Rotten policies, rotten generals – and rotten results.

A persistent theme of this blog is that we have a serious problem with both the quality and the integrity of many of our current crop of US Army generals. Simply put, we have the wrong people – subject to some exceptions - leading the Army. They are self-seeking careerists for the most part and, above all, they are not professional. They know how to keep up appearances but they lack the necessary breadth and depth of knowledge to be masters at what they do. They are neither informed or experienced. Some are entirely out of their depth. More than a few are extremely dumb. Most are risk averse (in the sense that any action might damage one’s career – so inaction is preferable).

Rotten leadership tends to produce rotten results which is why we have the mess we have in Iraq. It really did not have to be this way. A fiasco of such proportions was not inevitable. In fact, it was caused, to a significant extent, by the inactions and actions of a number of senior generals in the US Army. In essence, they, the Army generals, set the conditions for chaos in Iraq to result – and, predictably, our enemies, and many ordinary Iraqis who were not terrorists, but who were apalled at much US Army behavior, rose to the occasion. If the roles were reversed, and America was invaded by a bunch of Iraqis to remove an undesirable leader, many Americans would have behaved exactly the same way. People are naturally territorial – and they find it unacceptable to be invaded.

Many insiders know about this situation but so far have been reluctant to comment publicly because of a feeling that they would be pilloried for criticizing the Army during a time of war. This is classic misguided patriotism because the very time you really do need to seek out incompetent Army leadership is in time of war. That is when incompetence gets soldiers killed and jeopardizes the success of the Mission. Further, the leadership of any organization should never be confused with the led. The buck stops with those in charge, with people like General Abizaid, Lieutenant General Sanchez and General George Casey and so on.

So far, the Army generals have done a masterful of deflecting criticism by aggressively, but secretively, blaming the Bush Administration for sending them to war without enough troops (not necessarily a valid accusation, by the way) and by wrapping themselves in the flag. Dr. Samuel Johnson came up with the statement, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” to describe exactly such false behavior.

The Bush Administration is very far from innocent if only because members of that Administrations, such as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, refused to fire Army generals they knew were inadequate for the tasks at hand. Nonetheless, the truth about Army leadership incompetence is now beginning to leak out from subordinate Army officers who witnessed the poor leadership in detail, from civilian colleagues and from a number of well sourced journalists and academics.

My information is that a series of books exposing the deficiencies of Army generals in Iraq will hit the market in 2006. One of the most interesting promises to be a work by well known author, and Washington Post journalist, Tom Ricks. I am told the working title is ‘Fiasco.’