Thursday, December 8, 2005

the Revolt of the Generals

December 3/4, 2005

"Broken, Worn Out" and "Living Hand to Mouth"

The Revolt of the Generals



By ALEXANDER COCKBURN



The immense significance of Rep John Murtha's November 17 speech calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq is that it signals mutiny in the US senior officer corps, seeing the institution they lead as "broken, worn out" and "living hand to mouth", to use the biting words of their spokesman, John Murtha, as he reiterated on December his denunciation of Bush's destruction of the Army.



A CounterPuncher with nearly 40 years experience working in and around the Pentagon told me this week that "The Four Star Generals picked Murtha to make this speech because he has maximum credibility." It's true. Even in the US Senate there's no one with quite Murtha's standing to deliver the message, except maybe for Byrd, but the venerable senator from West Virginia was a vehement opponent of the war from the outset , whereas Murtha voted for it and only recently has turned around.



So the Four-Star Generals briefed Murtha and gave him the state-of-the-art data which made his speech so deadly, stinging the White House into panic-stricken and foolish denunciations of Murtha as a clone of Michael Moore.



It cannot have taken vice president Cheney, a former US Defense Secretary, more than a moment to scan Murtha's speech and realize the import of Murtha's speech as an announcement that the generals have had enough.



Listen once more to what the generals want the country to know:



"The future of our military is at risk. Our military and our families are stretched thin. Many say the Army is broken. Some of our troops are on a third deployment. Recruitment is down even as the military has lowered its standards. They expect to take 20 percent category 4, which is the lowest category, which they said they'd never take. They have been forced to do that to try to meet a reduced quota.



"Defense budgets are being cut. Personnel costs are skyrocketing, particularly in health care. Choices will have to be made. We cannot allow promises we have made to our military families in terms of service benefits, in terms of their health care to be negotiated away. Procurement programs that ensure our military dominance cannot be negotiated away. We must be prepared.



"The war in Iraq has caused huge shortfalls in our bases at home. I've been to three bases in the United States, and each one of them were short of things they need to train the people going to Iraq.



"Much of our ground equipment is worn out.



"Most importantly -- this is the most important point -- incidents have increased from 150 a week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over a time when we had additional more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revolution at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled."




read more at Alexander Cockburn: the Revolt of the Generals

1 comments:

Static Brain said...

I hope and pray people listen to what Murtha had to say and take action. He knows like many of the rest of us that Iraq is just Arabic for another Vietnam. This war is unwinnable and we are there for all the wrong reasons. Going to war for oil and killing people for lies is not okay. The children dying there and being born with birth defects from the 3000 metric tons of depleted Uranium is not okay. Halliburton getting no bid contracts and their profits rising is not okay. Privatizing Iraqi oil fields for profit by American corporations is not okay. In fact nothing about this war is okay. We are not liberating Iraq. We are enslaving it for oil.

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