

"Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel, decorated Gulf war veteran and adviser to the Pentagon until 2004, says he is disturbed by the "modern deification" of generals. "Most Americans have no military experience," he tells me. "They tend to impute to anyone wearing stars a degree of competence and courage associated with battle-hardened leaders of the Second World War or the Korean conflict. Nothing could be further from the truth."

According to this view, the Rolling Stone debacle is an example not just of a single general exercising bad judgement, but a microcosm of how the top brass as a whole - arrogant, hubristic, overmighty - have overreached themselves. It illustrates the urgent need to recalibrate the relationship between democratic politicians and military commanders.

“Certainly, if President Obama had not fired McChrystal, our civil-military relations problems would have become significantly worse," says one former Pentagon official who served under George W Bush. "But what few people recall is that when the Bush administration first came in, they were determined to rectify what they saw as very serious problems with civilian control, and determined to redress the imbalance. Ironically, because of how the Iraq war turned out, Bush left office with civil-military relations arguably in a far worse state than when he came in. General Petraeus had become the face not only of the military campaign, but of the strategy and policy of the war in Iraq."" Hasan

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Douglas Macgregor Is a friend. He is a fighting soldier, and not a politician, Like those whom I respect the most, he was "sacrificed" by the promotion system to the collective ambition of the soldier/politicians who control the system.

We Americans love military leaders too much and seek them as a corrective in a society too much given to commercial greed. "Greed is good," Gordon Gecko said. A lot of us do not really believe that and thus we seek the men who have given all for the Republic.

We should look to find someone like George Marshall, one of the most disinterested men who ever lived. We are failing in that search. pl

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2010/07/iraq-military-war-petraeus