WaPo: Fear The Anti-War Generals!

The WaPo's bizarre defence of Donald Rumsfeld continues. Today Charles Krauthammer basically argues that:

1. Former Joint Chiefs chairman Richard Myers and retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong were closer to Rumsfeld than his critics, and they still support him. So there.

2. If Rumsfeld didn't listen to advice, "that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing". What if the advice wasn't good? What if it wasn't "consensual"? NEver mind that it turned out to be right. Like accountability, retrospect is for losers. You can't blame Rummy if he chose the bad advice and ignored the good stuff. Besides, what about Afghanistan - "one of the more remarkable military victories in recent history" (just don't look at what is happening over there now).

3. The generals are just anti-American whiny ass tittie babies having a hissing fit anyway. In fact they are dangerous to whatever the hell we call "democracy" these days!

We've always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Hussein's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including the United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America.

You have been warned, damn it!

It is precisely this kind of division that our tradition of military deference to democratically elected civilian superiors was meant to prevent. Today it suits the antiwar left to applaud the rupture of that tradition. But it is a disturbing and very dangerous precedent that even the left will one day regret.

That'll learn y'all...