By Paul Craig Roberts
“It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.”—General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, http://www.jcs.mil/chairman/speeches/060217NatPressClubLunch.html, February 17, 2006.
“They will be held accountable for the decisions they make. So they should in fact not obey the illegal and immoral orders to use weapons of mass destruction.”—General Peter Pace, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0304/06/le.00.html, April 6, 2003
The surprise decision by the Bush regime to replace General Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been explained as a necessary step to avoid contentious confirmation hearings in the US Senate. Gen. Pace’s reappointment would have to be confirmed, and as the general has served as vice chairman and chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the past 6 years, the Republicans feared that hearings would give war critics an opportunity to focus, in Defense Secretary Gates words, “http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/washington/08cnd-military.html?ex=1338955200&en=092801a201e94a9e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss.”This is a plausible explanation. Whether one takes it on face value depends on how much trust one still has in a regime that has consistently lied about everything for six years.
General Pace himself says he was forced out when he refused to “take the issue off the table” by voluntarily retiring. Pace himself was sufficiently disturbed by his removal to strain his relations with the powers that be by not going quietly.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page interpreted Pace’s removal as indication that “the man running the Pentagon is Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan. For that matter, is George W. Bush still President?” [ http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010196, June 11, 2007
The Wall Street Journal editorial writers’ attempt to portray Pace’s departure as evidence of a weak and appeasing administration does not ring true. An administration that escalates the war in Iraq in the face of public opposition and pushes ahead with its plan to attack Iran is not an appeasing administration. Whether it is the war or http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050109_gonzales.htm.
A president audacious enough to continue an unpopular and pointless war in the face of public opinion and a lost election is a president who is not too frightened to reappoint a general. Why does Bush run from General Pace when he fervently supports embattled Attorney General Gonzales? What troops does Bush support? He http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/09/bushs-mickey-mouse-mafia-unveiled.html.
There are, of course, other explanations for General Pace’s departure. The most disturbing of these explanations can be found in General Pace’s two statements at the beginning of this article.
In the first statement General Pace says that every member of the US military has the absolute responsibility to disobey illegal and immoral orders. In the second statement, General Pace says that an order to use weapons of mass destruction is an illegal and immoral order.
The context of General Pace’s second statement above (actually, the first statement in historical time) is his response to Blitzer’s question whether the invading US troops could be attacked with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But Pace’s answer does not restrict illegal and immoral only to Iraqi use of WMD. It is a general statement. It applies to their use period.
On March 10, 2006, Jorge Hirsch made a case that use of nuclear weapons is both illegal and immoral. [http://www.antiwar.com/hirsch/?articleid=8678, Antiwar.com Despite the illegality and immorality of first-use of nuclear weapons, the Bush Pentagon rewrote US war doctrine to permit their use regardless of their illegality and immorality. For a regime that not only believes that might is right abut also that they have the might, law is what the regime says.
The revised war doctrine permits US first strike use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries. We need to ask ourselves why the Bush administration would blacken America’s reputation and rekindle the nuclear arms race unless the administration had plans to apply its new war doctrine.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, a number of http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-a=000a298a-sp00000000&sp-q=neoconservatism&sp-p=all.
http://vdare.com/roberts/070617_iran.htm