The lead story on the news recently as been the revolt of various retired generals against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. One is always tempted by the heuristic that the enemy of my enemy must be a friend, but that's unlikely the case. It's unlikely that the peace movement has a dog in that fight, as they like to say. The generals certainly haven't converted to pacifism. The Democrats may like this dispute more, since it question about Rumsfeld's competency tend to leave more fundamental questions unexamined. Indeed, the generals' revolt is most likely an attempt to salvage the military from any responsibility for the debacle in Iraq. This repeats what happened after Vietnam, when the military retrenched into its "professional" guise, allowing it to recover its political credibility.

This is a profound misreading of history. What Iraq tells us now is what Vietnam should have told us in the '60s: that military force, regardless of how overwhelming it may appear, is a self-limiting and self-damaging political tool, a dysfunctional absurdity. Rumsfeld has two problems: one is that he has single-mindedly pursued the accumulation of naked military power more aggressively than any past Secretary of Defense, especially in his programs for militarizing space and promoting tactical nuclear weapons; the other is that he has exposed the folly of doing so by blundering into an actual war. The military always looks most awesome when it isn't fighting, which was its good fortune for most of the post-Vietnam period. On the other hand, even such lopsided assaults as Panama and Iraq I bring it down to human scale -- at least temporarily. The long, unraveling wars in Afghanistan and Iraq expose the uselessness and sheer madness of the military all the more thoroughly.

Judging from George Packer's recent New Yorker Letter from Iraq, "The Lessons of Tal Afar" (April 10, 2006 issue; doesn't seem to be online), the context for the generals' revolt is a debate within the military between those who believe that a much smarter occupation can still prevail and those who believe that Iraq is lost and the only way to keep the military from losing as well is to redeploy as tactfully as possible. Packer, for reasons more nuanced than George Bush but not much more convincing, claims that the reoccupation of Tal Afar has been a success and points the way, showing how more politically sensitive military commanders might stabilize Iraq. That's hardly the only view of Tal Afar -- Juan Cole listed it high in his list of the top ten US blunders in Iraq in 2005. But both camps have plenty of axes to grind with Rumsfeld, especially for the cavalier way Rumsfeld entered the war and finessed and muffed the early occupation.

Calls for sacking Rumsfeld go way back. The problem with singling out the Secretary of Defense is that it lets the President and his policies off the hook. Rumsfeld no doubt acted with enough discretion that he bears personal responsibility for many details of how the war was actually prosecuted, but the overall direction of the war was set by Bush -- at least in his name and with his approval. (In theory, the policies could have been limited by Congress or the courts, perhaps in recognition of international law, but that hasn't happened.) As long as Bush knows what Rumsfeld is doing and countenances it, the one to sack is Bush. If you're against the war, you start with Bush; if you single out Rumsfeld, you're accepting the war and merely disagreeing with its implementation. That was, lamentably, what happened back in 2004 when Kerry focused on the need to replace Rumsfeld.

This doesn't mean that Rumsfeld himself shouldn't be fired. He should, and much more: he deserves to be brought before a war crimes tribunal, along with his bosses and individually culpable subordinates -- some names that come to mind include Wolfowitz, Feith, Cambone, Sanchez, and Miller. That way we not only dispose of those figures; we do so in a way that helps us to learn from their mistakes, much as the Germans and the Japanese learned from the war crimes trials of their leaders. Short of wholesale regime change, sacking Rumsfeld is just a matter of the war party trying to sort out its own dirty laundry. They may indeed be successful, especially if they can frame the case as negligence due to arrogance, swagger, bluster -- the very things Midge Dichter so swooned over back when Rummy looked like such a hot stud. I always enjoy the arrogant being taken down a notch, so good luck to them.

Packer, perhaps inadvertently, has some interesting things to say:

A field-grade officer in the 101st Airborne said, "The algorithm of success is to get a good-enough solution." There were, he said, three categories of assessment for every aspect of the mission: optimal, acceptable, and unacceptable. He made it clear that optimal wasn't in the running. "We're handing a shit sandwich over to someone else," the officer said. "We have to turn this over, let them do it their way. We're like a frigging organ transplant that's rejected. We have to get the Iraqi Army to where they can hold their own in a frigging firefight with insurgents, and get the hell out." The Iraqi national-security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, who chairs a high-level committee in Baghdad on American withdrawal, gave the same forecast that was mentioned by a planner on General Abizaid's staff, at Central Command: fewer than a hundred thousand foreign troopsin Iraq by the end of this year, and half that number by the middle of 2007.

In other words, "conditions-based" withdrawal is a flexible term. The conditions will be evaluated by commanders who know what results are expected back in Washington. I suggested to Senator Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican, who has been a critic of the Administration's war policy, that this sounded like a variation on the famous advice that Senator George Aiken, of Vermont, gave President Johnson about Vietnam, in 1966: declare victory and go home. "In a twenty-first-century version, yes, probably," Hagel said. "It won't be quite that stark." The Administration, he said, is "finding ways in its own mind for backdoor exits out of Iraq." He added, "We have an election coming up in November. The fact is, we're going to be pulling troops out, and I suspect it'll be kind of quiet. We're going to wake up some morning, probably in the summer, and all of a sudden we'll be forty thousand troops down, and people will say, 'Gee, I didn't know.'"

[ . . . ]

The pressure is partly driven by the strain on the military, and partly by the fear that thousands of junior officers and senior sergeants, who face future deployments, may quit if the war extends many more years. Divorce rates among Army officers have doubled since the war began. The Army is so short-staffed that it has promoted ninety-seven per cent of its captains. "If you're not a convicted felon, you're being promoted to major," a Pentagon official said.

This withdrawal looks just like Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam. It reduces the body counts -- both in service, where they're unable to staff, and in body bags -- but it prolongs the war. It also sets up the scenario for defeat, while postponing the event. In many ways the real war the Bush Administration has waged is between the their present corrupt power grab and the future. Surely they know there will be some sort of reckoning -- with the debt, the trade balance, the class balance, the job drain, the brain drain, global warming, all sorts of things. They people who will pay the harshest price for this cynicism will no doubt be the few Iraqis they lure to do our bidding while we set them up for the fall. Same as with Vietnam, except that compared to what we're seeing in Iraq, Ho Chi Minh was an old-fashioned gentleman. While this line of retreat may go down painlessly in easily-forgetful America, do you think any Iraqis who plan on living their whole lives in their home country won't see the writing on the wall?

Another quote:

Beyond the White House, various analysts have offered alternative strategies, all of them based on the notion that 2006 is the year in which Iraq's long-term future, for better or worse, will be decided. Barry Posen, a political scientist at M.I.T., has offered a more radical proposal than any officials have dared to entertain. In a recent article in Boston Review, Posen concluded that a unified, democratic Iraq is highly unlikely and that American interests require a strategic withdrawal over the next eighteen months. Posen is known as a foreign-policy realist; when I met him at his office at M.I.T., he said, "I've been depicted as a villain. I just want the American polity to consider all sides of the equation before undertaking armed philanthropy." Posen has decided that America can afford to leave behind a civil war in Iraq -- one that we will "manage" on our way out, so that its result will be, in his words, "a hurting stalemate." If one side seems about to win, the U.S. can tip the board in the other direction. "We managed a civil war in Bosnia from the outside," Posen said. "Whether we knew it or not, we were generating a hurting stalemate." In the end, after much violence, Iraq's factions will conclude that no one can win, and then they will come to their own arrangement.

Posen's version of withdrawal is realpolitik with a vengeance, offering the cold comfort of hardheaded calculations rather than grand illusions, but it's difficult to imagine how America, without troops in Iraq, could control events on the ground any better than it can now. When I asked Posen about the moral obligation to Iraqis, who will surely be massacred in large numbers without American forces around, he replied, "No one talks about the terrible things that can happen if we stay the course. The insurgents are trying for a Beirut Marine-barracks bombing." He added that he doesn't imagine his ideas will be heard in Washington. "These people are stubborn. A rational person would think that they've learned something about the limits of American power. They've learned nothing."

Hard not to close on that note. But nothing matters more than that we learn the real lessons of this folly. After Vietnam we settled just for the relative tranquility of peace, allowing all sorts of hideous myths to fester. And that's how we got to Iraq. We need to do better now that we got another clear cut example.

As it happens, the same issue of The New Yorker has a cartoon that depicts near perfectly the Bush program for peace and prosperity in Iraq, and for that matter the rest of the world:

If at first you don't succeed, bang it again. Show it who's boss. The only way you can lose is if you give up.