Mired in this town's weird political variation of a Save Ferris campaign, the non-stop onslaught by the Pentagon this week to save Donald Rumsfeld's job -- there's the flood of calls to talk radio stations, the relentless TV coverage, and the impassioned best wishes of some of his peers. I'm sure the T-shirts and parade are just around the corner... -- the man himself finally took the stand today, as it was, and said, when asked if he was considering stepping down, if only to help his beleaguered President and his Republican compatriots running in the fall...

"No."

Well, there's a shocker. In an Administration that prides itself on its maniacal refusal to accept culpability or admit wrong-doing (or even mere alterations to thought processes and decisions for its apparent reflection of weakness), this admission and the others that preceded it this week extolling the virtues of the job Rumsfeld is doing are merely more of the same. Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of central command for the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, both reiterated their support of the DC Donald (though to the former's credit, he also said the Administration's public upbraiding of Gen. Shinseki over his comments on Iraqi troop levels before the war was wrong), as did Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,  who called it "a good call" to keep him on, and Senator George Allen (R-VI), who said, "I think he's executed, obviously, to the extent that the President wants him to execute."

Obviously.

As for the President, he has come forward twice this week to express his undying support for the man at the head of Defense, eloquently stating today, " I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

This is somewhat surprising. He only came forward once to defend poor old FEMA-boss Mike Brownie in the wake of his post-Katrina bombardment, and he was doing "a heck of a job," as we all know. To come to the rescue twice in one week? Rumsfeld must really be doing a good job.

Unfortunately, though, not everyone agrees with these rosy assessments, including several from the very organization Rumsfeld's decisions directly affect -- the military. In the past two weeks, several more retired generals have come forward to criticize the secretary and call for his resignation or firing, joining earlier critics like Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training the Iraqi security forces, and Gen. Anthony Zinni, another former CENTCOM chair, bringing the total number to six. The latest additions include Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former head of the First Infantry Division in Iraq and Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, Jr., former commander of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, as well as Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, the previous director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Newbold, who wrote in his blistering essay recently published in Time that he regrets his earlier acquiescence to the way the war in Iraq was being conducted, railed against the callous way the decision to go to war was made and the culture of casual criticism that is endemic in the officers corps of the military, preventing all active officers from publicly questioning current policy while privately taking issue. (All of the recent officers calling for Rumsfeld's ouster are retired and thus safe from any professional penalties for their expressing their views.)

Newbold writes, "I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat — Al Qaeda.  I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy. Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I've been silent long enough...

My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions--or bury the results.

Flaws in our civilians are one thing; the failure of the Pentagon's military leaders is quite another. Those are men who know the hard consequences of war but, with few exceptions, acted timidly when their voices urgently needed to be heard. When they knew the plan was flawed, saw intelligence distorted to justify a rationale for war, or witnessed arrogant micromanagement that at times crippled the military's effectiveness, many leaders who wore the uniform chose inaction. A few of the most senior officers actually supported the logic for war. Others were simply intimidated, while still others must have believed that the principle of obedience does not allow for respectful dissent. The consequence of the military's quiescence was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort...

With the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership, I offer a challenge to those still in uniform: a leader's responsibility is to give voice to those who can't--or don't have the opportunity to--speak. Enlisted members of the armed forces swear their oath to those appointed over them; an officer swears an oath not to a person but to the Constitution. The distinction is important."

Adding to this, though not heeding Newbold's challenge, somewhat ironically, is a veteran from the Times article on Newbold's essay who poignantly says, "The officer corps is willing to sacrifice their lives for their country, but not their careers."

And that distinction Newbold raises is important -- between an officer's allegiance to the Constitution and an enlisted man's oath to his superiors -- and all too easily forgotten these days. These men and women, if they truly have such serious doubts as reported (here and in other places like COBRA II, for example), are not out of line to speak out. They're, in fact, professionally obligated to do so. It's why challenges and critiques such as Newbold's and the others' are greeted with such serious consideration and praise -- it's what many already suspect, but have yet to have confirmed, in the face of the Administration's unrelenting positivity and denial of debate.

But before my reactionary conservative friends get too up in arms, Newbold is not advocating withdrawal. He is merely calling for "fresh ideas and fresh faces."

"That means, as a first step, replacing Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach. The troops in the Middle East have performed their duty. Now we need people in Washington who can construct a unified strategy worthy of them. It is time to send a signal to our nation, our forces and the world that we are uncompromising on our security but are prepared to rethink how we achieve it."

George Packer, in his latest dispatch from Iraq in the New Yorker, explains why this last bit is so critical. As he details through his various interviews with military officials in the article, the continuing insurgency in Iraq has flourished because, among other things, Rumsfeld and his friends at the Pentagon refused to acknowledge (and still do, to a large extent) what the resistance really was -- not the work of foreign jihadists and Baathist "dead-enders," as we so frequently heard, but a true domestic insurgency.

Quoting Colonel H.R. McMaster, the leader of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Packer writes, "Militarily, you've got to call it an insurgency because we have a counterinsurgency doctrine and theory that you want to access," one that includes "offensive and defensive operations" (Packer's words now, not McMaster's), but "an emphasis on using the minimum amount of force necessary. For all these reasons, such a strategy is extremely hard to carry out, especially for the American military, which focuses on combat operations. Counterinsurgency cuts deeply against the Army's institutional instincts."

