gulag, Hartmann said in a later interview, "I could not leave my men.  That would have been bad leadership."  He and many others like him show a moral strength which reaches beyond the physical.  Think of John McCain refusing an offer of early release by the North Vietnamese command -- that is moral courage.

Transition now to the lavish lifestyles of men like Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus -- the plush lodgings and planes in which they traveled were more befitting of the Arabian 1001 Nights.  Their sumptuous offices at CENTCOM and all the other HQs, the limousines, the private command airship companies and all the other bling that kits out the 0-8 through 0-10 caste are far-removed from the lifestyles of their predecessors.

Instead of leadership we now have commanders steeped in West Point Honor Codes, Infantry Creeds, Ranger Creeds and a plethora of feel-good buzz words that are as meaningless as a mouthful of grits.  Witness Petraeus's vaunted "12 Rules for Living": "The only thing better than a little com­petition is a lot of competition. Set chal­lenges for your subordinates to encourage them to excel." The rules are generally insipid pop platitudes not likely to give Tony Robbins a run for his money on the motivational talk circuit any time soon.

Contrast present leadership with that of Chesty Puller at the Chosin Reservoir retrograde.  He gave his Jeep to the weak and wounded and marched out as a simple Infantryman (despite heart problems). On Guadalcanal his Regimental Command Post was in the forward reaches of the battlefield within rifle shot of the enemy.  Compare this with the fights at Waygul and Wanat, when the senior commanders were physically absent.

Leadership has both physical and moral aspects.  None of the U.S. senior officers refused to preemptively invade Iraq; First Lieutenant Ehren Watada is the only junior officer to officially protest the Iraq War by attempting to resign his commission (he was Court-martialed and ultimately discharged from service.)  Did any of our leaders even murmer the word, "Aggressive War"?

It is possible that ethics professor Colonel Ted Westhusing gave protest via suicide during his Iraq posting six years ago.  The Los Angeles Times reported, "In emails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the US had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military" (General Petraeus's Link to a Troubling Suicide in Iraq: The Ted Westhusing Story). In his suicide note, he wrote, "I didn't volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves." 

If elective invasions, bombing, Predators and Reapers, secret prisons, torture, open-ended detention and more do not raise any hackles amongst the General Officer class, then a penile thrombosis is very little thing in comparison, which is not to say it is nothing.  It is just a logical outgrowth of a corrupt and entitled mindset.

Amidst moral cowardice on such a scale, how do we even discuss Petraeus's moral lapse?  We have divorced morality from the equation when we adopted elective warfare and assumed the mantle of warriorhood.  Petraeus did what warrior-kings do: he took an Amazon concubine.

--Jim and Lisa

General Betrayus

--We think he looks like Alfafa, 
though "Spanky" would be a better nickname

Tell me how this ends?
--David Petraeus

The power of example is very important
to people under stress
--General Sir John Hackett
_________________

[We at RangerAgainstWar find the scuttlebutt surrounding the General Petraeus incident interesting and provocative on many levels, and so will examine its implications over the next week.]

Today: Officers, not Gentlemen

Once upon a time there was a military academy called West Point, which held as its highest imperative their Honor Code, a road map for behavior suiting an officer and a gentleman, a man who would reflect the highest moral values of a brave new nation.

Many years later, after the United States failed to win its first two military actions in as many decades (Korea and Vietnam), there came a graduate who would endeavor to restore shine to his nation's military by being a part of  grand plan -- the redefinition of warfare, late-20th century-style.  This cadet, David Petraeus, would write his thesis explaining the new way of war for the United States (the Counterinsurgency) and he would go on to pen the titular FM 3-24 -- COIN -- which promised a new and winning outcome to foreign wars by applying the moral values of America to win far-flung hearts and minds of people less moral than we.

In its moral high dudgeon, the United States tromped off to find its success in the woman-demeaning Middle East, hoping to teach them to not stone women for adultery, for instance.  The now-General Petraeus staked his claim on the success of his doctrine and sought to redeem his country's esteem, but all the Brasso at his disposal could not remove the tarnish he himself would re-apply.

