What ever happened to resigning?
I generally defer on military matters to people with miiltary experience. However, I've also read enough history to know that there are bad generals and good generals. It's not always easy to discern one from the other except in times of military conflict. McClellan: bad general. Grant: good general.
That's happening again today with this week's announcement that Navy Adm. William Fallon was retiring as head of U.S. Central Command which includes the Middle East battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fallon's early retirement is owed largely to one thing: He was against Gen. David Petraeus' successful surge strategy and has continued to attempt to undermine it. As Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations writes:
[Esquire article writer Thomas P.M.] Barnett writes further: "Smart guy that he is, Robert Gates, the incoming secretary of Defense, finagled Fallon out of Pacific Command, where he'd been radically making peace with the Chinese, so that he could, among other things, provide a check on the eager-to-please General David Petraeus in Iraq."
It's doubtful that this was why Bush and Gates appointed Fallon. Why would they want to "check" the general charged with winning the Iraq war? But it's telling that Barnett would write this; it may be a reflection of Fallon's own thinking. Even if he wasn't appointed for this reason, Fallon has certainly seen his job as being to "check" Petraeus. The problem is that Fallon is a newcomer to the Middle East and Iraq, while Petraeus has served there for years and is the architect of a strategy that has rescued the United States from the brink of defeat.
This is not, however, a strategy that Fallon favored. Not only was Fallon "quietly opposed to a long-term surge in Iraq," as Barnett notes, but he doesn't seem to have changed his mind in the past year. He has tried to undermine the surge by pushing for faster troop drawdowns than Petraeus thought prudent. ("He wants troop levels in Iraq down now.") The president wisely deferred to the man on the spot -- Petraeus -- thus no doubt leaving Fallon simmering with the sort of anger that came through all too clearly in Esquire.
Like a lot of smart guys (or, at any rate, guys who think they're smart), Fallon seems to have outsmarted himself. He thinks the war in Iraq is a distraction from formulating "a comprehensive strategy for the Middle East," according to the profile. The reality is that the only strategy worth a dinar is to win the war in Iraq. If we fail there, all other objectives in the region will be much harder to attain; if we succeed, they will be much easier.
When Grant started winning battles during the Civil War, does anyone believe that Lincoln would've stood for some general undermining a winner?
President Bush -- like Lincoln early in the Civil War -- has not always chosen to follow the advice of the "right" generals. The early, post-conventional war victory in Iraq was poorly managed, with too few troops and a focus on minimizing casualties by bunkering down instead of killing insurgents and terrorists. However, by every measure, the surge has been a success. Troop casualties are down, terrorist attacks are down, and political reconciliation is beginning to take place.
Why would anyone in his right mind attempt to undermine that sort of success?
Yet that's what Fallon was doing, publicly. It's a bad idea for your continued career advancement.
The long and short of it is that the military is subject to civilian control. General officers shouldn't be undermining the policies of an elected president -- of either party. If they feel so strongly about it, they should be resigning and then speaking out.
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Hi All,
I believe the general, general Fallon that is, should resign; but FIRST the military should WIRE HIS MOUTH SHOUT with a live GRENADE!!!
WOW, ANOTHER military BIG MOUTH, with a LITTLE BRAIN!
Court marshal him for TREASON!!! He MUST BE working for the ENEMY, have the FED's check into it and may find a MONEY TRAIL to his back pocket for selling out our military and the Iraq's to boot!
This one IS A BAD GENERAL...Glad to see him GO!
Go back and play WAR GAMES on the computer, Fallon, you might Learn how to fight!
'The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.' - Ronald Reagan