A comment on Sanchez from "The Captain's Journal" blog:
The Logic of General Sanchez
captainsjournal.com
Perhaps the General is conveniently ignoring the advances in Iraq of late, but rather than engage him on this level, let's turn our attention to the logic of Sanchez. As soon as he became top military commander, he says, he recognized that there were "serious challenges" to the strategy. Regarding his having stayed quiet to stateside command or the civilian authorities about this, the "last thing" we want is for general officers to "stand up against" political leadership.
But if he felt so strongly about these issues, could he not have at least spoken with leadership about strategy? Don't officers write doctrine and develop strategy? If not, then what do officers do in a war? He sounds more like a private than a Lieutenant General. But Sanchez knows that if he could have said more than he did concerning strategy, and even resigned his commission. Why, then, did he not?
Because "he feared that move could further jeopardize troops serving there." But wait. If he believed that such a move would jeopardize troops, what about a Lt. Gen. who cannot discuss doctrine or strategy and who even now has no original recommendations, believed the war to be a lost cause, and waited until he had retired to say to the remaining 160,000 troops in theater (and who are preparing to deploy) that they could die in vain for a lost cause?
Are his actions now placing the troops in any less jeopardy than bringing attention to what he believed to be a failed strategy? If he had taken the actions he said he was so reluctant to take, would the possibility not have existed in his calculus to effect a change for the better, thus ensuring the greatest possible likelihood of success in Iraq?
His own words appear to indict him for caring more about the success of his career and the exoneration of him from his own failures than about either the campaign or the men under his charge. Sanchez, for whatever he was during his tenure, appears to have become a bitter curmudgeon rather than a statesman and warrior in the twilight of a career.
Totally aside from past or current strategy or chances of victory in Iraq, his words are a sad testimony about him rather than one about Operation Iraqi Freedom. |
