Per aspera

I’m sure it’s a perfectly wonderful sign for the armed forces, not to mention the republic, that so many generals lately have felt compelled by their sense of duty to their country to retire from the military:

Sanchez: Iraq war ‘a nightmare with no end in sight’

Sanchez, who retired in 2006, said it was his duty to obey orders and not object publicly when he was on active duty, but now that he is retired he has an obligation to speak out.

“While the politicians espouse a rhetoric designed to preserve their reputations and their political power, our soldiers die,” he said.

The administration, he said, has ignored messages from field commanders that warned repeatedly that “our military alone could not achieve victory” without corresponding help from the State Department.

“Our National leadership ignored the lessons of World War Two as we entered into this war and to this day continue to believe that victory can be achieved through the application of military power alone,” he said.

“From a catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan, to the administration’s latest surge strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronize its political, economical and military power,” he said.

Sanchez said the current strategy, which included a “surge” of troops into Iraq, was “a desperate attempt by the administration that has not accepted the political and economic realities of this war and they have definitely not been able to communicate effectively that reality to the American people.”

“Too often, our politicians have been distracted and they have chosen loyalty to their political parties above loyalty to the Constitution because of their lust for power,” he said.

Congress, he said, has failed its job of oversight.

But because you can’t logically prove a negative, you can’t say that some unplanned unspecified good result may arise in the area currently delineated by the borders of Iraq at some undetermined point in the unbounded future, so talk of withdrawing troops is, now and for always, just defeatism.  So I have no worry that the Democrats in Congress will be influenced by this disgruntled former employee (”Note: this sentence not sarcasm,” he sighed).

(via Making Light - see especially Debra Doyle’s comment #9)