Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (17 page)

Army investigators confirmed that Westhusing had indeed committed suicide.
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A separate inquiry by the army inspector general exonerated Petraeus and Fil of any transgressions.
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USIS stayed in business. Case closed.

In essence, the army wrote off Westhusing’s death as an inexplicable tragedy. Why would this upright officer take his life just a month before his tour of duty was scheduled to end? Why had he not just run out the clock, returning to West Point and a family he loved? No one could answer these questions. An army psychologist looking into the case concluded that Westhusing possessed a “surprisingly limited” ability to grasp the fact that for some Americans Iraq was a moneymaking venture, not an opportunity to demonstrate benevolence. Westhusing had clung to the belief “that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses,” at least when the business at hand was war.
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The shrink knew better. In a war zone awash with profiteers, doing the right thing for the right reasons took a backseat to other more urgent and tangible imperatives.

Yet this cynical diagnosis mistook the symptoms for the disease. Grasping the significance of what was unfolding in Iraq actually did require a philosopher’s perspective. Call it Westhusing’s Theorem:
In a democracy, the health of the military professional ethic is inversely proportional to the presence of hired auxiliaries on the battlefield
. The pursuit of mammon and the values to which military professionals profess devotion are fundamentally incompatible and irreconcilable. Where profit-and-loss statements govern, devotion to duty, honor, and country inevitably takes a hit. Westhusing’s encounter with this reality exposed the inadequacy of his own elaborately constructed idealism.

Westhusing’s Theorem awaits definitive proof. Yet the experience of the Iraq War—unprecedented dependence on contractors coinciding with staggering malfeasance that the officer corps could not or would not control—qualifies at the very least as highly suggestive. For a true believer like Theodore Westhusing, becoming implicated in that malfeasance, even if indirectly, proved unendurable. In Iraq, he had discovered Westhusing’s Theorem, and doing so cost him his life.

GETTING THE DIAGNOSIS RIGHT

The Iraq War has not added to the population of unknown soldiers memorialized at Arlington Cemetery. Yet if there will be no new unknown soldiers, there will be many forgotten ones. Put Colonel Westhusing—at the time of his death the senior-most casualty of the Iraq War—at the top of that list.

Now that the war in Iraq has ended (for the United States at least), Americans might ponder the question of what the loss of several thousand soldiers there signifies. I have grappled with that question myself, not altogether successfully. One imagines that it becomes more difficult still when a soldier dies not in battle but as a result of an accident or by his or her own hand. Such circumstances deprive the bereaved of the consolation, however negligible or contrived, of knowing that their loved one died a “warrior’s death.”

Theodore Westhusing did not die a warrior’s death. Yet his death was a sacrificial act and should command the attention of anyone concerned about the health of the military profession. Here was the fire bell that rang in the night. Through his words and his own act of self-destruction, he warned of an impending cataclysm. Westhusing had not precisely followed Smedley Butler in becoming a “high class muscle-man for Big Business” or a “gangster for capitalism.” Yet in Iraq he discovered that in forging its lucrative partnership with defense contractors, the army to which he had devoted his life had sullied itself. The stain was indelible. For Westhusing, this proved too much to bear.

For others, and especially for the topmost echelons of the officer corps, the bell rang to no avail. The army paused to mourn Westhusing’s passing—in a handsome gesture, General Petraeus flew in from Iraq to attend the funeral service at West Point—but then just as quickly moved on. Westhusing became little more than “a buried footnote”—albeit a problematic one—appended to Petraeus’s career, which continued on its upward trajectory.
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In 2010, Colonel Matthew Moten, a faculty colleague of Westhusing’s at West Point who also happened to be serving in Iraq at the time of his friend’s death (and who escorted his remains home), took a run at reviving Westhusing’s cause. In an essay appearing in the journal
Foreign Affairs
, Moten decried the practice of allowing profit-motivated contractors to displace military professionals in performing functions traditionally reserved for soldiers. Conceding that the practice was now “so advanced within defense circles as to be almost beyond challenge,” Moten nonetheless insisted that “it is wrong.” Whether through ignorance or irresponsibility, the officer corps, he wrote, was opting for “short-term expediency over long-term professional health.” The decision was one that soldiers would come to regret. “By contracting out many core functions,” Moten warned, “the U.S. military is not only ceding its professional jurisdiction to private enterprise but … is also choosing slow professional death.”
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Yet if Moten’s case was well argued, his warning fell on deaf ears. Perhaps this was predictable. In many respects, the choices that really mattered had occurred long before the Iraq War. The real problem wasn’t that Iraq had somehow allowed contractors to elbow soldiers aside and insinuate themselves onto the battlefield. Rather, it lay in a series of decisions, made decades earlier, committing the United States to a military system that proved incompatible with Washington’s expectations of what U.S. military power ought to do. Cumulatively, these decisions, each in turn endorsed (or at least passively accepted) by citizens and soldiers alike, had placed the military profession in a bind from which it could not extricate itself.

