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From the ever-worthwhile 'Foreign Affairs'. Among other things, a thorough refutation of the idea that was common on the left that the military industrial complex favored Clinton and opposed Trump because he "wants peace". "When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, there was good cause to think that he would be popular with the armed forces. He was, for a start, a Republican, and the military leans heavily conservative. He had also run an ostentatiously pro-military campaign, promising to “rebuild the military, take care of vets and make the world respect the U.S. again!” There were, to be sure, some warning signs of trouble to come, such as when he attacked the war hero John McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona (“I like people who weren’t captured”), and belittled the parents of a soldier who had died in combat after they dared to criticize him. "But initially, at least from the military’s perspective, the good seemed to far outweigh the bad. Trump pushed for higher defense spending; sent more U.S. forces and firepower to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; and liberalized the military’s rules of engagement, giving commanders on the ground more freedom of maneuver. Even more eye-catching was his appointment of generals to senior civilian positions: the retired Marine Corps general James Mattis became the secretary of defense, the retired Marine general John Kelly became the secretary of homeland security and then the White House chief of staff, the retired army lieutenant general Michael Flynn became Trump’s national security adviser—and, when he flamed out after just 24 days, was replaced by the then active-duty army lieutenant general H. R. McMaster. Trump, for his part, reveled in the generals’ aura of manliness, hailing “Mad Dog” Mattis (a nickname Mattis hated) as “a true General’s General!” "Some critics worried that the overrepresentation of generals in the administration would impinge on civilian control of the military. But many others celebrated the appointment of these generals, hoping that their presence in the administration would provide the reality TV star turned president with much-needed “adult” supervision. "Things went wrong almost immediately. How that happened—how the promise of smooth civil-military relations devolved into acrimony, backbiting, and bewilderment—is documented in four new books. Two are journalistic accounts: Trump and His Generals, a fair and comprehensive overview of Trump’s foreign policy by the journalist and think tanker Peter Bergen, and A Very Stable Genius, a work of first-rate news coverage and valuable insight by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, reporters at The Washington Post (where I am a columnist). The other two books are memoirs. Holding the Line, by Guy Snodgrass, a retired U.S. Navy officer who served as Mattis’s Pentagon speechwriter, gives the impression of being hastily cobbled together and includes more interoffice politics than most readers will want to know. But it provides a few nuggets that have not been reported elsewhere—such as the claim that Trump told Mattis to “screw Amazon” on a major contract because he was so unhappy with The Washington Post (which is owned by Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos). The other memoir—Call Sign Chaos, by Mattis and Bing West—doesn’t deal with the controversies of the Trump administration at all. “I’m old fashioned: I don’t write about sitting Presidents,” Mattis explains. But the book does provide an expertly crafted account of Mattis’s career, which helps explain why the marriage between Trump and his generals was destined for divorce....." https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2020-04-06/few-good-men -- *“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black Jacobins" by C. L. R. James Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
