It seems that a Frank Gaffney front organization published an article calling on President Bush to engineer a coup to make himself president for life, while Martin Lewis at the Huffington Post put out the call for General Pace and the Joint Chiefs to engineer a coup against the Bush administration.

I’m gonna go way out on a limb and say that neither of these are very good ideas. Meanwhile, Jamie Malanowki’s new novel The Coup, involves a more clever (and funnier) method of toppling the incumbent. I do wonder sometimes what would happen if Bush did something really crazy like just call up the Joint Chiefs one day and order a preventive nuclear first strike (all the GOP contenders say it should be considered) on Iran without congressional authorization. Does the military follow that order?

Should they? My best understanding is that it’s completely within the president’s legal authority to order a nuclear attack on a whim, but that’s a pretty disturbing idea.

Here’s my chosen excerpt from Evan Thomas’ Newsweek cover story on the hunt for bin Laden:

When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora Bora, he was already in the early stages of planning for the next war. By early 2002, new Predators—aerial drones that might have helped the search for bin Laden—were instead being diverted off the assembly line for possible use in Iraq. The military’s most elite commando unit, Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh Special Forces Group—Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic speaker and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler for starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes fast) but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan.

At any rate, you’re welcome to pick your own paragraph, but that’s my favorite. Certainly, it’s a point that I think Democrats are going to want to emphasize in the 2008 election, which is why I think it would be smart for Democrats to, insofar as possible, not nominate people who think authorizing the invasion of Iraq was a good idea.

As best I can tell, David Petraeus’ doctoral dissertation on learning the lessons of Vietnam is, as Brian Beutler says, an exercise in saying nothing at extraordinary length. Check out the thesis paragraph of his conclusions section:

History in general, and the American experience in Vietnam in particular, have much to teach us, but both must be used with discretion and neither should be pushed too far. The Vietnam analogy, for all its value as the most recent large-scale use of American force abroad, has limits. Most importantly, the applicability of the lessons drawn from Vietnam, just like the applicability of lessons taken from any other past event, always will depend on the circumstances of the particular situation at hand.

That’s his conclusion. I even agree, but one would really hope for something firmer….

The Atlantic‘s website has a kind of review essay by Robert Kaplan about the “forgotten” Vietnam literature that provides a kind of user’s guide to the revisionist accounts of the war that the president has decided to endorse. To me, the noteworthy thing about this case is how hollow it is even on its own terms. For contemporary political purposes, here’s the key point:

While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front’s reaction to the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the protests at the Democratic party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, “clear and hold” territory replaced the dictum of “search and destroy,” and building up the South Vietnamese Army became the top priority. “There came a time when the war was won,” even if the “fighting wasn’t over,” writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. [...] Sorley told me he isn’t sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived.

The question naturally arises that even if one accepts all of this, what would the point have been? Propping up the South Vietnamese government was an expensive and diplomatically costly proposition. The initial strategic rational for propping up the South Vietnamese government was that preventing South Vietnam from going Communist was necessary to prevent the triumph of Communism worldwide. In retrospect, however, while “a respectable case might be made” that South Vietnam could have been saved, we know conclusively that the strategic case in favor of saving it was mistaken.

Recently, an indefinite military commitment to South Vietnam has been repackaged as some kind of humanitarian gesture, but that boat won’t float. The Saigon regime was a dictatorship like the northern one, and Abrams-era US military actions like the Christmas Bombings killed thousands of people. Insofar as the point of a military activity is to accomplish something worthwhile at some kind of reasonable cost, Abrams/Kissinger/Nixon never did anything of the sort. Now, it’s not Creighton Abrams’ fault that there was no good reason to expend vast resources propping up the shaky South Vietnamese government indefinitely, but it’s still the case that whatever tactical accomplishments the forces under his command may or may not have achieved that nothing he did actually vindicates the political agenda of indefinitely continuing the war.

Kay Steiger thinks about the professional military’s responsibilities to provide strategic advice:

Officers are trained to work on the “how” of a problem and they never are allowed to question the judgment of the decision itself. The administration called on generals to plan a war, but it was never their role to think about whether going to war was a good decision. Is this a good way to train the highest level of advisers to the commander in chief? Probably not.

This is inspired by Fred Kaplan who takes the view that the officer’s corps is repeating the mistakes condemned in H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty where he argues that the Vietnam-era military “betrayed their professional obligations by failing to provide unvarnished military advice to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the Southeast Asian quagmire.”

I’m not 100 percent sure about this. It seems to me that insofar as the generals are going to disagree with civilian officials, it makes sense for them to be somewhat subtle about it. At the end of the day, it’s up to civilians to decide whether or not to start a war, and with good reason officers want to avoid actions that will render the chain of command unworkable. The trouble is that when officers try to be duly discreet, they just get ignored if people don’t want to listen.

