Where Have You Gone Smedley Butler? A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to (Someone Like) You...

By Danny Sjursen, TomDispatch

21 February 20

In early 2017, U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen, who first stumbled upon TomDispatch while on duty in Afghanistan in 2011, wrote to the site wondering if he might do a piece for it. He got in touch, in part, because a former Army colonel, Andrew Bacevich, whom he admired, was already regularly featured here, as were other former U.S. military officers like retired Air Force lieutenant colonel William Astore. TomDispatch had, in fact, been one of the earliest places to highlight the work of former military officers critical of this country’s forever wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa. (After all, or so it then seemed to me, who could have grasped those disasters better?)

That February, when Sjursen wrote his first article for TomDispatch on the wars that had begun in 2001 and then (as now) had “no end in sight,” something struck me about the new administration of President Donald Trump. He had just filled key positions around him with generals from those very wars (all of whom are now gone from his administration). From James Mattis to John Kelly to H.R. McMaster, all of them were visibly wedded to those very never-ending conflicts. So, in introducing Sjursen’s inaugural piece, I wrote, “Under the circumstances, it’s good to know that, even if not at the highest ranks of the U.S. military, there are officers who have been able to take in what they experienced up close and personal in Iraq and Afghanistan and make some new -- not desperately old -- sense of it.”

Today, in his 26th piece for this site, Sjursen takes up that very subject: in a military that certainly has critics and dissidents in its lower ranks and its officer corps who have grasped the disastrous nature of almost 19 years of losing wars across large swaths of the planet, why are there no critical generals (or admirals) around? As he points out, the system that produces those flag officers is not set up to allow for the rise of anyone unwilling to buy in big time to the American way of war as it now exists across far too much of the planet

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

here once lived an odd little man -- five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet -- who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.

Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.

A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations -- that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests -- until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.

But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service... And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”

Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”

Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.

Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)

Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.

Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn't produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.

Why No Antiwar Generals

When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.

Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars.

The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and -- on some level -- cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.

Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image -- officers whose careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.

Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge” in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his -- future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster -- earned his star.

Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista" protégés and their "new" war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice -- once in each country -- as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.

But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.

At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization" after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game" most citizens had.

More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.

One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump -- but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn't “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.

What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?

In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.

That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington.

Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment, including -- to please a president -- the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

Of course, Butler didn't exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion -- and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule -- he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.

Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical...”

Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity...

Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and his forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill."

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and his forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill."

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

The Bloomberg Myth Explodes on Live TV

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

21 February 20

The Nevada debate offered voters vital information — including the exposure of Michael Bloomberg’s reputation for “electability”

hat a catastrophe Wednesday night was for Mike Bloomberg. The New York plutocrat was kicked in the teeth by Elizabeth Warren in the first minutes — she denounced him as a Trump-like “arrogant billionaire” who called women “horse-faced lesbians” — and never made it back to his feet.

Bloomberg stood in mute fury as his $400 million campaign investment went up in smoke. His contempt for democracy and sense of entitlement surpass even Donald Trump, who at least likes crowds — Bloomberg’s joyless imperiousness makes Trump seem like Robin Williams.

That Bloomberg has been touted as a potential Democratic Party savior across the top ranks of politics and media is an extraordinary indictment of that group of people.

Some endorsements were straight cash transactions, in which politicians who owe their careers to Bloomberg’s largess repaid him with whatever compliments they could muster. How much does a man who radiates impatience with the idea of having to pretend to equal status with anyone have to spend to get someone to say something nice?

California Congressman Harley Rouda called him a “legendary businessman”: Bloomie gave her more than $4 million. New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill got more than $2 million from Bloomberg’s Independence USA Super PAC, and in return the Navy vet said Bloomberg embodies “the integrity we need.”

Georgia’s Lucy McBath, a member of the congressional black caucus, got $4 million from Bloomberg PACs, and she endorsed him just as an audio clip was coming out of the ex-mayor talking about putting black men up “against the wall” in stop-and-frisk. News accounts of the endorsement frequently left out the financial ties.

That’s fine. If you give a politician $2 million or $4 million, it must be expected that he or she will say you approximate a human being.

But how does New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman excuse writing “Paging Michael Bloomberg”? (Well, Bloomberg philanthropies donated to Planet Word, “the museum my wife is building,” says Friedman, so there’s that.) How about Jonathan Chait at New York, who wrote, “Winning the election is starting to look hard. How about buying it instead?” Or John Ellis in The Washington Post, who declared Bloomberg the “dream candidate”?

