Trump, the Military & Wag the Dog Politics: Who’s the Dog?
In 2016, candidate Trump effectively distinguished himself from his competitors, both in the Republican primary and in the general election, by denouncing their embrace of failed military adventurism. How distant that seems as of last Friday, after he ordered a drone strike on Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, a blatantly unlawful act by both domestic and international legal standards. I’ve found myself laughing at the absurdity of it, thinking of how the American public needed to be primed with nearly two years of lies before our leaders started a war in our names in 2003. We apparently don’t even deserve advance notice anymore.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for this astounding failure, but I want to focus in on our military leadership’s role in this. The general impression we’re given is that they mainly interface with decisionmakers — providing information and options, executing orders related back to them — but this is a facile view proffered to minimize the public’s awareness of their outsize influence. Donald Trump is ultimately responsible for how this plays out, but Soleimani’s assassination is the latest instance reflecting US military leadership running amok, unconstrained by even the most basic forms of accountability.
The most telling detail so far that indicates a military tail-wagging-the-dog situation comes from a recent article in the New York Times. “Top American military officials” claim they put a number of options in front of the President and he chose the craziest one in the assassination strike, the one that they would not have expected him to pick, the one meant to steer him to supposedly more reasonable measures. This was the plan of our best military minds, for a president who has done this. And said this. Whose schedule looks like this. With nearly three years of a fever-dream Trump presidency behind us, our military’s top brass apparently still didn’t know who they were dealing with. How on earth was such a brutish, reckless, and short-sighted option even proposed to a President who can’t help constantly displaying those traits on a personal level? This just doesn’t add up. Even someone who only knows Trump from his public appearances could tell you that such a plan should not have made it to his desk; we deserve a better accounting of how it got there, one that doesn’t hide behind his obvious ineptitude.
At the same time that military leadership has minimized its role in the strike and pointed the blame back at the White House, it has vigorously stood by the intelligence that supposedly justified it, while remaining tight-lipped about just what that intelligence is. General Mike Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proclaimed that he will “stand by” the intelligence he saw that justified the plan, yet made a contradictory admission in the same statement: “Did it exactly say who, what, when, where? No…” Any attack made without congressional authorization must be in response to an “imminent threat” to the United States for it to be legal. Experts have already expressed concern that this strike does not meet that standard, and even a layman’s understanding of “imminent” does not seem to line up with the general’s words. The White House, the State Department, nor the Department of Defense have made their case to the American public with a shred of evidence as of this writing.
The military going beyond its mandate and influencing policymaking rather than its execution is not a recent phenomenon. Eisenhower’s famous warning against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” was referring in part to the same dynamic. He made that the centerpiece of his departing address because he already experienced our military and security apparatus circumventing the will of civilian authorities, and saw the urgent need for a line to be drawn. The Cuban Missile Crisis is probably the last best example of civilian leadership drawing that line, as JFK stood up to military leaders like General Curtis Lemay, who aggressively pressed for an attack. It was a historic moment of leadership. In resolving the Crisis, we not only got USSR missiles removed from Cuba and removed our own from Turkey, but built on the relationship formed from that to sign a limited nuclear test ban treaty. Despite the unqualified success of these maneuvers at ratcheting down tensions, many within the defense apparatus were actually disappointed at the conclusion, seeing it as a missed opportunity to topple Castro in Cuba and advance our front in the Cold War. Daniel Ellsberg, the eventual Pentagon whistleblower, described the atmosphere there after the Crisis’ resolution as “poisonous,” defined by “hatred and rage.” This isn’t a picture of a Department of Defense that copes with peaceful inclinations, in line with the President it serves.
As the War On Terror rounds out a second decade with no end in sight, the time for similarly dauntless civilian leadership is long overdue, and we will not get it with Trump in office. The military’s line so far, part Trump is crazy! We didn’t think he’d go through with it! and part We were totally justified, we have the intel… But we can’t show it to you, is the deflecting obfuscation of an institution running so rampant, for so long, that its leaders barely bother to get their stories straight ex-post-facto. It must end, and we should get serious about taking those responsible to task. Civilian control of the military and foreign policy is not a nice thing to do when we can swing it, it’s a cornerstone of our Republic.
