August 27, 2007 (LPAC)--As Lyndon LaRouche has argued for many years, the professional responsibilities of U.S. military officers go far beyond just the narrow technical competence of fighting wars, as shown by the officer's oath to uphold and defend the Constitution "against all enemies foreign and domestic." They must understand who the enemies of the U.S. Constitution are, and take responsibility for defending against those enemies. Yet the debate that is raging among the officer ranks of the U.S. Army over the conduct of the Iraq war, important as it is, appears to leave out the most crucial issue, that is, the decision to go to war in the first place, and who is responsible for that decision. As former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote, in an op-ed on truthdig.com last week, "The Vice President is the single greatest threat to American and international security in the world today," because it is Dick Cheney, who not only bears the most responsibility for the war in Iraq, but who represents the greatest threat to the U.S. Constitution.

The debate that is going on within the ranks broke out into the open last May, when an active duty Army officer, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, wrote an article for Armed Forces Journal entitled "A Failure of Generalship." Yingling argued that the failures of the U.S. in Iraq were attributable to a crisis in the institution of the Army. "America's generals," he wrote, "have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy." Fred Kaplan, national security columnist for Slate, reports in an article in yesterday's New York Times, that Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody was recently challenged about that article by a room full of captains at Fort Knox, Kentucky, who apparently felt that Yingling spoke for them. According to Kaplan's account, one asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops were needed for Iraq. Another asked whether any generals "should be held accountable" for the war's failures. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting that they wound up "sheltered from the truth" and "don't know what's going on."

Kaplan goes on to further describe the tensions between junior officers in the Army, who often have 2 or 3 combat tours in Iraq, and the generals who lead them, yet have no comparable experience. Kaplan directly relates the situation today to that in the early years of Vietnam, described in the book "Dereliction of Duty," by H.R. McMaster, himself an active duty colonel in the Army with a Ph.D. in history. McMaster concluded that the then-senior leadership of the military services betrayed their professional obligations by failing to provide unvarnished military advice to President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. In fact, though Kaplan doesn't say so, McMaster documented how certain of the leadership, notably Army Chief of Staff Gen. Earle Wheeler and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, among others, participated in the lies that Johnson and McNamara were telling about the situation in Vietnam. McMaster's book made such a deep impression in the Army when it was published in 1997, that it has been on required reading lists ever since.