STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter Blames Iraqi Military for Faulty/Absent USG Military Strategy in Iraq!
While Ramadi, Iraq and Palmyra, Syria fall to ISIS --Carter assumes no responsibility/neither does Obama Administration/White House.

Palmyra was a beautiful city and I had fond memories of the “Venice of the Desert” so I was deeply disturbed when this treasure of antiquity fell to hordes of ISIS (created by the CIA/Bush/Cheney/Jerry Bremer). Next I hear Sec Def Carter boldly declared that the “Iraqi soldiers have no will to fight” and another once beautiful city, Ramadi, is felled by a comparatively undersized and ill-equipped ISIS.

I wondered whether this effete physicist whose only real accomplishment was to manage his lackluster ‘Brooks Brother’s career’[thanks Col. Ralph Peters] had even prepared to be nothing more than highly paid consultant to the Temple Money lenders at Goldman Sachs [which is what he had been among other things unsavory].

When I was asked about his appointment, I shrugged my shoulders in disappointment. I had seen seemingly polished Ivy Leaguers [Yale Summa Cum Laude in Medieval History an Physics; Phd from Oxford] all my life in national security; as well as in my unique training at Harvard and MIT. They were all made from the same mold of growing up in a protective bubble where their parents [father a navy neurologist/psychiatrist] allowed Ashton to receive the best education possible.

Clearly, I don’t begrudge his educational accomplishments, other than the fact that even in his background there is evidence that he took the easy way out of academia. Going to Oxford to receive a Phd in Physics is close to the equivalent of buying a degree of little significance from one of our on-line commercial colleges. In fact, there is no evidence in his entire history of consultantships from Mitre [CIA fed] to an assortment of other prestigious anoxic organizations [CFR], that Carter had really been in the nitty gritty front of battle; fighting counter-terrorism; nor studying war strategies/tactics.  He is more on the profit-making side of war/conflict, please check out many of his “partner positions” and BOD appointments.

Carter is a man of the privileged classes in America where for the most part, he never got his hands dirty in the textured world of inhumane deaths and brutal executions of well-conceived strategies/tactics.  Yet he makes a good side income from the military-industrial complex. Carter, like Rumsfeld, and Bob MacNamara [whiz-kid of the Vietnam war who had a mental break down] are part of the sanitized and profit-oriented version of war—sterile and incompetent. I would call these incredibly credentialed ‘water walkers’ as ‘operatives whom I had to stay away from’ …or ‘neutralize’ in my past efforts to affect operational change in the field of combat/terrorism.

Now, I discover that this well-manicured, completely inarticulate civilian representative of our formidable fighting forces, has just blamed in public the very people whom our brave warriors has supposedly trained, equipped and instructed. Carter publicly crucified his supposed ally, the Iraqi army, for fleeing and cowardice in the field of battle. That is a very strong indictment of not the Iraqi soldiers nor even the non-existent Iraqi Government but rather of George Bush Jr and his coterie of neocon chicken hawks who created this mess a decade 

ago.

Moreover, Carter’s accusation is akin to a verbal boomerang which indicts himself and those military men who sacrificed their lives in order to select, train and ‘force’ this proxy army of ethnic strife to fight an entity which his predecessors created when they attempted to disband the Saddam Hussein’s Army. [thanks to Jerry Bremer and Rummie]. Carter demonstrated that in the blame game of this particular administration as well as the three previous ones, none of them had the slightest idea of what they were doing in the ‘human terrain’  of combat and sustained kinetic encounters.

Americans have had the privilege to fund in the trillions of dollars, a completely inept series of administrations, each of which had proffered the seemingly ‘best and brightest’ to the forefront of leadership. Again, many of those in leadership have profited significantly by this constant warring. The reality of the past decades concerning Iraq and Afghanistan is that we have wasted and discarded the most valuable assets America has to offer—the men and women who want to serve this country. How many of us who had been in Ramadi or Palmyra [ as I had been during the Second Iraq War] feel betrayed by the complete incompetency of our civilian and military leaders who are only to eager to write a book or work as a consultant for large sums of money. How pathetic it is that we, Americans, were offered to read the absurd memoirs of the dysfunctional braggadocios like  Bush Jr;  McCrystal; McRaven; Cheney; Panetta; Gates; Hillary; Obama in order to realize that there was no gravitas nor strategic sense in these representatives of the ‘best and brightest.’ 

It would be best if Carter would resign for having been rude, inappropriate and incompetent in all aspects of his short tenure. Not to mention, did anyone in authority realized that he was “mobbed up” by the war industry?  Talk about conflict of interest. Maybe President Obama had basically run out of possible sacrificial lambs. 

Our country has once again confronted the ineptitude of civility where the fighting grunts who have died and those who are willing to die—have to ask themselves as they had done in the Korean War, Vietnam War and the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—what am I doing? Was it worth being doomed to a hospital bed for life, trying to exist with half a body?

Americans must turn back to the times and methods when we were forced by necessity and limited time to select out a George Marshall; an Eisenhower; a Patton; a Curtis LeMay; and a Nimitz.  If we don’t address our real national security issue: the absence of effective civilian and military leadership then we,  the Republic will certainly disappear into the footnotes of history as an example of a country that had lost its way and destroyed itself through the pretense of having selected the ‘best and brightest’ when in fact they were the ‘worst and most cowardly’.