Almost a month ago, the White House announced that Army Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute had agreed to join Bush’s team as the “war czar,” despite ambiguities about what the job entailed. In some ways, it was a surprising choice — Lute voiced opposition to the president’s surge policy. In other words, the general Bush tapped to coordinate his war policy happens to believe Bush is wrong about his war policy.<\/p>\n
Indeed, in August 2005, Lute said<\/a> the U.S. was planning to draw down<\/i> troop levels as part of a more effective strategy. “You have to undercut the perception of occupation in Iraq. It’s very difficult to do that when you have 150,000-plus, largely western, foreign troops occupying the country.” In January 2006, Lute told<\/a> PBS’s Charlie Rose that “we would like to see a smaller, lighter, less prominent U.S. force structure in Iraq.” Lute argued such a move would “undercut the enemy propaganda that in fact we have designs on Iraqi resources or Iraqi bases and so forth.” It would also reflect a lesson “we’ve learned in post-conflict scenarios like…the Balkans” to avoid “the dependency syndrome.”<\/p>\n Regrettably, Bush rejected Lute’s good advice.<\/p>\n So, what did the general tell the Senate Armed Services Committee today? A few interesting things, actually.<\/p>\n * Lute believes there is “no purely military<\/a>” solution in Iraq, nor is there an “American-only” solution. That’s not quite in line with the tack adopted by war supporters.<\/p>\n * If Lute is coordinating war policy for the president, what will National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley do? It’s unclear, but Lute noted today that Hadley will no longer oversee and\/or coordinate policy for Iraq and Afghanistan. As Spencer Ackerman explained<\/a>, “There isn’t any precedent for a national security adviser during wartime to leave the war out of his or her responsibilities.” Perhaps it’s time for a real NSA who can handle the job’s responsibilities?<\/p>\n * Asked about permanent military bases in Iraq, Lute said that “we don’t seek this<\/a>,” and the U.S. would prefer “a more normalized nation-to-nation relationship” with Iraq. No one’s quite sure what this means in the context of the question. Iraq war supporters have repeatedly claimed that U.S. troops are harmed when Congress debates alternatives to the Bush administration’s failed policies in Iraq. “Think about the message we have sent them,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said recently. “We have undermined their efforts, lowered their morale, and clearly sent the wrong message.” Vice President Cheney said the war debate was “detrimental to our troops.”<\/p>\n Today, however, Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, President Bush’s proposed “war czar,” disregarded these claims. <\/p>\n “I don’t believe it undercuts their morale,” Lute told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing. U.S. soldiers “understand the democratic process,” he said, “and, in fact, that’s what we’ve sworn to protect and defend.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I know Joe Lieberman is on the committee and was in the hearing room for a while this afternoon. We can only hope he heard this part of Lute’s testimony.<\/p>\n As for his chances, no one’s quite sure what Lute is going to do, what his authority is, or how he’ll fit into the administration’s war-policy team, but his confirmation is a foregone conclusion at this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Almost a month ago, the White House announced that Army Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute had agreed to join Bush’s team as the “war czar,” despite ambiguities about what the job entailed. In some ways, it was a surprising choice — Lute voiced opposition to the president’s surge policy. In other words, the general Bush […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n* As for one of the more political exchanges of the day, Lute helpfully undercut<\/a> one of the right’s more common complaints about dissent.<\/p>\n