Honeymoon of the Generals in the Age of Trump: Wolfowitz on McMaster, Mattis

 “Cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war" (image source).

by Gaius Publius

“What I do is I authorize my military. We have given them total authorization..."

—Donald Trump, April 2017

The war strain is strong in both parties.

—Yours truly

Short and impossibly bitter. In all the talk of the multiple domestic disasters that the Age of Trump will usher in — health care destruction, assaults on immigrants, a new surge in death-by-lying-cop, a breaking broken climate, and all the rest — Americans have conveniently forgotten one of the worst, the loosing of our generals and their weapons of war upon the poor and brown of the world.

In short, Donald Trump, with what looks to me like bipartisan consent, has unleashed the dogs of war. That's my first point in this brief piece. My second point is this: There will be a price, and no one in this country will want to pay it.

The Dogs of War

Tom Englehardt considers my first point in a much longer piece, "The Honeymoon of the Generals." Near the middle he writes (my emphasis):

Institutionalizing War and Its Generals

Above all, President Trump did one thing decisively. He empowered a set of generals or retired generals—James “Mad Dog” Mattis as secretary of defense, H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, and John Kelly as secretary of homeland security—men already deeply implicated in America’s failing wars across the Greater Middle East. Not being a details guy himself, he’s then left them to do their damnedest. “What I do is I authorize my military,” he told reporters recently. “We have given them total authorization and that’s what they’re doing and, frankly, that’s why they’ve been so successful lately.”

As the 100-day mark of his presidency approaches, there’s been no serious reassessment of America’s endless wars or how to fight them (no less end them). Instead, there’s been a recommitment to doing more of the familiar, more of what hasn’t worked over the last decade and a half. No one should be surprised by this, given the cast of characters—men who held command posts in those unsuccessful wars and are clearly incapable of thinking about them in other terms than the ones that have been indelibly engrained in the brains of the U.S. military high command since soon after 9/11.

That new ruling reality of our American world should, in turn, offer a hint about the nature of Donald Trump’s presidency. It should be a reminder that as strange… okay, bizarre… as his statements, tweets, and acts may have been, as chaotic as his all-in-the-family administration is proving to be, as little as he may resemble anyone we’ve ever seen in the White House before, he’s anything but an anomaly of history. Quite the opposite. Like those generals, he’s a logical endpoint to a grim process, whether you’re talking about the growth of inequality in America and the rise of plutocracy—without which a billionaire president and his billionaire cabinet would have been inconceivable—or the form that American war-making is taking under him.

And lest anyone be confused, the dogs of war have bipartisan masters:

When it comes to war and the U.S. military, none of what’s happened would have been conceivable without the two previous presidencies.  None of it would have been possible without Congress’s willingness to pump endless piles of money into the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex in the post-9/11 years; without the building up of the national security state and its 17 (yes, 17!) major intelligence outfits into an unofficial fourth branch of government; without the institutionalization of war as a permanent (yet strangely distant) feature of American life and of wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa that evidently can’t be won or lost but only carried on into eternity. None of this would have been possible without the growing militarization of this country, including of police forces increasingly equipped with weaponry off America’s distant battlefields and filled with veterans of those same wars; without a media rife with retired generals and other former commanders narrating and commenting on the acts of their successors and protégés; and without a political class of Washington pundits and politicians taught to revere that military.

In other words, however original Donald Trump may look, he’s the curious culmination of old news and a changing country. Given his bravado and braggadocio, it’s easy to forget the kinds of militarized extremity that preceded him.

The piece is good; I strongly recommend clicking through to read the rest. Get ready for more war; lots and lots of it. Why? Read on.

Paul Wolfowitz, "Mad Dog" Mattis, General McMaster

By his own admission, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the primary neocon architects and prosecutors of George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq War, has had a long relationship with both Mattis and McMaster and approves of them both. At the moment, both have primary roles in Trump's foreign war policy, especially in the Middle East, Mattis as Pentagon chief and McMaster as National Security Advisor.

The Mattis and McMaster ties to Paul Wolfowitz go back a long way. From an interview conducted by Politico here's Wolfowitz talking about Trump's foreign policy (my emphasis):

Glasser: ... You know, there’s no one particular guide except the quirky personality of Donald Trump at times, it seems. How do you navigate understanding who this guy is when it comes to foreign policy?

