Recommended – Your Government Failed You

Richard Clarke worked for thirty years in the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the National Security Council, serving under three presidents. He has seen the transformation of the military from the inside, from the post-Vietnam reactions to the Iraqi invasions. He is dismayed, even outraged, at what the civilian leadership has done to the military, and at the failure of some senior military leaders to speak up and oppose the naïve and misguided directions of civilian leaders, and he has detailed his arguments in a new book Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters. (see booklist on sidebar for details).

In 1984 Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger put forth a list of six eminently reasonable guidelines for the use of American force, evolved as a consequence of the Vietnam War:

• U.S. vital interests must be at stake
• We must be committed to winning decisively
• The political and military objectives must be clear and obtainable
• The forces necessary to win decisively and achieve the goals should be made available and the appropriate force size should be regularly reviewed
• There should be reasonable grounds to suppose that the American people would support the operation
• Force should only be used as a last resort, after all other alternatives are exhausted or proven unworkable

Subsequently, General Colin Powell added four more principles:

• Have all the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
• Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entailment?
• Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
• Do we have genuine and broad international support?

These guidelines were all available to President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the U.S. military leaders while they considered the Iraq invasion, and hardly any of the guidelines were met, or apparently even considered by the politicians. Generals who protested that the guidelines hadn’t been considered were reassigned, and replaced with more compliant generals. The result has been soldiers killed because of inadequate equipment, a loss of American support throughout the world, and a messy and expensive insurgency for which our armed forces were not prepared.

Warning: this book will make your blood boil!!