During the Cold War, American Navy
ships were forced into humiliating positions. When
Soviet ships would come up and push them out of
the way, the American ships just ran away. We would
all like to forget the incident when a Romanian
jumped off his ship to an American vessel, asked
for asylum, and was sent back to Romania to go to
prison.
We found out after the incident of
the USS Cole that wimpishness is still the policy
of the Navy brass.
As one of the USS Cole crewmen told
the New York Times, "If we had shot those people
we'd have gotten into trouble for it. That's what's
frustrating about it. We would have gotten into
more trouble for shooting two foreigners than losing
17 American sailors."
All the guns on the USS Cole were
unloaded. Two sailors patrolled the deck with 9mm
pistols, but they too were unloaded. Like Barney
Fife, those two were allowed to have two bullets
each, but they couldn't load their guns with them.
Said another crew member, "In
the military, it's like we're trained to hesitate
now." When someone is attacking you, hesitation
is routinely fatal.
The report on the terrorist attack
on the USS Cole had Secretary of Defense William
S. Cohen upset, because he wanted to fix blame on
the captain of the ship.
The man who informed me of all this
is an old navy man, and he points out what all of
us who have been in the government know: this sort
of general policy is not invented by a ship's captain.
But Cohen is a moderate Republican,
and he follows the rules.
The rule is that you never blame the
brass. You sacrifice somebody outside the Pentagon
each time something like this happens. Back when
the Romanian jumped on an American ship and was
sent back, they blamed the captain. This was absurd.
During the hours that man was on the ship, you may
be assured that the captain asked the Pentagon for
orders and was told what to do.
But nobody in the brass is going to
stand up for the captain.
Today, you do not get a star on your
collar unless you are a bureaucrat first and a soldier
way down the list. Do you remember during the campaign,
when Pentagon generals lined up to say the Clinton
military policies were fine and Bush was wrong?
Those same generals are now shouting that they need
emergency appropriations to keep the military from
collapse. They now say that there's a crisis in
the military. We all expected that.
This will all be Evil Heresy to regular
conservatives, who worship anything in a uniform.
They worship Colin Powell because he had on a uniform.
The simple fact is that wearing a
star may have meant something honorable in the days
of Douglas MacArthur, but those days are long, long
gone.
|