The true danger of Pentagon corruption

by Mustang

With the possible exception of America’s gunboat diplomacy period, it has not been the mission of the Defense Department (or its predecessors) to engage in the art of statesmanship.  Sadly, except for John Hay, Elihu Root, and a fictional character named Bess McCord, diplomacy hasn’t been the domain of our State Department, either.

Pentagon

For the people running the Pentagon, the solution to every problem is remarkably consistent: bomb, kill, destroy.  Their names and faces may change, but the Pentagon people all cling to the same myths — that there are such things as surgical strikes and that a nation can be deterred by America’s ability to produce “shock and awe.”  It hasn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t keep the Pentagon from strutting about trying to convince us of how awesome our military is.

Of course, the people who suffer most are innocent (like us) who are stuck with an out-of-control government.  Among these innocents, we will discover survivors with deep scars and long memories, which will one day require we send our young people into harm’s way to confront them again.  For the American people, it has become a never-ending story.

This November, President John F. Kennedy will have been murdered for sixty years.  As it happens, John Kennedy was not one of my favorite presidents — but I do not think he deserved an assassin’s bullet.  The fact is that John Kennedy ran afoul of the Pentagon and its creation, the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.).

Had Mr. Kennedy survived with wounds, what would he have learned from the experience?  It might have been that even if a president distrusts the Pentagon and C.I.A., it would be best to keep a smile on his face and stay out of the rear sight of a skilled rifleman.  That term, by the way, would not describe Lee Harvey Oswald.  He barely qualified with the service rifle while serving in the Marines.

There was another lesson: if the Pentagon or C.I.A. wants to remove a president, there will be no hesitation in doing it in front of the first lady or national television camera.

In Kennedy’s day, the Pentagon’s generals regarded him as a weak sister.  He was no such thing, but neither was he exceptionally bright — or well-served by either the Pentagon’s leadership, anyone in the C.I.A., or his baby brother “Bobby.”

The generals and C.I.A. leaders didn’t like Kennedy because of the disaster they created in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.  The C.I.A. crafted this calamity and tried to sell it to President Eisenhower toward the end of his administration.  It was handed off to Kennedy, who was as inexperienced at that time as Barack Obama in 2009, who entered the White House with all thirty minutes of U.S. Senate experience.  Eisenhower didn’t approve the mission because he knew better.  Kennedy was naïve.

Badly stung, John Kennedy never again trusted the generals.  By the time Kennedy learned not to trust the C.I.A., following the C.I.A.’s assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diệm, his own murder was only days away.  If anyone ever wanted to compile a list of suspects in the Kennedy assassination, the Pentagon and C.I.A. would appear at the top of that very short list.

That was a long time ago — but this question remains: why do the Pentagon’s generals and C.I.A. remain fascinated with the Russians and former Soviet Republics? If, for example, we Americans didn’t like having Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (I.C.B.M.’s) in Cuba, what makes us think that the Russians would want them pointed in their direction from Turkey? In his dealings with the Soviet Union, John Kennedy could rationalize the Russian’s point of view.  Mr. Kennedy’s ability to understand the other fellow’s point of view helped avoid an atomic war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If anything, today’s generals are far worse than those mutton heads in the 1960s.  I suspect that the issue here, resting just below the surface, is that these generals live for conflict: it’s how they became three and four-star officers.  In any case, what’s the point of having lethal weapons if you can’t use them?  Here’s my point: why are these “skilled warriors” charging into the Oval Office and demanding that the President forget any intention of supplying Ukraine with rockets and tanks?  Answer: they want a war in Eastern Europe.

Our problem today (and we’ve had it for a while) is that our presidents are mental flat-liners.  President Reagan was indeed entering into the early stages of dementia in the final days of his administration, but Joe Biden was elected at a time when he was already living in the  Twilight Zone.  A conspiracy theorist might wonder if the men behind the curtain didn’t arrange this on purpose — to see if we needed a president at all.

This “problem” is not unique to the United States.  The entire European Union has proven that all that’s needed to make things go is a figurehead that can be swapped out every twelve months.  Presidencies are a thing of the past.  What is the problem?  These stocking-stuffer heads of state pose a clear and present danger to global peace and stability.  The problem is that none of these people, including the President of the United States, represent the nation’s interests or its people.

Let’s revisit Cuba in 1962 and see if we can find any parallels to the mishmash in Ukraine.  Did the United States wish to see Russian missiles sitting in silos in Cuba?  Of course not.  But they had the right to station those missiles in Cuba, with that government’s permission.  The Cubans were happy to give that permission, especially after the C.I.A.’s bumbled attempt to overthrow Castro and assassinate him.  The C.I.A. can deny that all they want, but it is a fact.

Four years earlier, the U.S. decided to place nuclear missiles in Turkey.  If global peace was the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in 1959, then we can only conclude that missiles in Turkey were a hair-brained idea.  And so, too, was the United Kingdom and United States’ decision to engineer a coup d’état in Iran in 1953.  It’s been one terrible idea after another since the end of World War II.

Scars and long memories continue to plague us.  For the most part, this is our fault, not Iran’s, Cuba’s, or Russia’s.

President Kennedy, in establishing a naval blockade around Cuba, declared war against the Soviet Union (naval blockades are acts of war), and the Soviets backed down.  It was a  gamble that paid off because we (narrowly) avoided a nuclear war.  But the Pentagon’s generals balked.  They wanted that missile exchange; they wanted a full-scale invasion of Cuba.  This should scare the crap out of us: America’s generals today want a war with Russia in Ukraine.

Why?

There is no good answer to this question — we should all be sitting on the edge of our seats.  The question should lead us to this conclusion: Senate confirmation of the appointment of individuals to high-ranking military and naval ranks isn’t good enough.  There has to be something more to protect us from our generals and admirals, who seem too anxious to take our country to war.

We shouldn’t care whether the former Soviet Republics are granted membership in the European Union, but there is no justification for urging these Republics to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.).  All that was, was poking the Russian bear with a stick.  What kind of foreign policy is that?  If Kennedy were alive today, he would be urging us in his aged and feeble voice that N.A.T.O. is a dinosaur that needs to be put down — for the good of all humankind.  The events in Ukraine would prove the wisdom of Kennedy’s post-mortem advice.

The scary version is that our late presidents are as muddle-headed as anyone in the Pentagon or C.I.A.  May God help us!

Mustang has blogs called  Fix Bayonets and Thoughts From Afar