Wolfowitz: Well, it’s certainly unpredictable, as an understatement. But at the same time you have in his national security team two individuals who are nearly the opposite, who have a long consistent record of thinking clearly, strategically. I’m talking about McMaster and Mattis.

[...]

Glasser: Have you talked with anyone in his White House since they have been set up and trying to figure things out?

Wolfowitz: I have some. I know McMaster quite well from before. And Mattis actually was my senior military assistant when I first came to the Pentagon in 2001, and I worked with him quite a bit later on in his various later capacities, including in Iraq. So I know them pretty well, but I haven’t—I’ve occasionally emailed them, but I have not had direct contact with them.

Wolfowitz later describes Mattis as a "peace through strength" advocate ... whatever that means. For me, a recommendation from Paul Wolfowitz, who thinks President Obama was not warlike enough, is the Neocon Seal of Approval. Later in the interview, Wolfowitz says of Obama: "Look, my big reservation about Trump, and I said it, was that he was sort of like Obama on steroids, particularly with respect to Russia and Ukraine."

In other words, weak. Wolfowitz hasn't changed his stripes. And there's certainly no question, based on the rest of the interview, that Wolfowitz still wants regime change in Syria, and also that he thinks McMaster and Mattis will bring it.

By the way, General McMaster is the author of the obviously false White House Intelligence Report that justified, after the fact, his Tomahawk attack on Syria. Details here and here. He's off to a fine Wolfowitzian start.

The War Will Come Home

To my second point, that America's endless war — and seemingly endless love of war — will come home at last, consider two points.

First, the war strain is strong in both parties. In modern times it runs nearly unchecked through the last three generations, starting with the immediate aftermath of WWII and Truman deciding to "scare the hell out of the American people" and not stand down the war machine. Or even earlier, when according to Gore Vidal, Truman dropped the bomb on Japan despite the fact the Japanese were actively trying to surrender, because he wanted to "send a message to Joe [Stalin]."

​​Americans experienced one moment of revolt against the well-greased, well-glorified, bipartisan war machine​​ — during the Vietnam War, when almost everyone knew someone whose life was at risk due to the draft. In those years, the war "came home" in the sense that people feared for their personal future or the future of those in their immediate circle. Since then, with the all-volunteer army, nada.

But second, what if these wars "come home" in spades via bombings at home, followed by the typical American response, self-righteous "muscular security" in the frighteningly named "homeland"? We will likely never recover from that twin blow.

For example, imagine the Mall of America blown up at Christmas, along with two or three others. What does security look like in every mall in the country after that? Does going to the mall look like going to the airport, or worse? And if malls in America do look like the airport, will Americans grow to hate their new life or accept it? Will they stand down their international violence or launch even more of it, retaliating with a literal vengeance?

Whatever the response, for the second time in this still-new century the country will have turned a corner it can never turn back to, and life in America will once more never be the same. If we don't stop these wars, we will soon be in them in full, the way Europe is in them, with a battlefield locally, not just overseas.

As I said above, there will be a price for America's endless war, and no one in this country will want to pay it.

By then, of course, it will be too late. We'll have eaten the meal; all that will be left is the bill. Or to change the metaphor, the generals will have had their honeymoon. The rest of will be left to live in the marriage they created.

GP
 

Iraq + 10 Years: The celebration continues!

By the time the American troops appeared in the center of Baghdad, on April 9th, everyone I knew had lost a relative in one or another of the bombings or the lethal street crossfires of the previous twenty-fours hours. For all their "smartness," enough bombs had gone awry or missed their targets to kill many hundreds of civilians. Still, among the Iraqis I knew, their mourning families attributed their losses to the fate of God while expressing their satisfaction that the Americans, after so long, had come to rescue them. They waited to be told what to do. No instructions ever came.

Instead, as the Americans allowed the city, including its armories, to be looted -- in many cases by members of the ancien régime -- while issuing fiats that disbanded the old army and banned the Baath Party, my Iraqi friends became first bewildered and then fearful. Within weeks, the "defeated" regime, with jihadist allies, had begun fighting back, of course, and the real Iraq war began. Almost every single Iraqi I knew then has had to flee the country and today lives in exile: in Sweden, in Cyprus, in the U.K., in the U.S., and many other countries.