These pundits clung to a triumvirate of delusions: Bloomberg “gets things done,” he’s more electable than a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren because he can spend unlimited amounts, and he has the “toughness” to take on Trump.

Far from showing “toughness,” Bloomberg on Wednesday wilted under attacks from his five Democratic opponents. He was unprepared throughout and seemed to be ad-libbing the most important exchanges. When Warren asked him with how many women he’d had sign non-disclosure agreements, Bloomberg muttered:

Warren: How many is that?
Bloomberg: None of them accuse me of doing anything, other than maybe s— they didn’t like a joke I told.

The answer drew groans. Any political consultant could have told Bloomberg “they didn’t like a joke I told” would go over like a dead flounder. Either Bloomberg is a lousy campaigner who doesn’t understand the need for preparation, or he thinks he doesn’t need to prepare for live performances because he’ll just buy PR elsewhere.

Both explanations bode badly for a theoretical general-election campaign against Trump, an expert at ad-libbing cruelties and generating free media in amounts exceeding even what Bloomberg can buy. If Bloomberg can’t handle being asked by Warren how many NDAs he’s had signed, just imagine when Trump offers him a box to stand on and asks him how it feels to have to spend $4 million per friend.

Bloomberg’s entire argument for office is that he’s better than Trump, but where exactly is he better? The biggest argument against a Trump presidency involves his racial attitudes. Bloomberg’s record is worse.

His defense Wednesday of stop-and-frisk — that it was a widely used policy that got “out of control” because “too many” African Americans were stopped — showed that even after all this time, he still doesn’t get the problem, i.e., that the mass-profiling policy was fundamentally discriminatory. Trump is a crude circus nationalist, but Bloomberg’s policing policies were profoundly, intellectually racist, and he proved in Nevada that his only growth has been to recognize their political inexpediency.

Trump is worse on the environment and on guns. Bloomberg supported George Bush at the height of the Iraq War effort, and says he still doesn’t regret supporting that invasion. Bloomberg also has an awful record when it comes to Wall Street. In the debate Wednesday, he said this about 2008:

The financial crisis came about because the people that took the mortgages, packaged them, and other people bought them, those were—that’s where all the disaster was.

That’s in the ballpark of true, although Bloomberg stopped well short of denouncing the “people that took the mortgages,” by which one presumes he means banks. This is unsurprising, because when Bloomberg was not running for president as a Democrat, he ridiculed Occupy Wall Street and regularly spouted bogus Wall Street talking points deflecting blame from banks. This is what he said in November 2011:

It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. 

Bloomberg then went on to say it was “entertaining” and “cathartic” for Occupy Protesters to “vilify” banks, a “let them eat cake” take on the financial crisis.

It would be impossible to find someone less believable as a reformer of Wall Street and an opponent of wealth inequality. Even Hillary Clinton was less of a guaranteed disaster on this issue. A vote for Bloomberg — a billionaire ex-Republican media executive, for God’s sake — would mean conceding the populist argument to Republicans again.

Trump has clear authoritarian tendencies and has wrapped his hands around autocrats, but for all the fretting about him perhaps not leaving office in 2020 if voted out, it’s Bloomberg who has already tossed term limits aside, and it’s Bloomberg who is openly trying to buy an election. There is zero evidence he will be any less of a threat to democracy or an agent for rapacious corporate interests than Trump.

Even assuming one could cross into believing that Bloomberg is somehow less revolting or dangerous than the current president — I don’t, but let’s say — Wednesday exploded the idea that he would have a superior chance at beating him than Sanders or a conventional, non-plutocrat politician like Warren or Pete Buttigieg. Bloomberg was a total zero charisma-wise, had trouble thinking on his feet, and failed to find even one issue where he sounded confident and convincing. His only distinguishing characteristic is his money, and fuck his money.

One revealing moment in the debate came at the end, when Chuck Todd asked all the candidates, “Should the person with the most delegates at the end of this primary season be the nominee?”

Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Warren, Joe Biden, and Amy Klobuchar all punted this question, deferring variously to the “rules” or the “process.” Only Sanders said, “The people should prevail.” This makes the endgame clear: All five non-Sanders candidates are placing hopes for the nomination in a backroom convention horse trade.

While the establishment Democrats like Warren and Buttigieg beat up on Bloomberg onstage last night, treating him like the interloper he is, the major question is, would they do the same in the privacy of that smoke-filled room this summer?

That’s the question that should have everyone worried. Sanders could lose, but a vote for Bloomberg would be a complete surrender to cynicism, and would probably fail besides. If that’s the plan, God help us.