As a consequence of Vietnam, the American people had jettisoned the tradition of the citizen-soldier. That was the first decision and arguably the most important. Accepting that decision as definitive, American military leaders devised and enthusiastically promoted the model of the warrior professional as the citizen-soldier’s replacement. Then, in the wake of the Cold War, American political leaders—senior military officers concurring and the public generally happy to go along for the ride—embraced militarized globalism as the cornerstone of foreign policy. The United States was going to lead the world, with military power the principal means for enforcing its will. Only when the world proved less compliant than Washington expected and American warriors found themselves enmeshed in wars they proved unable to conclude did contractor encroachment on matters that soldiers had once claimed as their own become ruinous.

Westhusing, Moten, and other exponents of the military professional ethic correctly identified the threat posed by predatory contractors as existential in its implications. Yet vainly attempting to banish war profiteers from the battlefield will not provide a remedy. Rather, those concerned to avert further erosion of military professionalism face a clear-cut choice. The imperative is either to limit the nation’s ambitions to those that a relatively small professional army can manage (which implies giving up on globalism) or to revive the citizen-soldier tradition (with globalism becoming contingent on a popular willingness to participate in war).

Military professionals have mistaken citizen-soldiers for their enemies. This tendency was especially pronounced after Vietnam. In fact, the citizen-soldier is the professional’s truest ally. The enemy of the military ideal that Theodore Westhusing sought to preserve is unbridled ambition on Washington’s part, expressing itself in an affinity for imperial adventurism that engenders massive corruption, while the American people sit idly by. Iraq was a case in point. Afghanistan is another. Reinstitute a military system that mandates shared sacrifice—people’s war—and you’ll have either fewer wars or the means to create a larger army. Either way, military professionals win.

Still, one wonders: How do those occupying the upper reaches of the national security apparatus and their profit-minded collaborators manage to get away with it? How do they succeed in perpetuating a “game” so manifestly rigged to suit their own purposes rather than contributing to the nation’s well-being? A partial answer lies in the failings of the American intelligentsia.

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TRAHISON DES CLERCS

Those who sit at the high table of American intellectual life pride themselves on their capacity to detect inconsistencies, contradictions, and hypocrisy. Yet that instinct does not encompass the nation’s military system or the relationship between the military and society. There, complacency reigns. The prospect of a particular war may arouse attention, but Washington’s penchant for war more generally largely escapes notice. So do the assumptions, ambitions, and arrangements—especially relating to the issue of who serves and sacrifices—which undergird that penchant.

One should take care not to overstate the role ideas play in the formulation of statecraft. Ideas as such—whether a strategy like “containment,” a policy like “flexible response,” or the vision of benign global hegemony to which neoconservatives swear fealty—rarely determine policy per se. Circumstances (however imperfectly understood) combined with expediency and a dollop of politics, partisan and bureaucratic, do. Yet ideas frame the environment in which statesmen interpret circumstances and justify their decisions. Out of the clash of theory and opinion, whether advanced by sober academics or inflammatory talk show hosts, come cues that policy makers consciously exploit or to which they subconsciously respond. Barack Obama did not invent the Obama Doctrine of counterterrorism any more than Bill Clinton invented the Clinton Doctrine of humanitarian intervention or George W. Bush the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. In each case, a president was merely adopting a concept that others had already devised, vetted, and promoted.

