Dana Mathewson

In July of 2017, every member of the joint chiefs of staff met with newly-elected President Donald Trump for the first time. It didn't go well. "You're all losers," the president told them, according to Foreign Policy magazine account. "You don't know how to win anymore."

It was a harsh assessment, obviously though arguably true, the joint chiefs of staff are the nation's highest-ranking military officers. Their job is to follow the order of elected officials and protect the country, no matter how much their feelings may be hurt. But in this case, that's not what happened because the rules are different now. According to U.S. Army Major General Paul Eaten, the president's insults that day, and the similar comments he made in public, were a bitter humiliation for the nation's military leaders. They made it their mission to undermine civilian control of the Pentagon ever after. "I was really shocked by how many of my former colleagues voted for the former president and openly supported him," Eaten said. "But when [Trump] turned on the military, well, the military turned on him."

Keep in mind, that is not how democracy is supposed to work—military leaders report to the people you elect. Again that’s not what happened. Stories began leaking about the president, President Trump, ignoring classified intelligence about Russian bounties in Afghanistan. Where do you think those stories came from? They came from the Pentagon—it was payback. Then the military refused to pull troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, even though they were ordered to do so by the elected president of the United States—again no civilian control of the military. When Joe Biden finally became president, on inauguration day, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, was so excited he couldn’t control himself. "No one has a bigger smile today than I do," Milley told Michelle Obama—sucking up like a child. "You can’t see it under my mask, but I do." The media people who have supported Biden from the very beginning -- including a former C.I.A. Director, there are many of those on TV these days-- also celebrated. They told us the adults were back in charge, they said. The orange man is gone—everything is going to be better now. [video clips follow in the original article]

[...]

Those clips are amazing to watch now because they consist of the most childish people in the country celebrating adulthood. But they look especially absurd in light of what we’ve just seen in Afghanistan. These days, Joe Biden's friends in the Pentagon and the "foreign affairs desk" at NBC News no longer think he’s an adult. He abandoned American citizens and got thirteen Americans killed, and suddenly they seem a little ashamed. Plus, he’s turned his back on the neocon project and that’s the greatest offense of all.

But the bigger question is why our media and the military were talking like this in the first place. "The adults are back in charge?" What does that mean, exactly? If you follow what our generals have been telling us for the past twenty years about Afghanistan, you quickly realize exactly what it means. "Adults," means people are willing who pretend that everything is going fine when in fact it is not going fine.

Consider that no matter how badly our mission in Afghanistan was deteriorating—we were never clear on what that mission was—but clearly, our strategy of pacifying the nation was falling apart. No matter how bad it got in Afghanistan, the Pentagon and its spokesmen repeatedly told us they were making incredible progress. And "progress" is the word they used again and again and again—almost as if they coordinated it. In 2005, the head of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, told reporters quote, "over the three years that we’ve been operating there, [Afghanistan] has shown interesting progress." In 2007, the website "Task and Purpose" reported that another senior General, Dan McNeil, had a similar message. Quote: "I’d like to point out that there is significant progress in the forward move of the Afghan National Army."

 

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