Four-Star Wars

Illustration: "Junta" by Jacques Moitoret

By Jeff Huber at-Largely

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has supposedly cautioned his generals against publicly challenging the White House, but it looks like Stanley McChrystal didn’t get the memo. McChrystal’s unrestricted information warfare against President Obama continues.

The rift between the Pentagon and the administration has grown so wide it may never close during the Obama’s tenure. This has been coming for some time; President Obama’s failure to clean house at the Department of Defense when he took office is catching up to him.

The military and its supporters have been maneuvering Obama into a box trap since before the election. Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen all spoke out against Obama’s campaign pledge to get U.S. troops out of Iraq within 16 months. Gen. Ray Odierno, now commander in Iraq, went on record with Tom Ricks as wanting to keep 30,000 or so troops in Iraq until 2015, years after the 2011 withdrawal deadline called for in the Status of Forces Agreement. He did so in March 2009, after Obama had taken office. Only recently, Odierno noted that the insurgency in Iraq might drag on for another five, ten or fifteen years.

In an Oct. 20 story in Rupert Murdoch’s TimesOnline, Odierno said he might not be able to live up to Obama’s withdrawal pledges due to increasing levels of violence in Iraq. This pronouncement came out the same day Obama promised Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that he would pull troops out on schedule.

McChrystal has been openly derisive of Joe Biden’s idea to go with a small-footprint, counter-terror strategy in Afghanistan.

As Professor Andrew Bacevich notes, Afghanistan is a “war we can’t win.” Unfortunately for us, it’s the only war the military has to bank on for its Orwellian long war strategy, one that hopes to keep us in a constant state of low level conflict in order to preserve the military institution and its supporting infrastructure. As President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned us, the unwarranted influence of the military industrial complex has persisted. It has become our national monster.

Read more at at-Largely

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.