The news that a group of retired generals have come out front and center against the war strategy of this administration ought to be – and is – music to the ears of the antiwar movement. ~Justin Raimondo

If “the antiwar movement” were a coherent and cohesive group that possessed a single purpose of bringing an end to the Iraq war (it is not, and doesn’t), the “movement” would not particularly rejoice in every tale of mismanagement and incompetence in this administration. Every day that the administration bungles something is another ten or twenty days that Americans will remain in Iraq, because all “responsible” opinion still maintains at this late juncture that it would be “irresponsible” to leave now.

It is important to have these critics, if only for the purposes of accountability, and the tremendous incompetence of the administration does encourage people to lose confidence in the war effort. This discontented public might then be harnessed to an “antiwar movement,” if one existed beyond the confines of ANSWER and other such organisations of dubious repute. Since there is no such animal that will mobilise the disaffected public into some sort of meaningful political force, the critics mostly serve to exculpate themselves and pin all the blame on the (admittedly very culpable) civilian leadership and, by extension, any military leaders still in service who continue to prosecute the war in the “wrong” way.

It is slightly amusing, in a commedia dell’arte sort of way, to see the elites pointing fingers at each other to determine who is responsible for the disaster, but unfortunately this is not a stage play and we are not (or at least are not supposed to be) a crowd of onlookers laughing at the foibles of the buffoons on stage. I do understand a sort of visceral satisfaction in watching the people who started this war be publicly humiliated like this, but their crimes deserve much more serious punishment than this, for one thing, and their humiliation does not seem to be hastening the day when we leave Iraq. If anything, their manifold incompetence guarantees that the next administration, no matter the party, will make a desperate attempt to “salvage” the situation and prove (if Republican) that the policy was always basically a good one or (if Democrat) that nation-building and interventionism are great as long as the Dems are running the show. This is no good for America, her national interests or the military, and those are, and always have been, the reasons why opponents of the war have opposed it all along.

The “antiwar movement” would also not be so quick to cheer critics of the incompetent administration when those critics wish to keep fighting the war and believe the war can be won if it is fought “their” way. Of the recently retired generals offering criticism, Gen. Newbold seems to be the one with the most honour in this business, as he retired when he saw the coming disaster and refused to participate in the colossal waste, but even he endorses the conventional wisdom that America must remain there to secure the country. So what would the “antiwar movement” have to be happy about? Its chief goal–ending the war–is, if anything, farther away than it has ever been. We have been cursed, in a sense, that the architects of the war were so ideological and so foolish (which ought to have assured that their policy would be rejected in the first place) that many conventional realists will assume that the war is winnable and has been “ruined” up to this point because of the ideological fools now in charge. Let the realists have a crack at it, they’ll say (and this is part of what most of the generals are saying when they call for Rumsfeld to go).

If Iraq really is nothing like Vietnam (and in so many ways it isn’t), a strain of the “Vietnam syndrome” has been affecting a lot of former top brass lately. This is the strain that causes people to say that if we had only bombed Vietnam more, let the military expand the war, let them do this and that, let them…then everything would have worked out relatively well. Gen. Zinni is undoubtedly right that a huge number of strategic errors were responsible for the present mess (including the main strategic error of invading!). The “lessons of Vietnam” (which apparently no one learned earlier) about meddling civilians and micromanagers are returning with a vengeance, sometimes with almost too much similarity to be happenstance, as if many of the present-day generals weaned on the sour milk of the experience of Vietnam were not in the planning hip-deep. The administration and the policymakers deserve the huge bulk of the blame, of course, but reiterating that they deserve a huge bulk of the blame is not going to extricate our soldiers from Iraq. If antiwar people are delighting in the “generals’ revolt,” if it “music to their ears,” I think they might need to get their ears checked.