Editorial

Another Iraq War victim

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the latest in a long line of generals thrown under the wheels of the train wreck that is the War in Iraq.

Bush's new Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has decided not to renominate the Marine general who will complete his first tour as JCS chair in September. Usually, JCS chairs serve two terms, but Gates said that despite earlier plans to recommend Pace for a second two-year term as chairman, he instead is recommending Adm. Mike Mullen, currently chief of naval operations, to take over the nation's top military post.

"I think that the events of the last several months have simply created an environment in which I think there would be a confirmation process that would not be in the best interests of the country,'' Gates said.

That's because, if Pace came up for reconfirmation, Congress would be able to question him about details of the last two years of the war. By putting a new flag officer up for the post, Congressional criticism will be significantly blunted.

This is a war in which the troops, and even most of the generals, have performed magnificently. But the nation's top military leaders have been micro-managed by the Bush administration and had their professional military judgement often overruled or ignored. General after general have been given impossible tasks and then canned when they failed, casualties of policies that gave them no capability to actually succeed.

Our top military leadership has been virtually wiped out by the Bush administration during this war, as those who argue with the administration are shunted aside and those whose ambitions for top command are sufficient to promise the president they can achieve results, and are then forced to fall on their own swords when they discover it's not possible to do so.

September is considered by Congress to be the deadline for results of the current "surge" to be successful.

As the top commander during that surge (although the JCS is a planning group and doesn't actually command troops), Pace would have faced intense Congressional scrutiny during his September hearings. Because, now that all the forces are finally in place, the surge is failing. After a brief drop in violence in Baghdad (but an equivalent rise in violence outside the city), the level of sectarian killing is back up to pre-surge levels, and less than a quarter of the city is actually under the control of U.S. and Iraqi forces. But the daily average of U.S. casualties has increased by 50-100 percent, and too many of the Iraqi troops either don't show up for operations, or are actually participating in the sectarian violence that is tearing the country apart and which the surge is supposed to prevent.

Pace is simply one more casualty of a war that has gone on too long, shouldn't have been launched in the first place, and has been mishandled by this administration from the start.

Meanwhile, this ground war will now be led by a Navy admiral, supervising a Navy admiral who now commands CENTCOM, the theatre of operations where the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought. It's not a Navy war. The best role the Navy can play is if we ever decided to bomb Iran. In that case, the Navy would have a major role in bombing operations and keeping the sea lanes open that Iran would try and close.

Somehow, the moves Bush's team is making at the top just don't seem to bode well for the future.