Retired generals speak out to oppose Rumsfeld

"Serious mistakes [were made] in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad," Colin Powell, former secretary of state and Joint Chiefs chairman, said in a speech last week. "We didn't have enough troops on the ground. We didn't impose our will. As a result an insurgency got started, and it got out of control."

In this, Powell echoed former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who told Congress just weeks before the 2003 invasion that several hundred thousand US troops would be necessary to secure Iraq after the invasion. For this he was publicly contradicted by then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld named General Shinseki's replacement a year before he was to retire and broke custom by not attending his retirement ceremony.

"What's remarkable to me is how long it took military resentment of Rumsfeld to surface in public," says military analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.

"Rumsfeld apparently has convinced the president that military criticism of his performance is traceable mainly to resistance to change," says Dr. Thompson. "That interpretation of the criticism isn't totally wrong. But much of the officer corps thinks he simply doesn't understand technology or operations in sufficient depth to grasp the consequences of his policies, and yet he routinely uses his position to quash dissent."

During the Vietnam War, it wasn't just the civilians in the White House and at the Pentagon who failed to adequately address the strength and determination of the enemy, concluded then Major H.R. McMaster in his 1997 book "Dereliction of Duty." Senior military officers were just as culpable for not speaking up.

His book became required reading at the Pentagon. Today Colonel McMaster commands the Army's 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq, where he is a rising star, lauded last month by President Bush for his unit's work in securing the city of Tal Afar. In press briefings, the colonel is enthusiastic about the Army's accomplishment. And if McMaster has any concern about officers failing to speak up he's keeping it to himself.

Asked about that for a recent New Yorker magazine article, he laughed and said, "I can't even touch that."

Though some retired senior officers are critical about the conduct of the war, that doesn't mean they want a quick pullout.

Gen. Merrill McPeak, retired Air Force chief of staff, says if anything the number of US troops there needs to be doubled - to around the figure Shinseki predicted would be needed three years ago - if Iraq is to become truly secure and democratic.

General McPeak lost friends when he started speaking out against the war several years ago. Now, he says, "everybody is sending me e-mails and cards and letters saying 'I wish I had seen it the way you saw it from the beginning,' and I've gotten some of those friends back."

Page: 1 | 2