Peacock Generals and the Ongoing Betrayal of Our Troops

While I have been a long critic of the military disaster in Afghanistan - and I truly opposed Chimperator Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney's lie based war in Iraq - I like so many others have been remiss in not doing more to wake people up to the urgent need to withdraw ALL of our troops now.  The carnage and wasting of young lives goes on unabated and for absolutely nothing in the longer term.  Sadly, until my son-in-law's severe wounding, I simply failed to pay sufficient attention. Saving face for incompetent generals and loud mouth sabre rattling politicians doesn't justify a single lost life.  Yet America continues to throw away the lives of our troops:

The Department of Defense announced today the death of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.
Killed were: Sgt. Channing B. Hicks, 24, of Greer, S.C., and Spc. Joseph A. Richardson, 23, of Booneville, Ark.
They died Nov. 16, in Paktika province, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with an improvised explosive device and small arms fire. They were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan. 

And then there's this:

A Marine from New Prague, Minn., was killed Sunday during combat operations in Afghanistan, according to family members and media reports.
Lance Cpl. Dale Means, 23, died Nov. 18 of injuries inflicted by an improvised explosive device, according to the New Prague Times.

These deaths are happening almost daily.  And why are these young men and sometimes women dying?  For bullshit like this?

HERAT, Afghanistan -- Women in Converse sneakers jog untrammeled -- if still in full, flowing chadors -- in this western Afghan city's biggest park, enjoying freedoms rarely witnessed in the rest of Afghanistan.

Rich businessmen, refugees for a few days of "picnic" from more violent Kandahar, pull on apple-scented shisha pipes like lotus eaters in the pagodas of the local pleasure garden. Unwary for once of kidnappers or suicide bombers, they punctuate the night with hoots of laughter.

It is enough to make one sick.   But there's more.  It's our narcissistic, peacock generals who in truth haven't been able to lead our troops to real victory since World War II.  Oh yes, there was the first Iraq War under the Chimperator's father, but there we saw flat terrain and an overwhelming force take on the far out classed troops of Saddam Hussein.  It wasn't even a real contest, especially viewed in hindsight. All we have seen since Vietnam has been American might going down to defeat in guerrilla wars that traditional battle plans simply cannot handle.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the strutting peacocks who have overseen the debacles.  Here are highlights:  

FASTIDIOUSNESS is never a good sign in a general officer. Though strutting military peacocks go back to Alexander’s time, our first was MacArthur, who seemed at times to care more about how much gold braid decorated the brim of his cap than he did about how many bodies he left on beachheads across the Pacific. Next came Westmoreland, with his starched fatigues in Vietnam. In our time, Gen. David H. Petraeus has set the bar high. Never has so much beribboned finery decorated a general’s uniform since Al Haig passed through the sally ports of West Point on his way to the White House. 

I would propose that every moment a general spends on his uniform jacket is a moment he’s not doing his job, which is supposed to be leading soldiers in combat and winning wars — something we, and our generals, stopped doing about the time that MacArthur gold-braided his way around the stalemated Korean War.

And now comes “Dave” Petraeus, and the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. No matter how good he looked in his biographer-mistress’s book, it doesn’t make up for the fact that we failed to conquer the countries we invaded, and ended up occupying undefeated nations. 

The genius of General Petraeus was to recognize early on that the war he had been sent to fight in Iraq wasn’t a real war at all. This is what the public and the news media — lamenting the fall of the brilliant hero undone by a tawdry affair — have failed to see. He wasn’t the military magician portrayed in the press; he was a self-constructed hologram, emitting an aura of preening heroism for the ever eager cameras.

[H]e did a lot of good things, like conceiving of the idea of basically buying the loyalties of various factions in Iraq. But they weren’t the kinds of things that win wars. In fact, they were the kinds of things that prolong wars, which for the general had the useful side effect of putting him on ever grander stages so he could be seen doing ever grander things, culminating in his appointment last year as the director of the C.I.A. 

THE problem was that he hadn’t led his own Army to win anything even approximating a victory in either Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s not just General Petraeus. The fact is that none of our generals have led us to a victory since men like Patton and my grandfather, Lucian King Truscott Jr., stormed the beaches of North Africa and southern France with blood in their eyes and military murder on their minds.

The generals who won World War II were the kind of men who, as it was said at the time, chewed nails for breakfast, spit tacks at lunch and picked their teeth with their pistol barrels. General Petraeus probably flosses. He didn’t chew nails and spit tacks, but rather challenged privates to push-up contests and went out on five-mile reveille runs with biographers.

His greatest accomplishment was merely personal: he transformed himself from an intellectual nerd into a rock star military man. The problem was that he got so lost among his hangers-on and handlers and roadies and groupies that he finally had his head turned by a West Point babe in a sleeveless top.

If only our political leadership, not to mention the Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies, had known how quickly and hard he would fall over such a petty, ignominious affair. Think of how many tens of thousands of lives could have been saved by ending those conflicts much earlier and sending Dave and his merry band of Doonesbury generals to the showers.

A harsh assessment?  Most definitely, but none the less all too true.  Obama needs to wake up NOW and get our men and women out of Afghanistan.