In 1992, then-Lieutenant Colonel Charles J. Dunlap Jr., writing in the Army War College’s official periodical Parameters, published a cautionary tale titled The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012. Dunlap’s work foretold the rise of a fictional "General Brutus," a charismatic and ambitious officer who parlayed the disillusionment of American citizens with civilian government into a takeover of the American government.
I thought of Dunlap’s story this week when the flap over MoveOn’s "General Betray Us" ad was in full swing. I was particularly chilled when I heard George W. Bush utter the following words at his latest photo op with the White House press corps:
...most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like MoveOn.org, or more afraid of irritating them than they are of irritating the United States military.
It occurred to me to wonder how afraid, exactly, Democrats are supposed to be. I had never imagined, in my twenty-plus years on active duty in the armed forces, that any civilian should be "afraid of irritating" me because I happened to be in the military. Yet now the President of the United States, who revels in referring to himself not as the chief executive but as the commander-in-chief, has plainly suggested that they should. Seventy-two senators apparently agreed.
In the past few days, we’ve had two leading candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidency make eerily threatening pronouncements: Senator John McCain called for MoveOn to be "thrown out of the country," and later said through a spokesman that attacks on General Petraeus’ character "should have no place in the American political debate." Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani said MoveOn "passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass." Giuliani refused to specify what penalties he would put in place to keep that line from being crossed in the future; but in Dunlap’s account of the coup of 2012, crossing the line by criticizing General Brutus was punishable by imprisonment and death.
Dunlap’s General Brutus took power in the aftermath of the disastrous Second Gulf War, in which American forces were soundly defeated in a conflict with Iran. We’re not at war with Iran, yet, and many of the events in Dunlap’s article have not come to pass in the fifteen years since it was published. But many others have, including the politicization of the military and the militarization of the civilian sector. Bush’s deployment of Colin Powell to roll out this war, and David Petraeus to deliver the White House report on its progress, both were deliberate decisions to clothe what have are fundamentally civilian decisions in military garb. Bush, of course, likes to dress up as a soldier whenever he can, and although he wasn’t the first to refer to his attorney general in this way, it always creeped me out to hear him refer to Alberto Gonzales as "General Gonzales."
Military officers should no more be immune to critical scrutiny than any other public servant; the history of warfare is littered with the corpses of those whose officers believed themselves above reproach. Real generals command real soldiers, who die real deaths when the generals screw up; yet now, we are told we should be "afraid" of "passing a line" by leveling harsh criticism of such officers. Such lines are quintessentially un-American. As the condemned dissenter in 2012 wrote to one of his former comrades in arms:
Finally, I would tell our classmates that democracy is a fragile institution that must be continuously nurtured and scrupulously protected. I would also tell them that they must speak out when they see the institution threatened; indeed, it is their duty to do so.
As a former soldier, I might have chosen different words than MoveOn; I might even have disagreed with the tone and content of what they said. But when I served, it was will the full intent of fighting to the death, if necessary, to defend their right to say it.
Times have apparently changed.
Dunlap’s tale, of course, was a work of fiction, and although Dunlap himself is now a two-star general, he’s not necessarily gifted with any particular predictive abilities about the course the nation and its armed forces will take. But 2012 is not so far away, and draconian penalties for criticizing our own charismatic generals may not be so far away, either.