Demoralized generals refuse 'war czar' job

According to popular myth and Pentagon propaganda, generals are the staunchest patriots, aching to serve their country and ambitious to take the leadership. They also don’t mind making top government connections where they can influence big arms contracts.

All the more is it a telling sign that at least three retired generals have turned down such an opportunity. To be precise, they refused to be considered for the job the April 12 Washington Post called “war czar” for the Bush administration. The responsibility of the “war czar” is to coordinate civilian and military direction of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “war czar” would report directly to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. It has been said that Hadley would take the job himself but he is “too busy.”

Had this job been offered four years ago, when the Iraqi government had just been smashed and Bush was preparing his victory speech, dozens of retired officers and an equal number of civilians would have lined up for the job.

It’s not that these generals now feel guilty that the U.S. is an aggressor and the Pentagon’s officers are war criminals. They just don’t want to lose. Apparently the Iraq war is going to hell in a hand basket—from U.S. imperialism’s viewpoint—and everyone connected to the Pentagon knows exactly how quickly.

Two of the generals held their tongues. But one, Marine Gen. John J. “Jack’’ Sheehan, was quite outspoken. Gen. Sheehan, a former NATO commander, now has a cushy job with Bechtel Corp., a company highly invested in the Middle East and in oil extraction. It is only under extraordinary circumstances that someone like Sheehan would turn down such a job, let alone criticize the administration.

“The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” said Sheehan. “So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No thanks.’” According to the Washington Post, “Sheehan said he believes Vice President Dick Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq.”

One refusal could be due to an individual quirk; two, perhaps a coincidence. That three or maybe five top military leaders of U.S. imperialism turned down the job is a sign that the military brass sees the war in Iraq, and perhaps in Afghanistan too, as already lost. They don’t want responsibility for a disaster that they know they can’t turn around. And they don’t even expect an opportunity to organize an orderly retreat.

If this is the attitude of the top officers, one can only imagine how this plays out among the rank and file who have just learned that their tours in Iraq are now 15 months instead of 12. Or of the National Guard from those smaller cities and rural areas in the U.S. who are being mobilized for the second time to go to the Iraq quagmire. When will their indoctrinated patriotism turn to class awareness and resistance?

It is fitting that much of the media chose to call the new post the “war czar.” A czar is an autocratic ruler, an emperor, with the root of the word from the Roman “caesar,” which then became the Germanic “kaiser” and Russian “czar.” Caesar was assassinated by his senators two millennia ago. The Russian czar and the German kaiser were overthrown when war-weary Russians and Germans, after 3-4 years of the World War I bloodbath, rose up against them.

It looks like Gen. Sheehan and his colleagues want to avoid that fate.

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