Well, another week and another retired general heard from. This time it was retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez who, last Friday, said the White House, the Congress and the State Department all share the blame for what he’s calling a nightmare with no end in sight.

Hmm, the nightmare from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. That’s kind of catchy; could be a movie there.

The sound bite that has been whizzing around the talk shows is this:

LT. GEN. RICARDO SANCHEZ (RET.), FMR. U.S. COMMANDER IN IRAQ: Continued manipulations and adjustments to our military strategy will not achieve victory. The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat.
 
There has been a glaring, unfortunate, display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders. As a Japanese proverb says, “Action without vision is a nightmare.” There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight.

Since 2003, the politics of war have been characterized by partisanship as the Republican and Democratic parties struggled for power in Washington. National efforts to date have been corrupted by partisan politics that have prevented us from devising effective, executable, supportable solutions. At times, these partisan struggles have led to political decisions that endangered the lives of our sons and daughters on the battlefield. The unmistakable message was that political power had a greater priority than our national security objectives. Overcoming this strategic failure is the first step toward achieving victory in Iraq — without bipartisan cooperation we are doomed to fail. There is nothing going on in Washington that would give us hope.

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After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism.
 
From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan to the administration’s latest surge strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronize its political, economic and military power.

Of course, he also said this, which the media has not dwelled on nearly as much, for obvious reasons.

The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our servicemen who are at war.

My assessment is that your profession, to some extent, has strayed from these ethical standards and allowed external agendas to manipulate what the American public sees on TV, what they read in our newspapers and what they see on the web. For some of you, just like some politicians, the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your preconceived notions, biases and agendas.

Okay, I understand that back when he was the former commander of allied ground forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004, that it was too soon to make a judgment like that. Plus the fact that when you are on active duty you can’t make public criticisms of the strategy of the commander in chief of the armed forces. It would be a violation of the sacred principle of military subordination to civilian authority, which is sacred for good reason. But he retired on November 1, 2006 and the U.S. position in Iraq was abysmal back then. Did he really have to wait a year before speaking out? I mean his pension is secure.

The answer to that question was given by Sen. McCain who said this on Face The Nation. Call it the Shinseki effect:

MCCAIN: At the confirmation hearing of these senior officers, the question is asked at the Armed Services Committee, will you give this committee your honest and candid opinion and personal opinion if directly asked? They always say yes, they will. That’s number one. Number two is if you think the country is going in the wrong direction and it’s going to cost the needless loss of young American’s lives, then of course you should stand up, and you should leave your position. And I know that’s a very tough decision for people to make. But first of all, I would start by giving my candid and honest and personal opinion when asked by Congress, because during their confirmation hearings, which means they are appointed to the rank that they are nominated for, then they should give that opinion at that time. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often. And one of the reasons, in all due respect, my friend, is because General Shinseki gave his opinion and got fired. 

I bring this up because those who want to keep U.S. troops in Iraq have wasted no time in trying to kill the messenger of bad news. Talk about partisanship. Here is what Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CNN’s Late Edition:

GRAHAM: I’m astounded, really. I was in Baghdad several times when he was in charge. I was there the day the U.N. facility was bombed, killing the U.N. diplomat. And I asked him every time, “Do we have enough people here?”
 
Senator McCain was an early critic of the strategy of not having enough troops on the ground. And every time we talked to General Sanchez, we got pushback, we have enough troops, guard and reserves aren’t being strained.
 
I appreciate his service, but Abu Ghraib got out of control under his watch, the war in general got out of control under his watch. And it’s not time to blame people, but his criticism is a bit astounding to me given his role in the war itself.

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The surge is a direct result of having to make up for mistakes early on. As far as I’m concerned, he was part of that mistake by being a commander who did not express now — then what he’s saying now. And I know he was asked because I asked him.

Of course, back when Senators Graham and McCain were asking Gen. Sanchez these questions the insurgency was nowhere near as developed or organized as it is now. It became so, in no small part, due to the monumentally stupid decisions of the United States to disband the Army purge the government of people who had belonged to the Baath party, pursue a lousy counter-insurgency strategy, and  not be serious about training up Iraqi security forces. But Senator Graham chose not to talk about that. We should also note that Gen. Sanchez lumped the troop surge in with everything else that’s been tried in Iraq since 2003 and said this is just a mild adjustment in strategy and it won’t lead to lasting security gains there.

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