The Night of the Generals

[question everything]

The Night of the Generals

Vanity Fair

The six retired generals who stepped forward last spring to publicly attack Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the Iraq war had to overcome a culture of reticence based on civilian control of the military. But while each man acted separately, all shared one experience: a growing outrage over the administration's incompetence, leading some of the nation's finest soldiers to risk their reputations and cross a time-honored line.
by David Margolick April 2007

By late 2001, briefing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was familiar territory for Lieutenant General Greg Newbold. As director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Newbold, a three-star in the Marines, had done it many times since Rumsfeld had arrived at the Pentagon earlier in the year, and had come to know the routine: the constant interruptions, the theatrics, the condescension. But, according to Newbold, there was something different, and alarming, about one particular briefing around that time: the topic. It was about going to war with Iraq.

Only a few months had passed since the attacks of September 11. The war in Afghanistan was just under way; officially, the enemies were al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But what interested Rumsfeld now was Baghdad, Basra, and beyond. To Newbold and many others, Iraq seemed irrelevant to the problems America faced, and besides, things there appeared largely under control; Saddam Hussein had been more or less handcuffed through sanctions and other diplomatic measures. Yet here was a sign, one of several, that Saddam, and not Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, was most on the Bush administration's mind.

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(Newbold).. until the midterm elections of 2006 he had never voted.. (but) waived that rule last year to back his old friend James Webb, another retired Marine, who is now the Democratic senator from Virginia, even though he warned Webb beforehand that a radioactive general might do him more harm than good. When, as the newest member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Webb praised those military men "of moral conscience" whom the Bush administration had "demeaned" and "destroyed" for their opposition to the war, Newbold was among those he had in mind. Then, in the Democratic response to Bush's 2007 State of the Union address, Webb listed Newbold on the honor roll of military officials who'd counseled against the war.

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It was apparent early on—from two or three days after 9/11, when, with the smoke from the smoldering Pentagon still in the air, Newbold told Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, of plans to go into Afghanistan. "Why are you going into Afghanistan?" he says Feith replied. "We ought to be going after Iraq." (Feith has previously denied saying this; Newbold says he'd take a polygraph on the point. Feith declined to talk to Vanity Fair.) It simply isn't possible now, says Newbold, to fathom how "extraordinarily inappropriate" Feith's comments sounded at the time. Then, at a meeting a few months later, as the Americans chased the leadership of al-Qaeda, he says, he heard Wolfowitz say essentially the same thing. In each instance, Newbold's reaction was the same: "Who cares about Iraq? We have this three-penny dictator, this bantam rooster of no consequence. Besides, they're quiet now anyway—who cares?" (Wolfowitz says he never disputed the need to go after al-Qaeda; the issue for him was whether a war against Saddam Hussein could proceed simultaneously.)

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Newbold is bitter about the ideologues who, he feels, hijacked American military policy, but they are not his department. What angers him more are his former superiors and colleagues, the men with all those stars on their shoulders. "When you look around at how many people were in positions to raise their voices, senior military leaders who had a duty to object, and how many did—I'm having trouble counting how many did," he says, his voice intensifying. "I'm having trouble getting above one. But I know, personally, how many thought this whole thing was crazy. And if the military had said, 'We won't be a part of this,' then it wouldn't have been. They couldn't have done it publicly, but they could have given their best military advice. And it was their duty."

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http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/04/iraqgenerals200704?currentPage=1