"The Chicken Hawk Factor."
"'There's more combat experience on the 7th floor of the State Department than in the entire Office of the Secretary of Defence,’ quipped the high-ranking State Department official to a room filled with senior military officers last month. The statement ‘generated riotous applause,’ according to an eyewitness quoted in the ‘Nelson Report,’ a private newsletter subscribed to by foreign-policy heavyweights and embassies in Washington.
The incident revealed the growing importance of the ‘Chicken Hawk’ factor in the increasingly rancorous debate over the Bush administration's push toward war on Iraq and beyond. At the moment, the military brass is leading the opposition. It includes both the folks who will have to fight this war and those who have retired from the service. The list of former generals includes Secretary of State and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and his deputy, US Naval Academy grad and Vietnam veteran Richard Armitage; as well as veterans of the Gulf War, including most famously Bush major's national security adviser, ret. General Brent Scowcroft; the Gulf War commander, ret. General Norman Schwarzkopf; and his logistics chief and later successor at Central Command, ret. General Anthony Zinni…
Dubya famously avoided the draft by getting a posting with the Texas National Guard, the kind of dodge that Powell referred to in his memoirs as being reserved for ‘the sons of the powerful.’ Cheney, however, avoided the uniform altogether, mumbling to one reporter that he:
‘… had other priorities in the Sixties than military service.’
Rumsfeld, the other leading Cabinet hawk, flew jets for the Navy between the Korean and Vietnam wars but never saw combat.
In fact, the only cabinet member with combat experience is Powell.
The sub-cabinet level also suffers from a distinct deficit in war-time experience. Cheney's hawkish and powerful chief of staff, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, scooted through the sixties at Yale University and Columbia Law School, while Rumsfeld's top deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Peter Rodman, completed graduate degrees before entering the national-security bureaucracy. The number three at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith, the administration's most avid champion of the Iraq war and its staunchest supporter of Israel's right-wing government, turned 18 only after the draft ended and, like Libby, went to law school. Other major administration hawks, such as Elliott Abrams, of Iran-Contra fame and now a member of the National Security Council in charge of democratizing the Middle East, and Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Strategy John Bolton; also avoided military service during the height of the Vietnam War, reportedly for medical reasons. They, too, were law school-bound.
As for the ‘axis of incitement,’ those beating the war drums loudest outside the administration, members of the
Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) also appear to have done what they could to avoid the uniform during the Vietnam War. The chairman of Rumfeld's Defence Policy Board (DPB) and one of the most visible advocates of military action to oust Saddam, Richard Perle, spent Vietnam at the University of Chicago (along with Wolfowitz) before joining the staff of Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, who at the time was among the last remaining Democrats to support the Vietnam war…
Another highly visible super-hawk and Perle protégé, CSP founder-director Frank Gaffney, also avoided military service during Vietnam.
Here's a startling fact: only four of the 32 prominent right-wingers who authored the now-famous Sept. 20
PNAC letter to Bush urging him to extend the war on terrorism to Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority, have any military experience. And three of those four were in the reserves like Bush. Among the signatories who have become fixtures on TV talk shows and op-ed pages arguing why the US must invade Iraq, stand by Sharon, or ‘remake the face of the Arab world’ are: ‘Weekly Standard’ editor William Kristol, his sidekick Robert Kagan, the Canadian-bred columnist Charles Krauthammer, Christian Right leader Gary Bauer, moralist William Bennett, former ‘Commentary’ editor Norman Podhoretz, former ‘New Republic’ editor Martin Peretz, and former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, alongwith Perle and Gaffney.
Other armchair hawks include Michael Ledeen, yet another omnipresent Iran-contra alumni who says that the word ‘stability’ gives him the ‘heebie-jeebies,’ who spent Vietnam curled up comfortably at a university library carrel reading Machiavelli; Rumsfeld intimate and DPB member Kenneth Adelman, who claims that a military campaign against Baghdad would be a ‘cakewalk,’ also avoided service.