Packer continues, "'They didn't even want to say the 'i' word,' one officer in Iraq told me. 'It was the spectre of Vietnam. They did not want to say the 'insurgency' word, because the next word you say is 'quagmire.' The next thing you say is 'the only war America has lost.' And the next thing you conclude is that certain people's vision of war is wrong.'"

And so they did nothing.

"The refusal of Washington's leaders to acknowledge the true character of the war in Iraq had serious consequences on the battlefield: in the first eighteen months, the United States government failed to organize a strategic response to the insurgency... In the absence of guidance, the 3rd ACR adopted a heavy-handed approach, conducting frequent raids that were often based on bad information. The regiment was constantly moved around, so that officers were never able to form relationships with local people or learn from mistakes. Eventually, the regiment became responsible for vast tracts of Anbar province, with hundreds of miles bordering Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria; it had far too few men to secure any area."

So with mounting casualties for both Iraqis and American soldiers, the inability to resurrect public infrastructure and production or to secure a sense of stability and order, and dangerously low public approval ratings for the President, his Administration, and its policies, fledgling success stories like the town of Tal Afar where the aforementioned counterinsurgency protocols were independently implemented are in danger of remaining miniscule rays of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape of darkness. Packer explains:

"Speicher [Forward Operating Base Speicher, home of the 101st Airborne and one of the super-bases north of Tikrit] provides a more representative picture of the American military's future in Iraq than Tal Afar. The trend is away from counterinsurgency and toward what, in Washington, is known as an 'exit strategy.' Commanders are under tremendous pressure to keep casualties low, and combat deaths have been declining for several months, as patrols are reduced and the Americans rely more and more on air power. (During the past five months, the number of air strikes increased fifty percent over the same period a year ago.)

More than half the country is scheduled to be turned over to Iraqi Army control this year. This is the crux of the military strategy for withdrawal, and it is happening at a surprisingly fast pace. President Bush has always insisted that the turnover and 'drawdown' will be 'conditions-based' -- governed by the situation in Iraq and by the advice of the commanders, not by a timetable set in Washington. But everywhere I went in Iraq, officers and soldiers spoke as it they were already preparing to leave. A sergeant in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, said, 'We'll be here for ten years in some form, but boots-on-the-ground-wise? We're really almost done.'

He continues,

"The Iraqi national-security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, who chairs a high-level committee in Baghdad on American withdrawal, gave the same forecast that was mentioned by a planner on General Abizaid's staff, at Central Command: fewer than a hundred thousand troops in Iraq by the end of this year, and half that number by the middle of 2007.

In other words, 'conditions-based' withdrawal is a flexible term. The conditions will be evaluated by commanders who know what results are expected back in Washington."

And this gets back to what Newbold was talking to -- if none of the active officers are willing to stand up and say what apparently is on a growing number of their minds, we will continue to operate under this deleterious system and lose, once and for all, our final opportunity for success in Iraq. (And while it would no doubt be flawed for me to imply all active officers are against this war's execution, so too is it negligent to assume, as Rumsfeld seems to, that of the 8,000 living active and retired general officers he mentioned in his briefing today, this mere handful that have come forward lately to criticize him are alone in their thinking.) Because the rush to retreat is already quietly well under way.

From Packer again,

"A President who projects a consistently unrealistic message of success to the public; a Defense Secretary who consolidates power in his office and intimidates or ignores the uniformed military; senior generals -- Tommy Franks, John Abizaid, Ricardo Sanchez, Richard Myers, and now Peter Pace, Myers's successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs -- who appear before congressional committees and at news conferences and solemnly confirm that they have enough troops to win: the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, in terms of the moral abdication of leaders, are not hard to see. In one sense, though, the two wars are inversely analogous: in Vietnam, Johnson claimed to be staying out while he was getting in; in Iraq, something like the opposite is happening...

In 1970, at the height of the pacification program in Vietnam, the US reconstruction teams included seventy-six hundred civilians and military officials; in a country the size of Iraq, that would mean eleven thousand people, but barely a thousand positions are planned for the provincial teams in Iraq. The Administration asked for just $1.6 billion in reconstruction funds for the coming year, which means that, though the output of electricity, water, oil, and other utilitites still falls well short of prewar levels, the major reconstruction effort in Iraq is now over."

But as I mentioned earlier, that isn't what many of these newly-surfaced naysayers are advocating. Newbold isn't, neither are Eaton, Zinni, nor many that Packer interviews throughout his article -- Major McLaughlin and Major Simmering, for example, from McMaster's 3rd Armored, among others. And yet still we're acting as though our knickers are on fire and relief -- be it at home, Iran, or our next proposed engagement site -- is anywhere but in the vicinity of Baghdad.

It's strange -- the President always professes to listen to his generals, yet somehow manages to act in the exact opposite manner they later tell advising. Perhaps this, plus the comments of those above, are why the military is such a well-respected institution, as Brig. Gen. Charles Dunlap, Jr., points out in Harper's fascinating forum on whether a coup d'etat is possible in the US. (Don't worry, the answer is no, and before my conservative mates get up in arms again, the magazine isn't advocating it, either. It's just an extremely interesting discussion of how our military really operates and what its role is in our society.)

He says, "Americans today have an incredible trust in the military. In poll after poll they have much more confidence in the armed forces than they do in other insitutions. The most recent poll, just this past spring, had trust in the military at 74 percent, while Congress was at 22 percent and the presidency was at 44 percent. In other words, the armed forces are much more trusted than the civilian institutions that are supposed to control them."

With the actions and explanations proffered by men like Rumsfeld and Bush, it's hard to see why. Until next time, my friends...