Krauthammer and the I-Know-Better Generals

When my son was involved in Operation Steel Curtain, Rep. John Murtha hit the networks with his anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war bloviating. It was picked up by Al Jazeera and other middle eastern media. Military families with sons & husbands involved in the mission were furious and felt betrayed.

I can imagine what the families of troops involved in Operation Mountain Lion in Afghanistan and ongoing operations in Iraq must have been feeling as the now infamous squad of retired generals rushed to the cameras to denounce their former boss, Donald Rumsfeld.

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent, well-reasoned opinion piece on Townhall.Com that serves as a timely warning. A small excerpt:

The Defense Department waves away the protesting generals as just a handful out of more than 8,000 now serving or retired. That seems to me too dismissive. These generals are no doubt correct in asserting that they have spoken to and speak on behalf of some retired and, even more important, some active-duty members of the military.

But that makes the generals' revolt all the more egregious. The civilian leadership of the Pentagon is decided on Election Day, not by the secret whispering of generals.

We've always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Hussein's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including the United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America. Some other retired generals have found it necessary to rise to the defense of the administration. Will the rest of the generals, retired or serving, now have to declare which camp they belong to?

It is precisely this kind of division that our tradition of military deference to democratically elected civilian superiors was meant to prevent. Today it suits the antiwar left to applaud the rupture of that tradition. But it is a disturbing and very dangerous precedent that even the left will one day regret.