Posted on 04/16/2006 12:01:29 PM PDT by A.A. Cunningham
A very telling anecdote.
Every day I thank God for people willing to put their personal popularity on the line to make decisions that they believe are best for the country.
That is too rare a commodity these days, but it seems to me that the Bush administration has more of these types than average.
The Clinton's corrupted everything they touched. I had hoped the Military had resisted their taint. Seem 6 of the Generals did not.
Or the CIA's. Excellent post.
Rummy will be there until Jan 2009. He is not leaving. Bush is not going to fire him. The rest of this PR stunt is just a Junk Media self abuse hissy fit.
Thanks for the thread of the interview. General DeLong did a good job with O'Brien, wish I would have seen it but I don't watch CNN.
Yes, he was another great general also.
If Rumsfeld's so bad, why didn't generals resign?
April 17, 2006
BY THOMAS LIPSCOMB
http://www.suntimes.com/output/otherviews/cst-edt-ref17.html#
There is a great furor over whether the opinions of a number of retired high-ranking officers should tip the balance in the ongoing debate over the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But the question really isn't whether Rumsfeld should resign. He has already resigned several times and had President Bush tear up his letters of resignation. He clearly is taking responsibility for his actions on a continuing basis.
But now that a galaxy of flag officers are raining down on Rumsfeld demanding his resignation, no one seems to have bothered to ask which, if any, of these generals had ever submitted his own resignation in protest against the conduct of the Iraq war, or the bumpy transition we are locked in now. The demands for Rumsfeld's resignation began with Gen. Anthony Zinni.
Differences in policy between the Pentagon brass and its civilian leadership are nothing new. At the end of the Clinton administration there was a dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in honor of the Joint Chiefs off Staff that illustrates this well. Over the years the Council has morphed from a small but influential voice in international policy issues to a glorified Rotary Club for Park Avenue investment bankers and lawyers. The once acerbic off-the-record questioning that rattled many of its guests of honor has degenerated into a love fest hosted largely for star-struck millionaires.
After listening to subtle and not so subtle digs at national defense policy by the guests of honor and appreciative sniggers from the audience, I jotted a question down on the back of a card and passed it to former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, who was at my table. ''If you have so many significant disagreements with national defense policy, what have you done about it?'' Lehman wrote back that if I asked that question, he'd buy me lunch, and passed it back to me with a smile. So I asked it.
''What do you expect us to do?'' a senior Marine general replied. ''Resign,'' I said. ''Cyrus Vance did. And he was [President Jimmy] Carter's secretary of state.'' ''You are questioning my cojones, and I am a Marine!'' the general shot back as the millionaire fan club gasped at my disrespect.
He was right. I was. I still am, his and any general officers who apparently decided discretion was the better part of a nice retirement parade with a medal or two and a couple of offers of board positions. At least Wesley Clark got himself fired and summarily retired as NATO commander in comparative disgrace for submarining the Balkans policies of his Oxford classmate President Bill Clinton and his defense secretary, William Cohen. Gen. Billy Mitchell is regarded by many as having saved American military aviation by accepting a court-martial and resigning from the service he loved because of his differences in policy with the federal government.
Retired military and civil servants are receiving ongoing retirement pay from American taxpayers. If they want to give the public the benefit of their experience in consideration of current policies, we are fortunate to get it. But policy differences are one matter and calls for a specific resignation are quite something else. As a book publishing executive for many years, I have always welcomed the opportunity to make a buck by publishing ''now it can be told revelations'' from those formerly in power. And timing those ''revelations'' to promote a forthcoming book is one of the oldest tricks in the trade.
But if Generals Gregory Newbold, John Batiste, Zinni and others have believed Rumsfeld's policies have been so dire that they are calling for his resignation, their opinions would have carried far more weight if they had stated them at some personal cost to themselves while on active service by resigning in protest. That action might have also carried some evidence of the courage Americans expect of the highest ranking officers of its uniformed services.
Thomas Lipscomb is senior fellow of the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future. He founded Times Books. tom@digitalfuture.org
The "paper of record" merits its name once in a while. Thanks for posting this guest OpEd column.
Uh-huh.
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld's job security is becoming more a function of partisan politics than any measure of his on the job performance.
And that's just stupid.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.