Congratulations General Odierno?
by Donald Devine
Issue 118 - October 22, 2008

General Ray Odierno bowls you over. He is not that big but is trim, solid-looking and radiates toughness – he epitomizes leadership, competence, energy, resourcefulness, even thoughtfulness, honor and bravery. You know immediately why men follow him into battle.

While Gen. David Petraeus deserves full credit for stabilizing the military situation in Iraq and his promotion to regional commander for doing so, his deputy Gen. Odierno has been in charge of daily battlefield operations and has borne the burden of the fight, to which Petraeus himself is witness. Bringing the Iraq war to a successful conclusion could not be in better hands than the man who has just been promoted as its new commander.

I saw him in operation in 2003 when I visited Iraq when he was also deputy to Petraeus, then as 4th Infantry Division commander, responsible for Saddam Hussein’s homeland around Tikrit. He was equally comfortable on the battlefield, in a helicopter, training Iraqis, and planning operations in the dictator’s former palace. He was clear that his job was to get the Iraqis in shape to take over the war so that U.S. and coalition forces could transfer daily operations to the locals and withdraw U.S troops to fortified locations as merely a reserve to the Iraqis.

Sometime thereafter the mission was changed to nation-building. Or had been already changed and not yet filtered down the chain of command - since the other regional commanders reported the same limited goal. With the publication of former Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith’s, Bob Woodward’s and the other new books and articles by the insiders, it is clear just what happened. The original blame for expanding the mission to nation-building and democratization was aimed at the crowd of neoconservatives surrounding Defense Policy Board former chairman Richard Perle. In light of fellow neocon Feith’s book, that is no longer credible. The neocons surely used their influence to move policy in that direction but they, like Perle, were in advisory or in staff positions in the White House or otherwise outside of the chain of command and were of secondary influence at best.

From the conversations and memos reflecting the thought of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the Feith book, it is clear he warned against nation-building, recommending an immediate turnover to Iraqis, and was even reluctant to invade Iraq if it meant committing large U.S. forces (unlike Afghanistan, which used mostly special forces). For what it is worth, in several meetings I (with several others) had with him at the time, while he was discreet, it was clear to me he favored a limited operation. In fact, that was what inspired me to accept the Defense Department offer to go to Iraq to see if his subordinates held the same views, which it was thereafter clear to me that they did.

Feith blames the State Department and, directly, Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer – who was nominally under Rumsfeld but also reported to former employer State and, critically, to the White House directly - for changing the mission. Bremer responded to Feith’s charge by saying it was President George W. Bush himself who told him to stay until he made Iraq peaceful and democratic. With wide access to the inside players, Woodward’s book seems to confirm this. Former Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker – apparently speaking for the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff – is quoted as confronting President Bush himself with: “I don’t think you have the time to surge and generate enough forces for this [ Iraq] thing to continue to go.” The president was quoted to respond, “Pete, I’m the president and I’ve got the time,” to which Schoomaker replied “Fine, you are the president.”

Now even the President’s time is running out and he might well be succeeded by a President Obama who apparently does not want to spend the time. The military bureaucracy, moreover, never wanted to spend the time and resources, although it formally submitted. Yet, from the two successive chairmen of Joint Chiefs of Staff at the very top, Gen. Peter Pace and Adm. Mike Mullen, to the regional commanders Adm. William Fallon and Gen. John Abizaid overseeing Iraq, to Iraq commanders Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and Gen. George Casey, all opposed expanding the mission to a long term occupation and nation-building. As Feith now reveals, the uniformed officers were joined in this view by most of the Pentagon political appointees.

National War College Professor Mackubin Owens calls this opposition the most blatant attempt by the military to undermine a president “since General McClellan tried to undermine Lincoln’s war policy in 1862.” It certainly is unusual that all of the nation’s military expertise is arrayed against the opinions of one civilian and the latter prevails but, of course, he happened to be the president. Boston University Professor of International Relations Angelo Codevilla argues in The American Spectator that the honorable solution was to resign, especially for the political appointees. As a matter of ethics he is undoubtedly correct but just imagine the incredible chaos if all of those who disagreed down the line - especially in the uniformed military chain – resigned! Who would be left to run the ship and what would be the consequences for the soldiers on the ground much less the U.S. military as an institution?

It was not just the Pentagon. As Feith and Codevilla make clear, State and the CIA opposed and undermined presidential policy as much or more. Feith presents evidence these people were dishonest in not properly expressing their exact policy concerns. Instead, they presented subterfuges that were tactically effective to delay but not reveal their true positions. Codevilla, using information presented by Feith, but not so interpreted by him, shows that Defense did this too - and that all of the bureaucratic and political parties to the debate were disingenuous in not presenting the president with the real alternatives he should choose between. Should the leaders of all three bureaucracies have resigned?

But it goes even deeper. It was National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice who devised the decision-making process that integrated the views of the contending bureaus into a single “consensus” document that Codevilla demonstrates forced the views of all parties into a vague phrasing that did not allow the president to make real choices beforehand and did allow the different bureaucracies afterwards to interpret them as they saw fit. Should she have resigned too? But it was the president who wanted a consensus view from the “experts” and was therefore the true initiator of the process.

The cascading implications of culpability from top to bottom, is why Codevilla focuses upon the resignation of Sec. Rumsfeld. As he correctly notes, Rumsfeld was “intellectually far above the other top officials” and as such he alone could have forced the president to make the tough decisions. As an insider in such high-level decision-making, and with some acquaintance with the secretary, I suspect he knew what the president would choose; but he also knew that the military bureaucracy opposed the president’s own policy prescription and to highlight this division between the uniformed commanders and the commander-in-chief would cause more damage than allowing the ambiguity. I eagerly await Rumsfeld’s memoir.

Bureaucratic decision-making in a democracy is a tough thing. Democracy and politics will have their way. But bureaucracy has its own dynamics and integrity. Take the case of Gen. Jack Keane, the former vice-chief of staff of the Army. He was among the minority in the military who supported the Iraq surge. In fact, even after the surge, he still considered troop levels “too low.” Unable to convince his military superiors about the surge, he went with leading civilian neoconservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Kagan to a fellow neoconservative high White House official to argue the case against his own chain of command. How is a military or other bureaucracy supposed to operate when subordinates act against the organization in such a manner? Democracies need functioning bureaucracies too, especially military ones. What happens when insubordination seeps down to soldiers under fire?

The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines constitute America’s most important bureaucracies. They have their failings as do all bureaucracies but over time they have developed traditions that allow them to transcend to a great extent those limitations. The outside political forces intrinsic to democracies intrude on them - yes to limit them from exceeding ultimate civilian authority but politics also undermines their effectiveness. When politicians, including presidents, overrule considered and widespread expert opinion on military matters it can have disastrous effect as it did under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam. If politicians’ opinions are to overcome all on military policy, why do we have West Point, Annapolis and the rest - together with their knowledge and traditions?

Back in the real world Gen. Odierno is now tasked with leading America’s finest in an extremely dangerous military environment with his president, the incoming president, a fractious Congress, and divided and conflicting bureaucracies and peoples all warring in the rear. Pity him – but do him and his troops the great honor they deserve for being able to succeed at all under these impossible conditions.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.