Military Voices of Dissent Regarding the War in Iraq
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March 23, 2003
The Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon)
Even Future Warriors Harbor Doubts About War
by Les Aucoin
On the day following President Bush's war ultimatum, I had an impromptu lunch with men and women who are on the fast track to leadership in the U.S. armed forces and intelligence services. As we were far from Washington and they were for the moment living outside the chain of command, we could speak freely.
Ironically, as these "troops" spoke their minds, American civilians who share their concerns are accused of not "supporting our troops."
The effect of such logic is, of course, to use our troops as "human shields" to prevent an honest questioning of the war's assumptions - the very kind of questioning my officers were engaged in when I lunched with them last week.
Does anyone think the warriors at my lunch table opposed our troops? If you do, your "troop support" is selective indeed. My advice is for supporters of this war to stop smearing those who oppose it. Many opponents could actually be said to "support" the troops in the most effective way - by trying to keep them out of harm's way.
Several aspects of this war trouble the officers I met. I've heard concern about those aspects again and again from civilian war critics. The apparent unraveling of Western security alliances that kept the peace since World War II and helped win the Cold War alarmed several officers who spoke to me. They don't see a new order emerging to take their place and are uneasy about America's riding alone in a troubled, dangerous world.
If this nation's future military leaders can harbor qualms about this war, civilian critics ought to be able to harbor them, too - without being heckled by others who haven't thought as carefully about the war as these military men and women.
Fact: Millions of citizens who oppose the war also support our troops. I, for one, especially support the ones who lunched with me and let their hair down last week.
Les AuCoin is a professor of political science at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. He represented Oregon's 1st District in Congress for 18 years (1975-93).
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0324-06.htm
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January 17, 2003
BBC News Online
Military voices of dissent
by Steve Schifferes
Nancy Lessin, one of founders of Military Families Speak Out has a stepson, Joe, in the marines. He is deployed in Kuwait as an Arab language specialist.
She said that opposition to an unjust war was patriotic.
And she said that if Iraq's main export was olive oil, we wouldn't be facing the possibility of war.
So far there are no members of these organisations who are also active members of the military. But the organisers believe that there is considerable hidden support for their views.
Many of the military activists, former Gulf War veterans, are warning that any conflict will be more costly, in terms of casualties and disabilities, than anyone is prepared for.
They have also called for more evidence and broader support from the Allies before launching a "vindictive" strike.
"This war isn't worth the life of one American soldier," said Charlie Sheehan-Miles, a former tank crewman in the Gulf who is one of the founders of VFCS.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2663191.stm
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January 26, 2003
Washington Post
Desert Caution
Once 'Stormin' Norman,' Gen. Schwarzkopf Is Skeptical About U.S. Action in Iraq
by Thomas E. Ricks
As a result, Schwarzkopf is skeptical that an invasion of Iraq would be as fast and simple as some seem to think. "I have picked up vibes that . . . you're going to have this massive strike with massed weaponry, and basically that's going to be it, and we just clean up the battlefield after that," he says. But, he adds, he is more comfortable now with what he hears about the war plan than he was several months ago, when there was talk of an assault built around air power and a few thousand Special Operations troops.
He expresses even more concern about the task the U.S. military might face after a victory. "What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan."
(Rumsfeld said last week that post-Saddam planning "is a tough question and we're spending a lot of time on it, let me assure you." But the Pentagon hasn't disclosed how long it expects to have to occupy Iraq, or how many troops might be required to do that.)
The administration may be discussing the issue behind closed doors, Schwarzkopf says, but he thinks it hasn't sufficiently explained its thinking to the world, especially its assessment of the time, people and money needed. "I would hope that we have in place the adequate resources to become an army of occupation," he warns, "because you're going to walk into chaos."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52450-2003Jan27.html
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Nov. 08, 2002
WEBB: DON'T ATTACK IRAQ
Former Marine urges restraint
By ALEX FRIEDRICH
A former Cabinet member under former President Ronald Reagan told military officers Thursday in Monterey that the United States should not invade Iraq.
Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb said the country should focus instead on eliminating international terrorism. Speaking at the Naval Postgraduate School, Webb said that without a clear understanding of consequences - or a clear exit strategy - U.S. forces face a decades-long occupation that could sap American resolve and resources.
The United States also risks inflaming Arab anger even more if it invades without first finding a solution to the Palestinian problem - which would include establishment of a Palestinian state, Webb said.
"I am very concerned with the direction this country may be going with regard to Iraq," Webb told several hundred students and faculty members. "Are we going to reshape American foreign policy to put (soldiers) on the ground in the Middle East? I think it's a mistake."
Webb, a best-selling novelist who also has written nonfiction since leaving the military, cautioned against an invasion in a Sept. 4 article in the Wall Street Journal.
He has argued against toppling the regime and rebuilding the government unless the United States is in direct danger. The evidence of such danger, he said, is not in sight.
Despite the size of the U.S. armed forces, he said, a collection of 1.5 million troops "is not that many" if it's spread out over the world.
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/local/4473702.htm
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Comments of Gen. Anthony Zinni (ret.) during a speech before the Florida Economic Club, Aug. 23, 2002:
Attacking Iraq now will cause a lot of problems. I think the debate right now that's going on is very healthy. If you ask me my opinion, Gen. Scowcroft, Gen. Powell, Gen. Schwarzkopf, Gen. Zinni, maybe all see this the same way.
It might be interesting to wonder why all the generals see it the same way, and all those that never fired a shot in anger and really hell-bent to go to war see it a different way. That's usually the way it is in history. (Crowd laughter.)
But let me tell you what the problem is now as I see it. You need to weigh this: what are your priorities in the region? That's the first issue in my mind.
The Middle East peace process, in my mind, has to be a higher priority. Winning the war on terrorism has to be a higher priority. More directly, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Central Asia need to be resolved, making sure Al Qaeda can't rise again from the ashes that are destroyed. Taliban cannot come back. That the warlords can't regain power over Kabul and Karzai, and destroy everything that has happened so far.
Our relationships in the region are in major disrepair, not to the point where we can't fix them, but we need to quit making enemies we don't need to make enemies out of. And we need to fix those relationships. There's a deep chasm growing between that part of the world and our part of the world. And it's strange, about a month after 9/11, they were sympathetic and compassionate toward us. How did it happen over the last year? And we need to look at that -- that is a higher priority.
The country that started this, Iran, is about to turn around, 180 degrees. We ought to be focused on that. The father of extremism, the home of the ayatollah -- the young people are ready to throw out the mullahs and turn around, become a secular society and throw off these ideas of extremism. That is more important and critical. They're the ones that funded Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. That ought to be a focus. And I can give you many, many more before you get down to Saddam and Iraq.
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/zinni.html
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November 26, 2002
worldnetdaily.com
First base, first!
by David H. Hackworth
While there's no question that Saddam is a silver-screen-size villain who definitely deserves the worst, the world stage is filled with other serial-killer types also plotting how to inflict maximum pain on much of the Free World. Take the leader of North Korea, a country that might have just joined the Atomic Bomb Club, whose henchmen keep threatening to destroy South Korea and Japan – when they're not getting off on their storm troops torturing and chopping up as many Americans as they can grab. Or the religious leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia, who've guaranteed their places in paradise by exporting shiploads of money, arms and wackos to almost every terrorist group going except for – as far as I know – the IRA.
But while none of these countries with heavy attitudes wishes us anything less than a crash landing, one way or another we've still managed to contain them without the war solution. Which makes a lot of sense.
Even during the darkest days of the Cold War, when evil creeps like Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev threatened to bury us, we bought time and saved lives by playing the containment card. The strategy worked: We won when the nuclear-armed Soviets went down just like so many great empires before them that grabbed too much turf and tried to support too big a military habit.
