“BUT GENERAL TURGIDSON, I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS AUTHORITY TO ORDER THE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS…’

10/11/09

Last week, General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. military commander in Kabul, sent his superiors three possible options for pursuit of the Bush/Obama war in Afghanistan. The first is to keep troop levels in Afghanistan about where they are, at 68,000 troops. The second option, and that preferred by General McChrystal, is to increase troop strength by 40,000 soldiers. The third, designed to make the General’s preferred option look sane by comparison, is to commit 60,000 additional troops to this hopeless conflict in that great graveyard of empires in Central Asia.

Fans of the Afghanistan war, primarily, but not exclusively, Republicans, are urging the President to “go with the general.” After all, they argue, he is a military man and knows what he is doing.

Hmm…

The defense of our country is the most important and most defensible duty of our government. Therefore, even though our political and military leadership has strayed from that task for at least the last sixty years, and the expansion of the military’s role has picked up considerably under the Bush/Obama administration, the military top brass are the most important bureaucrats in the federal government. However, they are only that…the most important bureaucrats in our government. As bureaucrats, the generals and admirals behave as bureaucrats do: they seek to expand their power and influence by increasing the numbers of people and dollars under their control. Therefore, if decisions on deployment and troop levels were left in the hands of the military because, after all, they are military people, and especially because four of our last five presidents have no real military experience, we would forever be increasing troop levels in places where our forces are already deployed and constantly looking for new places to deploy troops. After all, the bigger and more engaged the military, the greater the power of the military leadership. This is natural bureaucratic behavior.

The Founding Fathers were smart enough to understand the bureaucratic mindset. They further understood that wars had emptied the treasuries and decimated the young, promising generations of the monarchies of the old Europe from which our infant Republic sought a clean break. The Founding Fathers also knew that the most important liberty of which the state could deprive a citizen was his or her life. Those are some of the reason the Founders weren’t about to let the generals decide issues of war and peace and so put a civilian, the president of the United States, in charge of the military. While the GOP, in its curious and horribly misguided insistence on equating militarism with patriotism and conservatism, seems to have forgotten this, civilian control of the military is one of the paramount pillars of our Republic, and it has done as much to guard our liberty as have the actions our military has been ordered to undertake by our civilian leadership.