True, he did not (literally) stone a woman, but his adulterous behavior is not consonant with the morals he and his fellows would purport to be exporting. He recognized this (as a CIA report threatened to go public), and correctly removed himself from public office.  It is unknown if the affair began while he was still ISAF Commander; if so Petraeus was derelict and guilty of battlefield cowardice by espousing one set of values with his words and defiling them by his actions. If so, he may be subject to military charges.  Knowing, however, there are different spanks for different ranks.

How can a hypocrite win anyone's heart or mind?  Is it a greater good to export adultery or to disapprove of its punishment?  Should not the man tasked with imposing our belief system upon a foreign land not at least implement the best of that heritage in his personal conduct? Is it any wonder the U.S. is seen as morally bankrupt hypocrites?  Maybe there is a corroding worm that lives within our vaunted freedoms.  Maybe man is destined everywhere to corrupt the good he would do.  How did an honor code become so fuzzy?

If we have no fixed moral compass, how can we expect FM 3-24 with its "panoply" of pretty words to export the thing we cannot manage ourselves?  Stoning a woman for adultery is one step beyond adultery only because we value each human life.  However, seen from a more traditional perspective, all transgressions that threaten to unseat the authority of one's culture and jurisprudence are equally offensive.  Our Ten Commandments are not listed in hierarchical order; killing and adultery are both theological crimes.

Further, on the nuts and bolts level, how was Gen. Petraeus's dalliance financed?  Did our tax dollars finance his "bad decision"?

Counterinsurgency and morality should be complimentary concepts. Why could a major COIN war not produce a Four Star 0-10 that could decisively affect the outcome of the effort? [Generals McKiernan and McChrystal were previously both relieved of duty.] Will it be the moral, tactical or strategic deficiencies which will prove the greatest detractor from U.S. COIN policy? Why is the U.S. Army incapable of producing 0-10's capable of theatre Army command?

General Petraeus has now reached the tail end of his teleological inquiry.

Bad Faith

You either got faith or you got unbelief
and there ain't no neutral ground
--Precious Angel, Bob Dylan

We sing about beauty and we sing about truth
At ten thousand dollars a show
--On the Cover of the Rolling Stone,
Dr. Hook

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men
--The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

Do or do not -- there is no try
--Yoda, Star Wars
_______________

Friend Publius recently commented that recently demobbed General Stanley McChrystal, he of Rolling Stone infamy, may have unconsciously wished to be relieved of command.

So: What if McChrystal DID unconsciously engineer his dismissal due to the stress and internal confusion caused by executing an immoral, illegal and pointless war? What if his conscience is in revolt?

What if General Petraeus passed out while testifying in congressional hearings fainted because his conscious mind is rebelling against his subconscious knowledge that he is a hollow man laden with meaningless medals that signify naught. What if his mind just shut down from the psychic overload of the reality versus the lies?

What if the famous West Point Honor Code crept into his brain and overwhelmed his imposed and constructed beliefs? There is a place where reality (truth) and lies intersect, and this place is psychosis.

What if the U.S. currently resides in a state of national psychosis? What are the current wars if not a manifestation of collective psychosis -- wars which defy rational thought and will never achieve anything of merit?

What if logic and clarity of thought are no longer a leadership requisite? What if our leaders and their re-election reflect nothing so much as our ignorance and mass hysteria? What if we have approached an episode of national schizophrenia, sometimes defined as stimulus overload?

When is too much? We are on a treadmill of input, trying to filter out the extraneous or downright lies, but the feed never stops. News programs assault us with pugnacious opinionators, while dissonant feeds scroll across the bottom of the page. It is like some horrific dystopian world in which words are our SOMA.

When the psyche is overloaded, the organism enters a state of struggle for definition. It rarely heals without a period of rest and/or intervention. It does not look like the media onslaught will abate anytime soon.

As a nation, we are a bunch of re-actors. We vote to the swing of the pendulum, in anger and without much deliberation. Logic and orderliness of thought does not seem to be the order of the day. We prefer the antipodes, but cannot decide which reflects our best national interests.

