Why Does Lt. Gen. Newbold Hate America?

Two senior military officers are known to have challenged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the planning of the Iraq war. Army General Eric Shinseki publicly dissented and found himself marginalized. Marine Lieut. General Greg Newbold, the Pentagon's top operations officer, voiced his objections internally and then retired, in part out of opposition to the war. Here, for the first time, Newbold goes public with a full-throated critique: [...]

From 2000 until October 2002, I was a Marine Corps lieutenant general and director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq--an unnecessary war. Inside the military family, I made no secret of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense. And I think I was outspoken enough to make those senior to me uncomfortable. But I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat--al-Qaeda. I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy. Until now, I have resisted speaking out in public. I've been silent long enough.

Actually, General, you've been silent too long.

There's a natural tendency on the left for us to glom on to every military voice who's against this war. Gen. Shinseki is probably more popular in the forums of DailyKos than he is in the Pentagon these days. But people like Newbold don't deserve a pass from us. Where was Newbold in 2002? 2003? Most importantly, where was he in 2004? He had a chance to speak out when it would have mattered, when the debate could have been shifted away from this war. If, in October of 2002 Newbold had resigned, and the next day held a press conference explaining why, his words would have had incredible weight, and could have helped turn the debate.

Instead, Newbold stayed silent. I don't know if he's a Republican or not, but his silence - and the silence of other high-ranking military officers - has certainly helped George Bush. I actually do suspect that Newbold was motivated by partisanship, because of the following statement:

So what is to be done? We need fresh ideas and fresh faces. That means, as a first step, replacing Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach.

Earlier in the piece, Newbold calls the people under Bush "zealots", but the entire piece reads as if Newbold believes that the problem isn't Bush, but the people under him. Matt Yglesias has summed this up nicely as the "if only the Czar knew" complex - the belief that the problem lies not at the top, with the President, but beneath him - the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz axis.

This is simply dumb. There's no serious evidence that either Cheney or Rumsfeld has lost favour in the White House. Newbold apparently can't bring himself to admit that the President isn't being misled by zealots - the President is a zealot. And this is a problem. Because if Newbold had been serious about wanting to change the leadership who created this war, he could have spoken out in 2004, when it would have mattered. Now, all he can do is lower Bush's approval ratings, and probably not even that.