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Bucking the Rider

By Alex Urevick

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It always amazes me when I find a picture that contextualizes my thoughts, when I find truth in that cliché about a picture and a thousand words. Last week I found such an image in Anita Kunz’s cover of the October 13th issue of the New Yorker, where we see President Bush dressed in typical cowboy gear, riding horseback through a pretty Southwestern scene. Around his head are blinders, which we would and should expect to see on the horse, and the horse looks back in terror as they gallop forward.

I imagine the terrain ahead; it is treacherous, with many dangers lying in unexpected places. It is obvious that the horse can sense that his jockey is not capable of steering them clear of the pitfalls. I picture the pair approaching a deep canyon. Bush wants terribly to reach the other side, but cannot see any way to go but straight ahead; the blinders keep him from looking for alternative. So, with no other visible way to reach his goal he prods and kicks his horse onwards. “Yee-Haw! Giddy up!” However, the horse does not share Bush’s blinders. He can see a way around to the canyon, and can tell that his rider cannot. The question that I ask myself as I ponder this scene is: “Will the horse buck his rider?"

Lately it has seemed increasingly likely that the answer to the above question will be “yes.” Though I never thought that a coalition of liberals and generals was possible, the extremely disruptive and destructive moves of the Bush Administration over the past few years now make such a scenario seem likely. As long as I’ve been aware of politics (roughly the last 20 years) liberals and the armed forces have seemed to be generally at odds with one another. Liberals have always been termed “soft” and not willing to do the dirty work of running an empire. For at least the past 30 years, members of the armed forces have tended to vote largely for Republicans, and Democrats have generally been harmed in national elections by the widely-held belief that Republicans were stronger on foreign policy.  Recent events, though, are destroying this myth.

Why would this war turn the officers of the armed forces against the Republicans whom they usually consider allies? First and foremost, it should now be apparent to everyone that the present administration does indeed have ideological “blinders” on, and that it is determined to attain certain goals no matter what the cost to the country. The generals, the intelligence officers, and the State Department all made attempts to warn the administration, and the American people, that the threat from Iraq was not dangerous, that there was no Al Queda link, that there was little evidence of WMDs, and that we would face serious problems once we entered the country. All of these messages were disparaged or ignored by the administration, and those who argued against the validity of its claims were denounced or otherwise retaliated against, as was seen in the one now famous case where a CIA operative was exposed in retaliation for her husband's insistence that claims about Iraq trying to buy North African Uranium were false. Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who was in charge of U.S. Central command in the Middle East, has been telling everyone who will listen that the lies leading to this war should be seen on the same level as the Gulf of Tonkin affair, when the Johnson administration staged an attack on an American ship by the North Vietnamese as an excuse to escalate the Vietnam War.

Generals may also rebel against the Bush administration because it has led us into a war with no visible exit strategy, a clear violation of intelligent military doctrine. Now that our forces are on the ground in the Middle East, who can picture how this is going to end? We have opened a Pandora’s Box in one of the most complex and dangerous areas of the world, and our soldiers will be stuck in the middle of the mess for years to come. The potential is very great for things to go from their present bad state towards a much larger problem, for example if Israel uses the instability to launch further attacks against Syria.

We have also given our enemies a target that is now within easy reach. Terrorists no longer have to hijack planes to kill Americans (though they certainly would like to inflict more damage on American soil). They can now find their way to Iraq and strike at American soldiers there. Bush’s comments that the terrorists targeting American soldiers should “bring it on” certainly should have alarmed the generals in charge of making sure their men and women get home alive and in one piece.

In addition, our military forces are currently dealing with a region that was not a direct imminent threat to the United States, thus weakening our abilities to deal with other more real threats. With the good part of our military locked into commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and other “hot spots,” or held in reserve to relieve troops in these places, we have to wonder how we would deal with an unexpected threat if one arose. As Gen. Erik K. Shinseki, the 34th Chief of Staff of the Army, warned, “Beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division Army. Our soldiers and families bear the risk and hardship of carrying a mission load that exceeds what force capabilities we can sustain.”

The Bush administration appears to be ignoring many of the new threats we face. According to Zinni, these threats stem from all of the following: powerful states, smaller states with WMDs, failed states, illegal immigration, terrorism, environmental disaster, and weaknesses our networked infrastructure and abilities to transmit information. The point here is that at least some military officers (Zinni mentions Wesley Clark as one of the other Generals in the know) have recognized that some of the biggest threats to the survival of our nation come from non- to partially-military areas. It should be obvious that this administration is making it much harder to deal with these threats, many of which are international in scope and require cross border cooperation, and all of which require the very resources being diverted to Iraq to other unnecessary programs of this radical administration.

Finally, we are using our military in ways that they were not built for (peacekeepers and administrators/nation builders). This would be fine if the military was structured in a way that was as adept at building nations as destroying them, but currently the military is not built this way.

It is thus not surprising that we now see a general running for the Democratic nomination. We can only hope that this is the beginning of a trend, that the horse is beginning to buck the rider, and that those members of the government with institutional memory become aware of just how extreme the Bush administration really is. They should recognize that Paul Krugman is dead on in his assessment of the Bush Administration, and that we are dealing with a revolutionary power bent on destroying the structures that currently hold this country together. None of us can know what the revolution will lead to, but all of those people who love the strength, stability, and prosperity that this country has enjoyed over the past half century should be more than worried about what might happen, they should be fighting back, and now it appears that some finally are.

The question remains though; can liberal thinkers come to terms with allying themselves with the military-intelligence agencies, and with the dirty work that is sometimes needed to keep together a strong nation?  Will liberals be willing to pick up the reigns of the horse and right our course before we ride into the abyss?

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Alex Urevick is a student at the New School's Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science.  He can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three