A lot of senior soldiers, active and retired, say we need to continue the same strategy with Iraq – where it will also eventually work – while we use our resources where it won't: in the tricky fight against international terrorists who have no flagpoles to bomb, fleets to sink, aircraft to shoot down or armies to punch up. Who can keep delivering sucker punches without a worry about our putting the containment squeeze on them with embargoes or economic sanctions?
Because if GWB doesn't make sure we've battened down the home-front hatches before heading for Baghdad – which you can count on millions of Muslims viewing as an attack on the Islamic world – the invasion of Iraq will surely activate thousands of Arab kamikazes coiled like rattlesnakes, waiting to strike us from "sea to shining sea."
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=29786
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November 16, 2002
It's best to contain Saddam, Hackworth says
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/steigerwaldqa/s_102774.html
http://www.hackworth.com/
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January 15, 2003
Seattle Times
Questions About War That Can't Be Ignored
by Bruce Ramsey
In antiwar circles, Philip Gold was the man of the week: the military analyst, formerly of the Washington Times, splitting with conservatives over war with Iraq. This month, Gold severed formal ties with Seattle's Discovery Institute, where he had been a senior fellow in national-security affairs.
His allies on the Internet hailed him. One Web site called him "The Heroic Phil Gold."
He does not look the part. With his short stature, dark beard and soft voice, Gold looks more like a university professor than a U. S. Marine. Actually, he has been both, with no apologies. He is no pacifist.
Gold has no doubt that America can beat Iraq. His question is whether it can do so with the minimal loss of U.S. lives (the only lives we count) that Americans have come to expect.
Maybe. In the Gulf War, he says, "We got awfully lucky."
"Anything that smells like taking Iraqi oil to pay for the war will backfire," says Gold.
Even if we don't steal their oil, our military occupation will be hated. Iraq is not a country to be won over with candy bars and baseball. We will not be there, as in South Korea or West Germany, to protect Iraqis from foreign enemies.
The Iraqis are going to want us out — and a lot sooner than we will be planning to get out.
War is being seen by some Americans as the solution to the problem of Saddam Hussein. It may mean the end of him, but it is not an ending in any other sense. It is a beginning — and of something, Gold reminds us, that we have not thought much about.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0115-03.htm
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September 30, 2002
Marine questions commander in chief
by William Raspberry
WASHINGTON -- Larry Williams, a retired Marine colonel now teaching at George Washington University, has a few questions he'd like to ask his commander in chief. They aren't smart-aleck questions. This a serious military man, whose service included stints in Vietnam and Lebanon.
And though his questions may seem obvious, I think you'll be struck by how few of them the President has answered perhaps, as Williams says, even to himself. Here they are, abridged from his recent open letter to President Bush and elaborated in an interview:
• What is the actual threat to the United States -- the purpose of war?
Chemical and biological weapons, Williams argues, are not weapons of mass destruction. "They are very inefficient and unpredictable and hard to use effectively. Casualty-producing, yes, but not on a large scale."
Says Williams: "Even if the Iraqis make a nuclear device -- which also concerns me -- what would they do with it? The Mideast is not alarmed. Why are we -- thousands of miles away -- alarmed to the degree of war?"
• How many American lives will we expend to punish Saddam Hussein?
Baghdad has nearly 5 million residents. It is reasonable to expect that many of them would see America not as a liberator but as an invader -- and that many of these would see our military as at least as great a threat as Saddam. "If," says the professor, "1 million of them resist an American invasion in street-to-street resistance-under a local threat of chemical and/or biological weapons, how many Americans will die?"
• How long will public support last when hundreds, possibly thousands, of body bags start arriving?
Williams thinks most Americans do not remember Vietnam. "Desert Storm and Afghanistan make war look so easy, with so few casualties. When support at home wanes, how will you turn back the clock?"
• How, militarily, do you plan to fight this war?
The Army is too "heavy" to get there short of a Desert Storm-style of buildup. Air power and advanced technology get you little in the fight to conquer cities.
• How many Iraqi citizens do you plan to kill in order to bestow democracy?