The U.S. is a nation in opposition to itself and its national values, or what we thought were our core values. The decisions of our Supreme Court reflect this ambivalence. Engineers of state torture -- Bybee, Yoo and Addington -- were recently cleared of charges because they believed in the righteousness of their decisions. And so passioneering takes the torch from disinterested rationale.

What if we are so morally bankrupt that we have actually adopted a Warrior Code, and war has become our national identity?

We are acting from Sartre's mauvaise foi (bad faith). For the world's freest nation, saying "You made us do this" is poor form. "You won't you let me (be a democratic nation; honor our civil rights, etc. . . .)" -- is the cry of spoiled child. We do or we don't, we are or we aren't.

Perhaps the Generals know this, and their innards are staging an externally-witnessed revolt.

--Jim & Lisa

_________________

Last day to exercise your franchise!!!
You must vote in the 5 categories marked with an asterisk (+ #18, in which RAW is also competing).

PLEASE GO TO:

Captain American

I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face of your T.V. ohh…
I'm the Cult of Personality
I exploit you; still you love me
--Cult of Personality, Living Colour
______________

When Ranger looks at General David Petraeus's medal-festooned uniform, he always wonders: Where are the meaningful badges, like the Combat Infantry Badge and the valor awards that used to reside on General officers ribbon bars? Heck, even good Platoon leaders had these in previous wars.

The same can be said of General Stanley McChrystal and most of our present-day warrior elite. All the medals on their chest will not ensure success or victory. But this post concerns Petraues -- the Teflon Boy whose leadership in Afghanistan is now touted as essential and indispensable to that war effort (as though fighting in Afghanistan has anything to do with warfare, anyway. It is merely organized violence.)

To debunk some of the Petraeus myth:

[1] Petraeus did not write the Counterinsurgency manual. He was the Officer in Charge or Commanding Officer to the group which produced the manual.

There are no manuals in the U.S. Department of Defense system which are written by only one or two people. A plethora of GS 1712 Training Specialists and GS 1710 Education Specialists are generally tasked with writing and researching manuals.

It is infrequent that soldiers write manuals; Petraeus was a contributor, and should not be hailed as some modern-day developer of COIN warfare techniques. The COIN FM 3-24 strikes us as a disjointed group effort, and does not belie the articulation imputed to the General.

[2] No man is indispensable in our system. Witness the hasty departure of former indispensable General McChrystal.

We are replicant replacement units, as it should be. Wars are not about individuals, nor are they individual efforts. War is an institutional effort and if this system cannot produce replacement leaders, then we are a lost bunch of warriors. Nobody is irreplaceable, whether we are talking the platoon or national level.

Even al-Qaeda has produced twelve number 3's since the beginning of hostilities. Individuals are irrelevant. We are not living in a Marvel comic book

General Petraeus is not Captain America.

Misdiagnosis

Close your eyes
Have no fear
The monster's gone
He's on the run and your daddy's here
--Beautiful Boy, John Lennon

The roman promoters really did things right.
They needed a show that would clearly excite.
The attendance was sparse so they put on a fight
Threw the Christians to the lions, sold out every night
--Give the People What the Want, Ray Davies
__________________

Is being a citizen a case of believing, or is it simply one of suspending disbelief?

Listen to General David Petraeus: He seems calm, intelligent and reasonable, but what he says is absolute insanity. Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) the loss of sanity, or the exact opposite? Ranger asks because he cannot accept the exhortations of Gen Petraeus as sane.

Petraeus was interviewed on Charlie Rose 4.22.10, and Ranger left the late night program impressed with the General's demeanor. It was not until the day after that he realized he had listened to, what the Southerner's call, "a mouthful of mush." It was beautiful piffle. A trifle. He wore the suit well is the best that could be said.

Has the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) become our national entertainment, our own home-grown reality show -- "Survivor Afghanistan"? PTSD is reality-oriented, versus the talk of Petraeus which merely presents the illusion of sanity.

Our leaders actually feed us a malignant reading of events which poses as sanity; in comparison, even the occasional paranoia of PTSD is sane as it has basis in actual lived events.