The Neoconning of a Nation
by Eric Margolis

Favored generals carry Bush's flag
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Elizabeth Sullivan
Plain Dealer Columnist
The Pentagon's plan to use hand- picked generals and colonels to spin the 24/7 news cycle on Iraq was going swimmingly until Aug. 3, 2005.

That was the day 14 Marines attached to a Brook Park reserve unit were killed by a massive roadside blast in Haditha, Iraq.

The deadly bombing was the last straw for decorated Vietnam combat vet and retired Marine Lt. Col. Bill Cowan, a Fox News analyst.

His revolt from parroting the Pentagon's "twisted version of reality" via a secret spin campaign is part of the chilling story reporter David Barstow told in the New York Times last Sunday.

The secret Pentagon information warfare using a phalanx of retired military officers against the American people started well before the 2003 attack on Iraq - and is still ongoing.

It used more than 75 of the nation's best and brightest ex-military officers, according to the Times' months-long investigation that pieced together 8,000 internal Pentagon e-mails, notes and documents.

Many were lured by the promise of access to high-level briefings, free trips and key procurement officers, or the defense contracts that could be won or lost if the officers did, or did not, play along. Others were motivated simply by a misguided notion that the U.S. military was at war with a "liberal" media shaping public perceptions.

Yet almost all appear to have been chosen because they were favored commentators on the 24-hour cable channels and on major newspaper op-ed pages, including The Plain Dealer.

Still, what had to become quickly evident to all but the most gullible of these politicized ex-warriors was that they were expected to dish out the Pentagon line while keeping the extent of their behind-the-scenes conversations hidden from public view.

This was certainly obvious to Cowan, CEO of a firm owned by disabled veterans that was seeking contracts in Iraq.

After the Ohio Marines died, Cowan called to warn the Pentagon that what he planned to say that day on Fox News "may not all be friendly," according to internal records obtained by the Times. What he actually said was that America was "not on a good glide path" in Iraq.

The Pentagon retaliated by immediately dumping Cowan from the surrogates group, Barstow reports.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman - who also helped "embed" journalists with military units in Iraq - told the Times the analyst group was merely "an earnest attempt to inform the American people."

Hardly.

What it was, and remains, is an improper use of taxpayer dollars to manipulate domestic opinion and peddle distortions to the American people.

It's also another troubling indication of the politicization of the officer corps.

Too many generals and colonels and captains seem more interested in their own advancement than in their oath to serve, abetted by a Pentagon that repeatedly promotes the politically correct over the strategically adept.

Army Gen. Tommy Franks segued almost effortlessly from knuckling under to Donald Rumsfeld on how to fight the war in Iraq to campaign shill for President Bush's re-election in 2004. Now he sits on two boards of directors, including that of Bank of America Corp.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke eloquently to the next generation of generals last week about the need for smart officers fearless about speaking out.

"Our Army will require leaders of uncommon agility, resourcefulness and imagination; leaders willing and able to think and act creatively and decisively in a different kind of world," Gates told West Point cadets Monday night.

Yet what those cadets see instead is the ritual destruction of officers who dare buck the White House line. Adm. William "Fox" Fallon, forced into early retirement this spring when his idea for bolstering the fight in Afghanistan conflicted with the White House plan not to pull too many troops from Iraq before the elections, is but the latest example. The guy who'll get Fallon's old job at Central Command turns out to be the one dutifully hewing to that plan - Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus.

Petraeus may be smart, but in a military world where only the most politicized, compliant, go-along generals get the job, there can be no hope for "leaders willing and able to think and act creatively."

Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.

To reach Elizabeth Sullivan

bsullivan@plaind.com, 216-999-6153

Elizabeth Sullivan is the columnist who exposed the Hillary fabrication of being shot at when her plane landed at Bosnia.