12 March 2008
Doughy Neocons
I did not want to get dragged into the controversy. I have enough problems this morning, like why the picture that should be above is not there.
The controversy is not of my making, and the lingering bitterness over what is happening to the institutions I served for so long is something I have tried to stay away from. It is not my fault and it is not my fight, not any longer. I have been guilty of having opinions that were molded by the malicious and ignorant before, I have resolved to stick with those things that I know.
I know that the new concrete is marching across the pit of the vast new apartment building that is rising across the parking lot. I know that the housing market has slowed to the extent that the luxury town homes have ceased to multiply, and the site preparations for the next dozen have been desultory.
I know the spring is coming. I can see the buds, and I know that Congress should stop messing around with the clocks and let us deal with the rotation of the planet around the sun in our own fashion.
But I know that they will continue to mess with us. The most horrifying image came to me on the cover of the New Yorker yesterday. A red phone was apparently ringing in the foreground, and a couple suddenly aroused in their bed, unmistakably Hillary and Barack, were both reaching for it.
Their expressions were of alarm, and in the sinking moment, I realized in my gut that was the truth, that one or the other will answer, and that the recession will deepen and taxes will go up and the currency is going in the crapper and the American Century is well and truly over.
It did not have to be this way. I felt the clammy hand of old delusion wrap around my heart, and with a sickening lurch I felt that it was 1973 again, oil process out of control, inflation zooming, and an ally in a war far away being left to its own devices.
Didn’t these people know about war? Didn’t they know how serious this was going to be?
Apparently not. Things have been going fairly well of late, now that some grownups have been put in charge and most of the rigid ideologues have been sent home. Consequently, when the rumors began to fly yesterday, I felt the claws of anguish. “YEOW!” went one of the first notes I received about the crisis. “The rumors are true!!! Gapped command billet in a war?”
Admiral Fox Fallon’s time at the helm of the Central Command is over. Secretary Gates, the old gray Spook who is leading the Defense Department in the guttering candlelight of the Bush Administration, had the had the obligatory press conference to tepidly praise the 41-year career in the uniform of his country.
Fox was the first naval officer selected to command CENTCOM, responsible for both the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I do not know him personally, and that makes the hackles rise on my neck. I do know officers like him, Dick Mackey is the one who springs to mind. Dick was the Pacific Commander in 1995, and whose treatment of a rape case in Okinawa was considered cavalier.
His public utterance of what many thought privately ended his career. He was typical of hard-headed, plain-spoken flag officers of another era, just as Fox is.
His elevation was considered curious when it occurred He took the Central Command post almost a year ago to the day. At the time, he was described as a strategic thinker, a uniformed Metternecht who apply finesse to a difficult situation. Take it a level above the understandable fixation of his predecessor Gen. John Abizaid on the ground war in progress in Iraq.
“Strategic” was not the first word that would have occurred to me to describe the Admiral’s career. I could think of others. His tenure was controversial from the start. As a sailor, it seemed that he was expected to bring a cautionary message to the Iranians. Instead, Fox became the improbable maverick in the Administration’s policy team, insisting that the Islamic Republic would not be invaded.
It is clear that low-profile remaining neo-conservatives in the Administration were not happy with his public persona. The last straw came with the publication a strange little article in Esquire magazine. “The Man Between War and Peace” was a profile written by Thomas P. M. Barnett, an academic from the Naval War College.
I don’t know him or his agenda, though he must have had some clear intent to roll this particular grenade into the leadership tent. Fox was remarkably candid, the article’s tone breezy and approachable as you would expect in a time when the candidates all appear on Saturday Night Live, and the only real news is on Comedy Central.
The article contained just enough rope for the Admiral to hang himself.
I read it this morning to get some context for what Mr. Gates felt he had to do to his proconsul.
Fox comes across as pretty blunt, profane, and realistic. What apparently finally tore things was the reference to the hands of the “doughie neocons,” who apparently want to keep war with Iran on the list of policy options.
I can imagine that when the dough-boys read that they were pretty irritated. None of them served in the last war we lost, and they have been fighting it ever since.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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