That policy called for systematically inducing Hanoi to stop supporting the Vietcong through calibrated US military operations. Its main thesis was that during the Vietnam War the Joint Chiefs of Staff became politicized, deferring to senior civilian officials in the Johnson administration who crafted the policy of “graduated pressure” on North Vietnam. His dissertation became a widely acclaimed book on civil–military relations, Dereliction of Duty (1997). Between those two wars, he earned a Ph.D. McMaster had performed brilliantly in the first Gulf War, earning a Silver Star for gallantry in leading a tank assault that destroyed a much larger Iraqi force, and he became the exemplar of US counterinsurgency prowess in pacifying Tal Afar early in the post–September 11 US occupation of Iraq. No doubt he also found irresistible the opportunity to advance from something of a military backwater-he was then deputy commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command and director of its Army Capabilities Integration Center-to one of the most important jobs in the executive branch. His rationale-or at least his rationalization-was likely that the position would best be filled by a warrior-scholar with the spine and rectitude to protect the country against Trump’s rash leadership.
This was in evidence almost immediately, when Trump’s executive order banning citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from traveling to the US was issued without being vetted by the State, Defense, or Homeland Security Departments.Īs an active-duty soldier, McMaster probably felt compelled to accept the job out of deference to the commander-in-chief-whoever he or she was. Under Flynn’s supervision, the National Security Council would have become a crude vehicle for a far-right agenda. He was a shrill Islamophobe and right-wing ideologue who tolerated no disagreement and recruited acolytes he had groomed in previous active-service positions. Flynn had been unlikely to foster that kind of open conversation.
0 kommentar(er)
