He's Baa-ack!

Our favorite reporter since Geraldo Rivera, Seymore Hersh, reports the following:

The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy

That’s right, folks, the military -who (this week) are being portrayed as the noble warriors with the courage to speak truth to power. We’ll see how long this will play out, until the media template reverses back to the military as a) un-educated redneck morons from the south with no hope of social mobility who join military and become cannon fodder becasue society at large has failed them -or, b) a relentless machine of sadistic torturers who crush the lesser peoples of the world under their jackboots as they spread America’s evil imperialism across the globe. But Hersh has inside sources in the Pentagon (conveiniently without name and/or rank to attach to their comments).

Sayeth Hersh:

Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States.

…

A senior military official told me, “Even if we knew where the Iranian enriched uranium was—and we don’t—we don’t know where world opinion would stand. The issue is whether it’s a clear and present danger. If you’re a military planner, you try to weigh options. What is the capability of the Iranian response, and the likelihood of a punitive response—like cutting off oil shipments? What would that cost us?” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior aides “really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the adversary,” he said.

…

A retired four-star general, who ran a major command, said, “The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don’t want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, ‘We stood up.’ ”

I’ve said earlier that a stand-alone bombing campaign probably won’t work, just on the basis of maneuver warfare. What do I mean? Who took Baghdad? “Shock and Awe” or the 3rd ID? Air power is great, but ground forces are essential, and air power acts as another element of fire support to your maneuver units. Bombing Iran alone probably is a bad idea, even with limited objectives like neutralizing a nuclear plant. Bombing a country is an act of war, much the same as a ground invasion across its borders -once the first bomb drops, that’s it: war. That being said, lots of factors have to go into evaluating a decision to go to war with another nation. Obviously there will be disagreements on how to proceed.

So if I came to that conclusion, I’m sure the folks at the Pentagon have been working this issue for a long time, but Hersh paints a picture of a coup in the making:

In late April, the military leadership, headed by General Pace, achieved a major victory when the White House dropped its insistence that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear device to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. The huge complex includes large underground facilities built into seventy-five-foot-deep holes in the ground and designed to hold as many as fifty thousand centrifuges. “Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “And Pace stood up to them. Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable.’ ” At the time, a number of retired officers, including two Army major generals who served in Iraq, Paul Eaton and Charles Swannack, Jr., had begun speaking out against the Administration’s handling of the Iraq war. This period is known to many in the Pentagon as “the April Revolution.”

“An event like this doesn’t get papered over very quickly,” the former official added. “The bad feelings over the nuclear option are still felt. The civilian hierarchy feels extraordinarily betrayed by the brass, and the brass feel they were tricked into it”—the nuclear planning—“by being asked to provide all options in the planning papers.”

Sam Gardiner [a name! at last!] , a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force as a colonel, said that Rumsfeld’s second-guessing and micromanagement were a fundamental problem. “Plans are more and more being directed and run by civilians from the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” Gardiner said. “It causes a lot of tensions. I’m hearing that the military is increasingly upset about not being taken seriously by Rumsfeld and his staff.”

Gardiner went on, “The consequence is that, for Iran and other missions, Rumsfeld will be pushed more and more in the direction of special operations, where he has direct authority and does not have to put up with the objections of the Chiefs.” Since taking office in 2001, Rumsfeld has been engaged in a running dispute with many senior commanders over his plans to transform the military, and his belief that future wars will be fought, and won, with airpower and Special Forces. That combination worked, at first, in Afghanistan, but the growing stalemate there, and in Iraq, has created a rift, especially inside the Army. The senior military official said, “The policymakers are in love with Special Ops—the guys on camels.”

I stopped reading when I saw that quote: “the military is increasingly upset about not being taken seriously by Rumsfeld and his staff.” Replace “the military is” with “I am,” and you begin to get the picture about the motivations of the John Does in the E-ring who let slip internal disagreements over policy. There are serious issues to confront in this day and age, and Iran’s nuclear program is at the top of the list. All articles like Hersh’s do is present the image of a divided and bickering defense establishment, and that gives our enemies the perception of weakness. At this point, we shouldn’t appear weak. Just because there is a press industry willing to publicly air your private (and probably classified) disagreements doesn’t mean you should use it.