In early 2017, U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen, who first stumbled
upon TomDispatch while on duty in Afghanistan in 2011, wrote
to the site wondering if he might do a piece for it. He got in touch, in part,
because a former Army colonel, Andrew Bacevich, whom he admired, was
already regularly featured here, as were other former U.S.
military officers like retired Air Force lieutenant colonel William Astore. TomDispatch had, in fact,
been one of the earliest places to highlight the work of former military
officers critical of this country’s forever wars across the Greater Middle East
and Africa. (After all, or so it then seemed to me, who could have grasped
those disasters better?)
That February,
when Sjursen wrote his first article for TomDispatch on the
wars that had begun in 2001 and then (as now) had “no end in sight,” something
struck me about the new administration of President Donald Trump. He had just
filled key positions around him with generals from those very wars (all of whom
are now gone from his administration). From James Mattis to John Kelly to H.R.
McMaster, all of them were visibly wedded to those very never-ending conflicts.
So, in introducing Sjursen’s inaugural piece, I wrote, “Under the
circumstances, it’s good to know that, even if not at the highest ranks of the
U.S. military, there are officers who have been able to take in what they
experienced up close and personal in Iraq and Afghanistan and make some new --
not desperately old -- sense of it.”
Today, in
his 26th piece for this site, Sjursen takes up that very
subject: in a military that certainly has critics and dissidents in its lower
ranks and its officer corps who have grasped the disastrous nature of almost 19
years of losing wars across large swaths of the planet, why are there no
critical generals (or admirals) around? As he points out, the system that
produces those flag officers is not set up to allow for the rise of anyone
unwilling to buy in big time to the American way of war as it now exists across
far too much of the planet. Tom
Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler?
A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to (Someone Like) You...
By Danny Sjursen
A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to (Someone Like) You...
By Danny Sjursen
There once
lived an odd little man -- five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds
sopping wet -- who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all
but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General
Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago,
this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero,
celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this
country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.
Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in
Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end
up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars”
from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional
Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general
in the Marines.
A teenage
officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the
Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a
constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia
(while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine
Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as
in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency,
and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the
Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While
he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or,
as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy”
operations -- that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate
business interests -- until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal
Marine.
But after
retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist
foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played
such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what
became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled“War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years
and four months in active military service... And during that period, I spent
most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall
Street, and for the Bankers.”
Seemingly
overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed
antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were,
admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and
politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas.
This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would
pejoratively label American “isolationism.”
Nonetheless,
Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his
unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist
critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face
increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was
particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later
France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly
proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.
Nevertheless,
the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism
and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven
historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry
into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of
an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath
should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American
militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America
remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from
one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In
the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally
inconceivable.)
Smedley
Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a
different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed
forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still,
there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and
today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours
of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may
have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s
generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both
sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely
concealed economic and imperial interests.
Nonetheless,
whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth
century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first
decades of this century hasn't produced a single even faintly comparable
figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about
the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it
particularly encouraging.
Why
No Antiwar Generals
When
Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals
holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief
of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on
active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with
scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine
public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably
unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star
generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash,
there are more of them today than there were even at the height of
the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was
then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public
critic of today’s failing wars.
Instead,
the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired
colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me),
as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of
either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know
just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against
America’s forever wars.
The big
three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point
history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich;
and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public
servants, poignant voices, and -- on some level -- cherished personal mentors.
For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired
senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same
critiques.
Something
must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel.
Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early
retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting
flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack
of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of
top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to
earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that,
according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not
explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image -- officers whose
careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to
foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.
Consider
it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David
Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge”
in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that
selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over
colonel, a protégé of his -- future Trump National Security Advisor H.R.
McMaster -- earned his star.
Mainstream
national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a
major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted
counterinsurgency or “COINdinista"
protégés and their "new"
war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very
tactics twice -- once in each country -- as did acolytes of his later, and you
know the results of that.
But here’s
the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed
general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who
had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they
were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this
country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership
system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a
crew of future Smedley Butlers.
At the
roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization" after the Vietnam War debacle. This
first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier
tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The
elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it
increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game" most citizens had.
More than
just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the
professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular,
ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in
retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to
producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak grufflyand look like a man with a head of his own, but
typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.
One group
of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump --
but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think
that The Donald doesn't “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to
wage war forever and a day.
What
Would Smedley Butler Think Today?
In his
years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component
of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had
fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the
constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the
interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this
still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion
embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as
looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of
April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain
the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial
complex.
That
beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement
regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the
giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of
Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time,
the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United
Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment
had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what
Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington.
Of course,
he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop
levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist
excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936
presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond
belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and
capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives”
seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case
in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment,
including -- to please a president -- the creation of a whole new military
service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.
Sadly
enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public
institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it
would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general
in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of
ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the
military system of our moment.
Of course,
Butler didn't exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost
25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion -- and demonized as a leftist,
isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule -- he
checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died
there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to
death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar
activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the
two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very
end.
Someone of
his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today.
Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure.
In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military
profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental
faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of
higher-ups. This is typical...”
Today,
generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And
more’s the pity...
Danny
Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army
major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and
Afghanistan and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the
Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers,
Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and his forthcoming
book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is
available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and
check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill."
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us
on Facebook.
Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the
second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S.
Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright
2020 Danny Sjursen
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176665/tomgram%3A_danny_sjursen%2C_why_no_retired_generals_oppose_america%27s_forever_wars/
