Tomgram: William Astore, Mutiny on Spaceship Earth

Sometime in September 2007, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore wrote me at TomDispatch to complain about America’s disastrous and already seemingly never-ending war in Iraq. The invasion of that country had taken place more than four years earlier and things had long gone from bad to worse. That very year, the administration of President George W. Bush had doubled down again in that country, sending in General David Petraeus and yet more troops for a “surge” -- the first but hardly last one of these years -- against Sunni rebels in that country. Astore noted one other strange thing: the generals in America’s already visibly faltering wars were sporting remarkable chestfuls of ribbons (in the case of Petraeus, nine rows of them) that reminded him eerily of the look of the military chiefs of the failing Soviet Union before its implosion in 1991. Typically, when you examined photos of America’s successful generals like Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Marshall of the World War II era, men who had genuinely overseen winning wars, they sported only one to three exceedingly modest rows of such decorations. It seemed to him to speak worlds about where the planet’s most exceptional and indispensable nation was heading, militarily speaking -- and, once he pointed it out, it did to me, too.

So, in that September more than 12 years ago, I replied to his email suggesting that he might want to turn it into a piece for this website. He did so and more than 60 of his articles later, the U.S. is still involved in an Iraqi disaster (which has long since morphed into a strange set of other disasters, including the rise of ISIS, across the region) and America’s generals still sport chestfuls of putative honors that now accompany losing wars across a far greater expanse of the planet. If you don’t believe me, just check out a couple of recent photos of General Mark Milley, the latest chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chest is essentially nothing but an assemblage of ribbons of every imaginable sort. And then consider what Astore has to say about the same all-American disaster a score of years later. Tom