-- The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson,
from "How We Forgot Iraq"

by Ken

I realized that I should have plunked the above David Sipress cartoon from this week's New Yorker into my post last night, "Were the CIA and MI6 told that Iraq had no WMDs? Tony Blair's 'too busy' to comment -- how 'bout George and Big Dick?" Luckily, though, we're only just beginning the festivities to remember our great triumph in Iraq. Or to not remember, as it were. Here's more of Jon Lee Anderson's newyorker.com post (here's the link again):

. . . Iraq has become the Great American Unmentionable, the fiasco that was.

Iraq has dropped from America's national discourse like a hot stone since the last U.S. combat troops were extracted. Its disappearing act rivals that of the man who launched the war, George W. Bush. Almost no one has said a thing, apart from notes on the anniversary, since [President Barack] Obama's chapter-closing speech, which dutifully highlighted America's achievements there. In the most surreal part of it, sounding for all the world like the C.E.O. of DHL, Obama described as a laudable achievement how "thousands of tons of equipment have been packed up and shipped out."

Notwithstanding the belated success of General Petraeus's 2007 troop surge and the concurrent Sunni Awakening, which permitted us to carry out our troop withdrawal with a modicum of decency, the Iraq war represents a geostrategic catastrophe of colossal proportions for the U.S., not to mention a humanitarian catastrophe for Iraqis. It remains a severely damaged country. Iraq today is effectively a Finlandized state, under the influence of a vituperatively anti-Western Iran

In keeping with national custom -- remember Vietnam? -- we calculate only the number of Americans who were killed in Iraq; their four thousand four hundred and eighty-six deaths have been carefully tabulated. As for the Iraqis, no one knows how many died. During the war itself, famously, the Pentagon declared that it didn't keep casualty figures for Iraqis, and there it remains. There have been wildly fluctuating estimates, but it would seem likely that, at a minimum, some hundred and twenty-five thousand Iraqis died as a result of our invasion -- and, it should be said, continue to do so today. But the only Hollywood movie that consecrates our Iraq experience, and that significant numbers of Americans went to see, "The Hurt Locker," is a self-referential film about our pain, not theirs. There are, meanwhile, popular video games, like Call of Duty and Full Spectrum Warrior, in which millions of us constantly return to Iraq, virtually, and win battles we actually lost, or never really waged.

The new normal in Iraq is a country where oil is pumped and nightlife has returned to parts of Baghdad, but where suicide bombs also go off, here and there, every few days, with the regularity of tornados touching down in Oklahoma. As if to drive that point home, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia -- the terrorist force that our ill-conceived invasion unleashed from Iraq's chest of horrors -- came out yesterday, on the anniversary of the initiation of hostilities, and set off bombs that killed at least fifty-seven people. As we celebrate -- what, no longer being there? -- let's spare a moment for Iraq, and the Iraqis.

[I should note that I've regretfully skipped over Anderson's opening paragraphs, with his on-the-ground recollection of Baghdad in the immediate Shock and Awe period. You really should check it out for yourself. -- Ed.]

(Just one question, Jon. This alleged "George W. Bush" of whom you speak. The name isn't ringing any bells. Can you supply any biographical particulars? I gather he was once somewhat well-known?)

LEST WE REMEMBER

Now if you're no-memory skills haven't been quite up to forgetting that whole, um, business in Iraq, you're not alone. Consider, for example, the large chorus of budget-deficit hawks who have worked so hard to make the need to slash so-called entitlement programs the centerpiece of their blunt insistence that the national debt is an American shame and a sin against future generations of Americans. How many of them have included in their white papers and sermons an accounting of how much of that debt is owing to our recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan? By my calculations, the answer is approximately zero.

Dontcha love that Dickie Perle?

However, in case you're still having difficulty forgetting Iraq (or is it Iran? is there a difference?), our Washington Post "In the Loop" pal Al Kamen is on hand to honor his "Quote of the Week" -- and a runner-up.

The 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion reignited the bitter debate over the war. And once again it brought some great quotes from the war’s staunchest defenders.

But the quote of the week goes to Richard Perle, who was on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and a vociferous backer of the war.

Wednesday, Perle had the perfect answer to the inevitable question, posed by National Public Radio’s Renee Montagne.

"When you think about this, was it worth it?" she asked.

"I’ve got to say," Perle responded, "I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn’t have done that."

