I’ve come to expect unusual encounters at press tour, but I wasn’t even in my seat long before someone came walking up to my seat with retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, with whom I would talk war, peace and Plato.
A four star-general whose military term in the Army spanned 1964-1996, and is also a familiar talking head consultant on NBC, McCaffrey is among nearly a dozen active and retired U.S. Army generals, looking back at a half-century of American battles in a National Geographic special this fall.
McCaffrey told me the most surprising thing he found after seeing the film by Tresha Mabile and Peter Bergen “was how unwarlike the generals are. The reason why generals and admirals are old guys, is because they all don’t want to fight.”
On the other hand, he added, “politicians want to fight. Because we’re the only ones who will respond to their directives. So it almost doesn’t matter what it is — can you deliver the mail, grab 10,000 refugees or hammer the Saddam Hussein machine, the answer is yeah, we could do that. But whether it’s a good idea is a legitimate question. Is there another way around this? And by the way, do you know the result if we take down the regime in Libya?”
Beyond that, there is the drumbeat of the news media, McCaffrey says. “In the end, you have CNN and everybody pressing you in public and you say, ‘What are we going to do?’ ‘How are going to respond to this?’
“I think 24-hour cable changes the way our government operates, there’s no question about it,” McCaffrey said. “It puts the heat on to do short term action.”
So are we living in an era now of nonstop war?
“There’s been nonstop combat somewhere for most of the country’s history, the truth being known,” McCaffrey said.
Will that ever change? I asked him. And this is where ancient Greek philosophy came into it.
“Plato — ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war,'” he quoted. “We play a global, and I think, positive role.” But that has to also include diplomacy, sanctions and actions other than combat.
In the film, McCaffrey takes former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to task for his mismanagement of the invasion.
“I have a permanent sense of hatred for what Secretary Rumsfeld in particular and these people that got in there and convinced themselves that they could do this with a minimalist approach of military power.”
On the panel, McCaffrey recalled the failures of the Iraq invasion.
“I actually started on the fourth day of the ground invasion,” he said. “I’d had a lot of dealings with Rumsfeld on the glide path to war. He called in a series of us for consultations. I thought they were actually listening. In retrospect, I think it was more an attempt to try and manipulate people who had credibility in the public media. And it was clear to me we had a completely inadequate force going in there.”
Very soon, McCaffrey said, “I became, early on, the strongest critic, not of the intervention, but the manner in which it was carried out.
“We were on the edge of a disaster going in there, never mind when it welled up around our ears with an insurgency,” he said. “And then a year or two or three later, there’s this great controversy over is this a civil war. Which it obviously was, for God’s sakes.
“There was an element of foolhardiness that the manner in which we carried out that intervention that was just astonishing to me. And a lot of you know, 60,000 killed and wounded U.S. military forces and pushing a trillion dollars. It did need to come out that way.”
Other generals featured in the film include Generals Colin Powell, Stanley A. McChrystal, David Petraeus, Wesley Clark, George William Casey. “American War Generals” premieres Sept. 14 at 8 p.m.