An excellent example is the case of General Eric Shinseki. He testified in public, before congress, that it would require “on the order of several hundred thousand” soldiers to secure Iraq. To an uninformed member of the public (as I was at the time) this sounds like professional military advice on a technical military question. As we can now see in this era of “surge,” however, the Pentagon can’t deploy several hundred thousand troops to Iraq — there just aren’t enough people in the whole Army. One has to assume that, as Chief of Staff of the Army, Shinseki knew perfectly well how many soldiers the Army contains. He was saying, in other words, that it was his opinion that stabilizing Iraq would be impossible.

His message was just ignored. And to a substantial extent, it continues to be ignored, as one still hears this frequently cited as an example of Bush and Rumsfeld mishandling the invasion. But unless you assume that Shinseki was just totally unaware of Army logistics, it’s pretty clear that he was trying to send a message that we shouldn’t invade Iraq without doing anything insubordinate. Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or John Warner or Richard Lugar or Tom Lantos could have asked their staff “hundreds of thousands of troops: can we do that?” and they would have heard back “no.” But the politicians who wanted to back the war didn’t want to hear such things.

Besides which, it wasn’t actually a secret in elite quarters that the professional military thought it was a bad idea to invade Iraq, anymore than it was a secret that diplomats and intelligence professionals (to say nothing of international relations academics and middle east studies specialists) thought it was a bad idea to invade Iraq. As this classic June 10, 2002 New Republic editorial sneered “That the military brass opposes going to war shouldn’t surprise anyone not frozen in amber.”

Last week, as thousands of Europeans took to the streets to protest American plans to topple Saddam Hussein, a similar cry went up along the Potomac. It didn’t come from liberal editorial writers; and it didn’t come from Democratic members of Congress. No, the opposition to invading Iraq came from the very force that would be doing the invading: the U.S. military. We know this because high-ranking officers have been leaking like sieves–to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and others–about how silly they consider the whole enterprise to be. In the Post, for instance, “one top general” told reporter Thomas Ricks that “the ‘Iraq hysteria’ he detected last winter in some senior Bush administration officials has been diffused.” And indeed, over the past week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush himself have gone to unusual lengths to downplay the possibility of military action against Saddam. We find that disappointing and hope that in the coming months the president will remember what he seemed to understand so well in the searing weeks after September 11: The case for taking on Saddam doesn’t require believing that an invasion carries no risks, but merely that they pale beside the risk of allowing his regime to remain in power. But in the meantime, the president needs to make another decision: He needs to fire some of his generals. Not because they oppose going to war with Iraq, but because they have been advertising their opposition in the nation’s newspapers.

Under the circumstances, I really don’t think that generals speaking out more loudly would have done any good. Sure, if they spoke out more forcefully Bush might have come under more attack in the press from folks like TNR for his famous habit of being overly-tolerant of dissent and hyper-deferential to expert advice, but it wouldn’t have stopped the march to war.

This debate (one, two, three) about Barack Obama and genocide between Hilzoy and Jamie Kirchick over at Andrew’s site reminds me of a broader point I’ve been meaning to make forever.

When you look at different takes on the Darfur situation, you see them divided into two main camps. On the one hand, you have people who are interested in Darfur who don’t normally write about humanitarian issues or Africa, but who do frequently write in support of militarism and in derogation of the UN. In this camp you have Kirchick, The Weekly Standard, Leon Wieseltier, Marty Peretz, etc. These people believe, naturally enough, that unilateral American military intervention in Darfur is the only responsible option. On the other hand, you have people whose interest in Darfur stems from a larger interest in humanitarian issues and in Africa. I’d take the International Crisis Group, the Enough Project, and Africa Action as typical of the latter. If you follow the links, you’ll see that none of these organizations think that what Kirchick is saying about this is correct.

Meanwhile, as Kirchick himself notes, Obama is pretty close to Samantha Power who wrote the book on genocide. Like the people in the second camp, she’s a skeptic about unilateral military intervention as the prime tool of fighting genocide. Indeed, she explains in the book that she thinks this kind of Kirchick-style thinking is counterproductive; sending people the message that if you care about this issue you need to sign on for a costly and geopolitically problematic military intervention leads far more people to say “I should stop caring about this issue” than it leads to say “I should support a costly and geopolitically problematic military intervention.” Thus, they favor thinking pragmatically about actions that might realistically be implemented.

The difference, though, is that if you’re more interested in wielding Darfur as a bludgeon against liberals, the UN, Arabs, etc. than you are in saving people’s lives, this kind of pragmatism becomes less appealing.

This is really Fallows’ beat, but this New York Times article about China being really, really, really polluted sure is something. Manufactured Landscapes, a film I’ve recommended previously, is full of really eye-opening images.

This is, perhaps, the achilles heel of Chinese authoritarianism. The Soviet Union was full of just astounding things, like the incredible shrinking Aral Sea pictured above. China, by contrast, used to be too poor for anything truly awful to happen on the environmental front, but capitalism has set the table for nightmare scenarios. Democracies have, obviously, our share of environmental problems, but this really is one of those situations where it’s the worst form of government except for all the others.

Public domain photo by Wikipedian Staeker