The General’s Labyrinth Revealed
by PInglis
Guest Editorial
Patrick Inglis
Thomas Weiss, Presidential Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center, and moderator of the recent panel discussion entitled “Military Power,” held in the Proshansky Auditorium, had asked General Barry McCaffrey (ret.) his thoughts on former military officers acting as analysts in the media. “I’m a determinably non-partisan commentator,” McCaffrey responded. As if to prove his point, he then recounted a conversation with Donald Rumsfeld, in which he shared with the former secretary of defense some lessons from his days as a college boxer.
First, the general said, before you start a war you must treat your enemy with respect. After all, “when you pick up military tools, you don’t know the outcome.” Second, “When that gun goes off you step into the ring and try and kill your opponent with a first punch and dominate the fight from the outset.” His last piece of advice, incongruent with the first two, was to keep in mind that war “doesn’t mean just military power,” but also providing humanitarian aid in the aftermath. If only Rumsfeld had listened.
In the story, compelling and well told, McCaffrey neglected to say anything about the personal and financial motivations that drive him to pursue these sorts of conversations with top military brass. So, too, did President William Kelly, who introduced McCaffrey and the other two panelists, Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Fellow Alex de Waal.
Kelly listed McCaffrey’s many accomplishments: a retired four-star general with thirty-two years of service in the US military including four combat tours of duty, and the two-time recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross and winner of the Silver Star of Valor. In retirement, Kelly noted, the general had been named director of National Drug Control Policy in the Clinton administration, and now is “president of his own consulting firm based in Arlington, Virginia.”
That consulting firm, BR McCaffrey Associates, as revealed in reports in the New York Times Magazine in November 2008 and in The Nation in April 2003, works on behalf of military firms seeking the ear and pocketbook of the US military. These reports, in addition to another account from 2000 by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that alleges McCaffrey committed war crimes in the first Iraq war, raise serious questions about the general’s claims to be a “determinably non-partisan” analyst of the present Iraq war. He is paid undisclosed sums of money by military contractors to advocate on their behalf in the media and in the offices of the Pentagon.
McCaffrey’s associations to the military industrial complex don’t so much reflect a conflict of interest, but an interest in conflict. His income depends on whether or not the war continues. In this light, President Kelly’s vague, and on the surface of it innocuous, mention of some “consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia,” is disingenuous and misleading. It was an act of bad faith amidst so many acts of bad faith perpetrated on the American public, notably in the media in the lead up to the Iraq war, but also more recently in the treatment of the financial crisis on Wall Street.
Some members of the Graduate Center community may have preferred that McCaffrey not even speak on the panel. That is not my position. I simply would’ve preferred open disclosure about the man’s ties to the military industrial complex.
Indeed, a group of students and activists, none of whom I know personally, did what President Kelly did not do. They circulated a flyer that presented the general’s “other” biography only to have it confiscated by security guards before even a few rows of people were presented with it. Fortunately, the offending activists were permitted to remain in the audience. When one of them spoke up at the end of the event she was summarily removed from the auditorium, as one of the security guards, wearing a bullet proof vest, stood on stage, presumably on the lookout for other disturbances. Thus, the event “Military Power” came to a close.
A great deal may have been gained had McCaffrey’s associations been disclosed. Whether or not McCaffrey would’ve engaged in such a discussion is another matter. There is a good chance he may have declined the invitation. Such disclosure, or analysis of the relationship between the Iraq war and the people who sold it and the goods to fight it, even without McCaffrey in attendance, would’ve made for a more critical and ultimately more enlightening discussion than the one that occurred.
Instead, what we got was a rather banal rolling out of well known mishaps and blunders by the Bush administration, and, for Ricks and de Wall, but not McCaffrey, the argument that the war was wholly unnecessary. In other words, little, if anything, was said that has not been said a thousand times over by critics of the Iraq war, either from the left or right of the American political spectrum. (The crisis in Darfur and Sudan was also a topic of conversation.)
Nevertheless, one comment did stick out. Ricks, asked about the American public’s waning interest in the Iraq war, and disinterest in the broadening of the war in Afghanistan, had this to say, drawing on an apt analogy: “Just because you walk out of a movie halfway through doesn’t mean it ends.” As for the Iraq war, he said, the American people “have walked out on it,” despite unabated conflict, and talk of a lot more fighting in Afghanistan.
But not everyone has walked out on the war. Some, like the people who showed up to listen to the panel on military power, are still fixated on this war, arguably the biggest mistake in US foreign policy history, and have a vested interest, as citizens and taxpayers, in other wars the US may fight in the near future. They deserve to know exactly who the characters in this present theatre of war are. President Kelly, in not fully disclosing the nature of Gen. McCaffrey’s relationship to the military industrial complex, deprived them of that.
