BY Scott Horton
December 16, 2007
One of the myths of the Bush Administration goes to its relation with the military. The facts are very stark. This Administration consists largely of men and women who evaded military service and who have little respect for those who serve in uniform. They have a passion for heavy-handed use of the military, for foreign escapades which they pursue with little planning and shoddy design, but they are uninterested in taking the advice of the career military about how to pursue these matters. Their mantra is consistent: We know better. But in fact it should be: We know nothing.
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Polling shows these numbers are changing. That’s largely the result of a sense that the military is disrespected by the Bush Republicans, and that its role is abused. Just looking at the headlines over the last week, a fairly typical one, we see that in a number of stories. For instance, polls show that
military families have turned against Bush and now have an on-balance negative view of his performance as president. A group of
more than thirty generals and admirals,(PDF 864 kb) including many very prominent names, called on Congress to defy a threatened presidential veto and to pass a bill that would state still more explicitly the existing outlawing of the Bush Administration’s torture techniques.
Even the Armed Forces Journal, a right-leaning bulwark of military thinking, issued harsh words against Rudolph Giuliani and Attorney General Mukasey over their irresponsible comments on the subject of waterboarding and abusing detainees.
What is the Bush Administration’s response to this? It wants to politicize the military. It seeks to introduce a system in which officers are reviewed on their politics in connection with promotions. We see the trend to politicization in the way the Bushies respond to criticism from retired military already. Any general or admiral who raises a critical voice towards them is instantly labeled as a “Clinton general”—and if he or she makes a critical attitude plain before departing, something far more vicious is likely to happen. I catalogued some of the cases in which generals were viciously assailed for expressing mild criticism of an Administration policy or decision here. The truth is that military promotions have long rested on a careful process of peer review, resisting political intervention for all but the highest echelons of generals. This is a system designed to build professionalism and self-confidence and to break away from the American military legacy of the nineteenth century in which officer appointments were the subject of constant political gamesmanship–with disastrous results.
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John Yoo, the man who authored the Administration’s torture policy and other abominations, and who rather surprisingly continues to roam freely across the political stage, is the dark figure behind this move as well. He authored a shocking piece in the
UCLA Law Review recently in which he viciously, and falsely, attacks the JAGs and suggests aggressively that they need to be brought under political control. I discussed his piece
here. Now we see the control measure that has been settled on.
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