So critics should start being reasonable.

Then there's "Wolfman Paulie" Wolfowitz

Yes, the Wolfman, the onetime deputy secretary of defense, is responsible for Al's first runner-up quote, delivered in a Fox News column. Take it, Al!

The problem, it turns out, was really just a matter of strategy, Wolfowitz wrote. But it took four years to develop the right strategy, Wolfowitz said, noting "how different things might have been if the U.S. had been pursuing a counter-insurgency strategy from the outset."

Which brings us back to our David Sipress cartoon. This "we're right and they're wrong" ethos isn't, as one might at first think, a mere propaganda line designed to hornswoggle the unwashed masses. Simpletons of this stripe can be found in the highest reaches of government. So it may be that Wolfman Paulie isn't such a champion at forgetting. You don't have to forget what you never knew. For the record, Al Kamen points out:

[I]t’s not that the problems weren’t evident almost immediately, judging from an article by our colleagues Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest only a month after the invasion.

The headline? "U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites." The report found that "U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Just a week into the war, the Army’s senior ground commander in Iraq was saying, "The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against."

AN ADMINISTRATIONFUL OF LYING LIARS

Wolfman Paulie makes a splashy appearance in a "Fine Print" column by WaPo's venerable sage Walter Pincus, "Iraq's lessons are there for the heeding." In fact, he's the lead player:

"Fundamentally, we have no idea what is needed unless and until we get there on the ground."

That was then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz three weeks before the Iraq war began a decade ago. He was digressing from his script on what he thought would be positive results from a military action while appearing before the House Budget Committee on Feb. 27, 2003.

None of Wolfie's questioners seem to have paid much attention to this, since the people selling the need for war in Iraq were assumed to have all these on-the-ground matters under control. Especially not when he was dishing out zingers like this:

Disarming Iraq and fighting the war on terror are not merely related. Disarming Iraq's arsenal of terror is a crucial part of winning the war on terror.

Of course this was based on the nonsensical lie that Saddam Hussein was the architect of 9/11, which even at the time was known to be utter nonsense by everyone who wasn't under the spell of the lying liars of the Bush regime.

It turns out that Wolfie wasn't being absolutely straightforward with the House budgeteers. Walter P rehashes a rasher of rationales thrown out by assorted boosters of an Iraq invasion, and Wolfie seems to have been aware of this too.

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz said more than a year later about the justification for the war, according to a Pentagon transcript of an interview he gave to Vanity Fair.

It's apparently just a minor detail that "the one issue that everyone could agree on" was a lie.

It's hard to know whether Wolfie was lying or just kidding when, as Walter P recalls, he told the Defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, on March 27, 2003, a week after the invasion began:

There is a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.

"He certainly was wrong about that," Walter P notes, and adds:

The fact is neither Wolfowitz nor Bush nor other senior policymakers knew much about Iraq's culture and domestic politics. The result was that they totally underestimated the task being undertaken, which meant the loss of 4,400 U.S. service personnel and 32,000 wounded.

The fact is neither Wolfowitz nor Bush nor other senior policymakers knew much about Iraq's culture and domestic politics. The result was that they totally underestimated the task being undertaken, which meant the loss of 4,400 U.S. service personnel and 32,000 wounded.

And he goes on to note, returning to a theme we heard him talking about in December ("Walter Pincus wonders how Americans lost the will to pay for our wars"):

What many forget is that Iraq and Afghanistan also mark the first U.S. wars in which a president, first Bush and now President Obama, has not sought a war tax. The result: nearly $2 trillion in war expenditures put on the nation's credit card.

Have those pushing for military action against Iran, North Korea or involvement in Syria mentioned asking taxpayers to support paying for such operations?

Again, will the deficit hawks currently having riding high in full bamboozlement of the hapless infotainment noozers be chiming in on this debate? (Ha ha, like there's going to be a debate. Sure!)

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As we enjoy today's installment of "Where's Paulie W?" we have to pause to wonder: Does this mean we're bombing Korea next?

Al Kamen is back from vacation, and already in today's Washington Post is reporting a sighting of the man we love to hate, "Paulie Wolfshit" Wolfowitz.

Where's Wolfowitz?

Keeping up with . . . former Pentagon No. 2 and former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, who's now at the American Enterprise Institute. Last seen Friday in Seoul chatting with incoming president Lee Myung-bak of the conservative Grand National Party.

