© Joshua Roberts / ReutersPresident Trump with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general.
Fifty years ago, I could have tried to stop the Vietnam War, but lacked the courage. On Aug. 20, 1967, we at CIA received a cable from Saigon containing documentary proof that the U.S. commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, and his deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams,
were lying about their "success" in fighting the Vietnamese Communists. I live with regret that I did not blow the whistle on that when I could have.
(I wrote about this two years ago: "
The Lasting Pain from Vietnam Silence," republished below.)
Why raise this now? Because President Donald Trump has surrounded himself with starry-eyed generals (or generals with their eyes focused on their careers). And he seems to have little inkling that they got their multiple stars under a system where the Army motto "Duty, Honor, Country" can now be considered as "quaint" and "obsolete" as the Bush-Cheney administration deemed the Geneva Conventions.
All too often, the number of ribbons and merit badges festooned on the breasts of U.S. generals these days (think of the be-medaled Gen. David Petraeus, for example) is in direct proportion to the lies they have told in saluting smartly and abetting the unrealistic expectations of their political masters (and thus winning yet another star).In my apologia that follows, the concentration is on the crimes of Westmoreland and the generations of careerist generals who aped him. There is not enough space to describe (or even list) those sycophantic officers here.
Comment: While Trump's new Afghan strategy is making him strange bedfellows with the previously antagonistic liberal media, his core supporters are voicing their outrage at the new Afghanistan surge. Progressive commentator Jimmy Dore, who was actually aligned with Trump's non-interventionist campaign stance, points out the foreign policy divide between Trump and his core supporters: