Last time we discussed your refusal to abide by the Constitution’s hard-and-fast war-making provision, a decision that merits — as it did for most of your post-1945 predecessors — impeachment proceedings. Waging war in the manner you did in Syria is the work of an absolute monarch or a dictator, not that of a popularly elected president of this republic.
Today, we must discuss a topic that has been covered in this space on multiple occasions; namely, the need for you to immediately purge — via forced retirement — scores of your general officers. The American fetish for treating these officers as god-like wonders is baseless, and must be curtailed to the greatest possible extent. Among the most obvious reasons they merit forced retirement are:
–They and their predecessors have not won a war since 1945. In truth, they have won nothing in the most war-filled 72 years in American history.
–They have regularly betrayed the military men and women entrusted to their care by American parents by taking those troops to fight in wars that neither they nor their political masters intended to win. I do not know of a single case, since 1945, when a general officer resigned and told the citizenry that he did so because he refused to lead their soldier-children into a war no one meant to win, and in which the rules-of-engagement made those soldier-children targets rather than killers.
–They hold their positions for venal self-interest. To understand why no general has resigned and told the foregoing truth to the public, just survey the membership of America’s corporate boards of directors. Those boards are loaded with former generals who are making more mounds of money to add to their already luxurious pensions. The formula-for-success for US general officers obviously is: keep silent, get use to losing, get your troops killed for nothing, and you will be generously rewarded when you retire.
–They are incompetent and, apparently, shoddily educated men and women. One example should suffice. They have been waging war, at various levels of intensity, against Islamists since Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war in 1996, and they have lost on every field of battle on which they have engaged the Islamists. Mr. President, did you know that our Islamist enemies are not professionally trained soldiers; that they are armed almost entirely with small arms, some of Korean War vintage; that they have no air cover or naval support; and that their funding, supply lines, and safe havens are always at risk? Did you know that this is the kind of paramilitary force that has consistently humiliated the United States and its military for two decades, one that has forced your canting generals to obliquely admit to being losers and fantasists with the words like “There is no military solution to this conflict” and “The Islamists have nothing to do with Islam.”
–They are thoroughgoing liars. Again, one example will suffice. Since at least 2003-2004, every Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and every US general officer commanding in Afghanistan, has told the American people that: (1) the remnants of the Taleban, al-Qaeda, and other Islamist groups were being eliminated; (2) that our democracy- and nation-building efforts were bearing durable results; and (3) that the Afghan military was on the verge of being able to defend its country with minimal foreign assistance. Each statement was a transparent lie every time it was spoken, and the general officers who spoke them knew they were lies. Today, the truth is that al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Taleban are thriving in Afghanistan, while the Afghan government and its military are collapsing. No number of additional lies will save either. Are these dishonest men and women the ones you are going to trust to restore America’s greatness? They are much more likely to again cover the republic in infamy.
Now is the moment, Mr. President, to fall back on you instincts, commonsense, and, most important, the non-interventionist demands of the people who elected you. America has no life-and-death national interests in Syria or the rest of the Middle East. Very few citizens want to expend trillions of additional tax dollars and their kids’ lives on a war there that is not necessary; which would be fought for Israeli, Saudi, and U.S. corporate interests; and which your generals would surely lose. So, dump your in-house, Cheney-sounding, Neocon war-monger, General McMaster; immediately ban the self-admitted criminal General Petraeus– who lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then deliberately compromised classified information — from the White House grounds; and then get on with a wide-ranging purge that can do nothing but improve the the quality, commonsense, and nationalism of the US general-officer corps.
With this done, Mr. President, recall how much essential work you have pledged to do at home, and how sick your supporters are of unnecessary, interventionist, and always lost wars. Then, Sir, look around the nation and understand two irrefutable facts: (a) that America is located in North America, 5,000 miles from the Middle East’s idiot wars, wars which cannot come here save through the continued lax enforcement of border and immigration laws, and (b) that the republic’s security, unity, and prosperity would not be damaged if those distant peoples killed one another for however long it takes for their wars to burn out, or until there is not a single living soul from Morocco eastward to India.
America First, Mr. President, always, America First.
Michael Scheuer is an American former intelligence officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, blogger, author, commentator and former adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies.