Wolfowitz was part of an informal Asia-hands delegation put together by former representative Steve Solarz, now senior counselor at consulting firm APCO Worldwide, and Cal Berkeley professor emeritus Robert Scalapino as the new Korean government takes shape. Others in the meeting included former defense secretary William Perry, now at Stanford, former nuke negotiator Robert Gallucci, now at Georgetown, former ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith and Alexander Vershbow, the ambassador to Korea.

That's actually a fairly not-all-that-embarrassing assemblage. (Steve Solarz once represented Howie's and my old Brooklyn CD, and was a pretty decent congressman.) Still, it's always useful rule to watch where Paulie W. treads--and stand clear.


DON'T FORGET ABOUT THE CONTEST

Al also reminds us that tonight is the deadline for his "What Was in That Office, Anyway?"
contest:

Last Call for High Honors

Don't forget! The deadline is midnight tonight for the In the Loop contest to guess what the intended target was in that still-suspicious fire last month in Vice President Cheney's office in the Old Executive Office Building.

Send your entries to hitthevault@washpost.com. Top 10 winners, in addition to bragging rights and a mention in the column, also get a coveted, official In the Loop T-shirt. Hill and administration folks can enter on background. You must include a daytime or cellphone number. Good luck.

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Should you see this man--very likely rooting around in your garbage, scavenging for his next meal?-- please give him one good swift kick in the behind

Why must we have Wolfowitz to kick around some more?

Last night on Countdown David Shuster (filling in for Keith O) and Rachel Maddow shared some hearty yuks over the return--yes, he's ba-a-a-ack--of Paul Wolfowitz to government "service." Well, what else are you gonna do? If you don't laugh, what else is there to do but cry?

I'll tell you what! I say give him a good swift kick in the behind!

A bit of history first, for the benefit of the young uns out there.

In 1962, two years after losing the presidency to John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon ran for governor of California and got his ass kicked by the incumbent governor, Edmund "Pat" Brown (left, father of a future California governor, Edmund "Jerry" Brown). In the wake of this defeat, the gracious (ha ha!) Mr. Nixon, facing the press he believed to be his nemesis, said the second most famous thing he ever said: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” (Isn't it interesting that the press corps trailing the Dickster--in 1962--was apparently all-male?)

Like the most famous thing Tricky Dick ever said--"I am not a crook"--as well as so many other things that came out of the man's mouth, this wasn't true. But at least he probably meant it at the time, and it was a good thought: “You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore.” There are plenty of public figures from whom that's the best we could hope.

Now, when Paul Wolfowitz slunk away from the World Bank in disgrace, he never said, "You won't have Wolfowitz to kick around anymore." But wasn't it kind of implied? Don't the neocons have foundation money to take care of fallen comrades who come out of battle damaged beyond repair? I mean, wasn't it just understood that no quasi-public organization marked by a shred of decency, integrity, or self-respect--or even just a healthy respect for the attendant public-relations black eye--would ever put him on the payroll again?

Yet now here he is, about to be named--if he hasn't been already--by Secretary of State Rice to chair the International Security Advisory Board. ("The board," according to Reuters, "gives the State Department independent advice on arms control, disarmament, international security and other matters and its members include two former directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.")

As I recall, the word that drew the biggest guffaws between David Shuster and Rachel Maddow (right) was "credibility," when he asked her about, you know, his. Credibility. Paul Wolfowitz.

Yeah, right.

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For once, even the damn liberal media can't deny Wee Paulie Wolfshit the . . . er, credit he's due

The Right often complains that the liberal media fail to report good news--concerning, of course, the people/places/things about which they like to pretend there's good news to report. So let the record show that the Washington Post's Al Kamen, who didn't exactly cheerlead Paulie Wolfshit on through his trials and travails at the World Bank, reports in today's "In the Loop" column, under the head "The Writing's on the Wall":

[I]t is most emphatically not true that all [World Bank] staffers were opposed to [ousted head cheese Paul Wolfowitz]. Anyone who thinks they were should simply read the writing on the stalls: specifically, the three stalls in the women's restroom next door to the staff association headquarters and near the elevators going up to his office.

Someone this week scrawled this message in marker on three stall doors: "God Bless Mr. Wolfowitz."