This glaring disparity between experience and rhetoric has not been lost on the military brass.
‘It's pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another,’ noted Zinni, who as chief of the US Central Command in the late 1990s was responsible for US forces in the Persian Gulf region. The main concern of ex-generals like Zinni and Schwarzkopf is that an invasion will burden the military with an impossible and perhaps interminable political task.
‘Do we really want to occupy Iraq for the next 30 years?’ asked former Navy Secretary and Vietnam veteran James Webb in a ‘Washington Post’ column last week.
But the Chicken Hawks have not been shy about counterattacking Zinni and Co., arguing, like Clemenceau, that "war is too important to be left to the generals."
CHUCK HAGEL. Republican Senator for Nebraska. Vietnam veteran.
"It is interesting to me that many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war. They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off… Maybe Mr.
Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad."
GENERAL NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF
. "The War Room," website. http://www.sierratimes.com/cgi-bin/warroom/topic.cgi?forum=11&topic=175
"The thought of Saddam Hussein with a sophisticated nuclear capability is a frightening thought, okay? Now, having said that, I don't know what intelligence the US government has. And before I can just stand up and say, 'Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we need to invade Iraq,' I guess I would like to have better information. Candidly, I have gotten somewhat nervous at some of the pronouncements Rumsfeld has made. It's scary, okay? Let's face it: There are guys at the Pentagon who have been involved in operational planning for their entire lives, okay?… And for this wisdom, acquired during many operations, wars, schools, for that just to be ignored, and in its place have somebody who doesn't have any of that training, is of concern."
COLONEL DAVID HACKWORTH. "Newsday." 24th January, 2003. http://truthout.org/docs_02/020403F.htm
Hackworth was the youngest US captain in the Korean War, and the youngest colonel in Vietnam.
"Having thought long and hard about war with Iraq. I cannot find justification. I don't see a threat. They are not Nazi Germany. This is not the Wehrmacht. In no way does the situation in Iraq affect my nation's security. That is the bottom line of analyzing threats. 'Does this country threaten my country's security?' In this case, absolutely not…
I don't think militarily it will be a big deal to smack this little broken pussycat out of the way. Four weeks, he's history. He'll be tacked up on the barracks wall. Iraq is not a tiger that is roaring with nuclear weapons in each paw like North Korea…
There's a real possibility we take catastrophic casualties. 160,000 disabled and almost 10,000 dead as a result of Gulf War illness. All of us that were there, we look in the mirror and still wonder if something is going happen to us…
We're still in Japan, Korea and Germany 57 years after World War II. My guess is at least 60 years in Iraq, costing as much as $2 trillion to $3 trillion…
One and a half billion Muslims, who don't like us anyway. Now they're gonna look and say, 'Here come the crusaders again.'..
Cheney and Bush and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, they've never stood and faced the elephant. These are the people who gush for war.
Through the long eight-year bloodbath of Vietnam, not one general sounded off and said, 'Bad war, can't win it, let's get out.' They went along to get along. It's true again. The top generals are head-shakers."
"Not only have the past six decades of hot and cold war bucks been finger-lickin' good for the game's insiders who slip back and forth between government and business, they have also motivated a lot of fanatics around the world to hate all things American. And now many of these scary types are willing to kamikaze planes into buildings on Main Street USA or drive explosive-laden trucks into our facilities in other countries where we probably shouldn't be." (http://www.iraqwar.org/)
"If GWB doesn't make sure we've battened down the home-front hatches before heading for Baghdad – which you can count on millions of Muslims viewing as an attack on the Islamic world, the invasion of Iraq will surely activate thousands of Arab kamikazes coiled like rattlesnakes, waiting to strike us from ‘sea to shining sea.’" (Ibid.)
"Here we are, the most powerful nation in the world, the sole surviving superpower, and around the globe our military folks are hunkered down like inmates in maximum- security prisons.