"You can't level cities by bombing, as in World War II. When newspapers and TV broadcasts around the world start to show pictures of Iraqi mothers carrying babies dead from U.S. bombs -- pictures real or staged, it doesn't matter -- the world will be inflamed in anti-American sentiment, and U.S. public support will dissolve."
• How will you govern a defeated Iraq?
"Of course, a military victory is as assured as it was at the outset of Desert Storm. But then, how will you govern a country probably still resisting through guerrilla activity and in which we do not speak the language? Will your military forces be confined to cantonments at night because they do not control the streets of Baghdad?"
• How does the war against Iraq contribute to winning the war against terrorism?
"The origin of the attacks of 9/11 and the preceding chain of attacks against the embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks in 1983 and other embassies thereafter were in the Arab/Muslim world. Victory in the war against terrorism must necessarily be found in that worldwide presence. How does alienating every facet of that world contribute to victory in the current war on terrorism?"
Williams, a career Marine who insists that his thoughts are his and not to be linked to George Washington University, says he learned in Beirut and South Vietnam that his government didn't always have better information than he had -- not because officials lied but because critical details were filtered out as communiques made their way up the chain of command.
"That experience convinced me that the most senior leadership does not always have the best counsel," he said.
He then offers Bush his own bit of counsel:
"As President and commander in chief, you clearly have it in your power to move a reluctant nation toward war. But if war is too important to be left to generals, it is also too fraught with unforeseeable catastrophe to be left to the personal whim of one man. Please, sir, ask yourself my questions -- and make certain you have the answers right."
William Raspberry's e-mail address is willrasp@washpost.com
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=58369
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January 29, 2003
BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH
Ignore the First Chickenhawk's "State of the Union" – listen, instead, to General Schwarzkopf
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j012903.html
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February 13, 2003
The Nation
The Army's Empire Skeptics
by Jason Vest
Over the past year the American intelligentsia has expended no small amount of cerebral capital in an effort to articulate, if not delineate, visions of empire. Whatever form a Pax Americana might take, it will almost certainly require expanded use of the US military. Although there is virtual unanimity of opinion in the ranks of the Army's officer corps that war with Iraq--the cornerstone of the new order--will likely result in a US military victory, Nation interviews with dozens of active-duty and retired officers, as well as reviews of recent military studies and articles, found that there is, nonetheless, a marked lack of enthusiasm in some segments of the officer corps not just for the Iraq mission but for its greater implications for the military as well as the society it defends.
Within military ranks, according to one midlevel officer, "one group believes that our Constitution is the right way to go for everyone and that we have a moral imperative to give everyone the world over the opportunity to have that device. You have another group that sees our military as a defensive weapon to use in the face of an actual threat to the nation, which means in this context enthusiasm about taking on Al Qaeda but not Iraq. Then there's a smaller group that believes political leaders, instead of really addressing problems and resource issues, are going to go out and empire-grab and disguise it as something else so we can feed a warped version of the American dream, in which we continue to consume more resources and produce more waste, rather than really struggle with what it takes to keep the American dream viable and inspirational in a world of 6 billion people."
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030303&s=vest
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February 17, 2003
PTI
US becoming a colonial power: Wesley Clark
WASHINGTON: The United States is well on its way to becoming a colonial power if President George W Bush does go ahead with plans to attack Iraq, a former Nato supreme commander said on Sunday.
General Wesley Clark, a former Nato supreme commander and a potential Democratic candidate for president, told a Meet the Press programme on NBC that Saddam Hussein was "finished" and having gone so far, the US could not change its plans to remove him.
"We are at a turning point in America's history. We are about to embark on an operation that is going to put us in a colonial position in the Middle East following Britain."
It is a huge change for the American people and what this country stands for, he said.
The Bush administration, he said, has not respected its allies and that is why it finds itself without the support of many Nato allies and even in those countries prepared to support the US, public opinion is against the war. Iraq, could have been contained without war, he said.
Clark also warned against a civil war in Iraq after the present regime is removed because of the ethnic and religious divisions in the country--Kurds in the north, Shiites who constitute the majority in the country, and Sunnis who now wield power.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=37738538
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