So it is no small thing that leading members of America’s chattering classes find nothing objectionable in the way Washington parcels out responsibility for fighting the nation’s wars. When it comes to military matters, what intellectuals care about is not how America raises its armed forces but when, where, and how to employ them.

In December 2002, for example, the journalist George Packer wrote a long essay for the
New York Times Magazine
, sampling opinion among liberal intellectuals—for Packer, a phrase synonymous with persons of enlightened sensibility—regarding the impending invasion of Iraq. Why among liberal thinkers he admired, Packer wondered, was there no deeply felt antiwar sentiment? None of the notables answering Packer’s question—“the ones who have done the most thinking and writing about how American power can be turned to good ends as well as bad, who don’t see human rights and democracy as idealistic delusions”—even mentioned U.S. military capacity or prowess as factors worthy of consideration. None paused to consider the possibility that the coercive propagation of liberal values abroad might undercut liberal values at home, especially given the fact that the chosen means of propagation was an army largely divorced from the American people. The bellicose Christopher Hitchens, more Trotskyist than liberal, declared that “Americanization is the most revolutionary force in the world” and expressed his enthusiasm for seeing U.S. forces unleash that revolution in Iraq. Hitchens, Packer reported, had “plans to drink Champagne with comrades in Baghdad.” Lacking comparable revolutionary zeal, Leon Wieseltier, longtime literary editor of the
New Republic
, was on the fence. He feared that Saddam Hussein’s reputed weapons of mass destruction made war necessary, but worried about where armed intervention would ultimately lead. Yet the outcome was predetermined: “We will certainly win,” he declared. For his part, Paul Berman, archfoe of radical Islam, shared none of Wieseltier’s modest hesitation. The nation and the world were facing a new brand of totalitarianism. “The only possible way to oppose totalitarianism is with an alternative system, which is that of a liberal society,” imposed if necessary at the point of a bayonet. Whether to trust George W. Bush’s promises to democratize Iraq gave Berman pause; that some considerable number of American soldiers might get killed or maimed along the way did not.
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Nor did the possibility that the existing American military system might prove ill suited to the task of foisting liberal values on illiberal nations. Berman contemplated the prospect of war with sublime confidence. As he commented elsewhere, invading Iraq offered the chance to “foment a liberal revolution in the Middle East.” Doing a fair imitation of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles denouncing communist appeasers a half century earlier, Berman added that such a war could provide the means “to begin a roll-back of the several tendencies and political movements that add up to Muslim totalitarianism.”
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Faced with war plans gone awry, the odd left-leaning hawk might later express doubts about that system, but even then only in passing. Richard Cohen offers a case in point. The
Washington Post
columnist supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then recanted when things went badly. By early 2011, Cohen—who decades earlier had served briefly as a reservist—was bemoaning the gap between the armed forces and society that enabled Washington to wage wars “about which the general public is largely indifferent.” To maintain a military establishment that is “removed from society in general,” he had concluded, offered a recipe for recklessness. “Had there been a draft, the war in Iraq might never have been fought—or would have produced the civil protests of the Vietnam War era. The Iraq debacle was made possible by a professional military and by going into debt. George W. Bush didn’t need your body or, in the short run, your money.”
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Yet not long after this epiphany, with civil war erupting in Syria, Cohen once again donned his liberal hawk’s regalia, calling for “the United States to get involved in a muscular fashion.” In 2011, with Iraq in mind, Cohen had written, “Little wars tend to metastasize.” In 2012, with Iraq seemingly forgotten, he subscribed to another view, writing with assurance that if U.S. forces “hit Syria’s command and control centers,” they would trigger a “stampede” of defections by senior members of the hated regime of Bashar al-Assad. “Nothing so illuminates an exit sign as the certainty of defeat.”
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Back in 2011, Cohen worried that the United States had followed in the path of the Roman and British empires, “able to fight nonessential wars with a professional military in places like Iraq.” In 2012, to fight another less than essential war that in Cohen’s eyes had become an object of desire, the professional military was just the ticket.