Dear Mr. President,
FIRE THEM NOW. Oh, and you might want to order up the film "Seven Days in May" for your weekend viewing.
I saw this coming back in December when the U.S.-Iraq status of forces agreement and troop withdrawal were finalized. General Ray Odierno (who bears an uncanny likeness to Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now") was first off the blocks contradicting the plans of his civilian masters. And I fear that keeping Gates on as Defense Secretary has emboldened these renegade general officers.
President Obama might want to brush up on his history of the Korean War when another commanding general, Douglas MacArthur challenged his Commander-in-Chief, President Harry Truman. Truman wasted no time in recalling MacArthur and informing him that his services were no longer required. Firing MacArthur, who had been lionized and idolized as the savior of America in winning the war in the Pacific during WWII (to hear MacArthur tell it, he did it all by himself), was an act of great courage on Truman's part. The outrage it generated went as far as members of Congress calling for Truman's impeachment.
But Truman's steadfast defense of civilian control of the military, a principle as old as the nation itself could not be challenged or dismissed.
Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States subscribed to this suspicious assessment of the virtues of standing militaries; as Samuel Adams wrote in 1768, "Even when there is a necessity of the military power, within a land, a wise and prudent people will always have a watchful and jealous eye over it" [5]. Even more forceful are the words of Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the American Constitutional Convention, who stated that
[s]tanding armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican Governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism [6].
Yes, the movie I referred to in the beginning, "Seven Days in May", is fiction. But the threat it depicts is not out of the realm of the possible. President Obama needs to act now to remind the generals who really runs the Armed Forces of the United States.
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