Plucked

18 May 2007



Lute Chosen as War Tsar

President George “LBJ” Bush has finally found someone to take the job of “War Tsar.” Unable to convince a retired military officer to take the poisoned chalice, he offered it to Lieutenant General Douglas Lute. As a serving officer, General Lute had the choice of accepting the position or resigning his commission if the president really wanted it to come to that. The general is “charged with coordinating the efforts of the Executive Branch to support our commanders and senior diplomats on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan,” according to the White House. Surely someone should have been doing this for 5 years now.

In looking at this appointment, one must remember that tsars don’t work in Washington. They are specifically created to make it look as if the president and his administration have taken decisive action on an issue that worries the electorate. In recent years, America has had an energy tsar (James Schlesinger under Mr. Carter), drug tsars (Harry Anslinger and John P. Walters to name but two), and an education tsar (William Bennett). Energy, drugs and education remain intractable problems in America.

General Lute as war tsar won’t be engaged in any combat or even leaving the country. His job is going to be getting Defense, State and all the other departments to work together of fixing Iraq-Nam and Afghanistan. It’s a tall order, especially when one recalls that in the run up to the war in Iraq-Nam, the DoD essentially told the rest of the government to go away and let it run the show. There’s a sense in which the rest of the bureaucracy will only help if the DoD’s role is diminished, and that isn’t going to sit well with this administration. And indeed, it might be hard for a three-star general to accept.

That is not to say that General Lute is an incompetent bungler like so many in the Bush administration have been. In fact, he has a most impressive resume: West Point, MA in public admin from Harvard, and is a veteran of the 1991 Kuwait War. He’s been at the Pentagon in various capacities ever since. To his credit, he didn’t accept the “surge” idea, and for all anyone knows, he still doesn’t. He is on record as saying a troop drawdown in Iraq-Nam is a good idea. He could easily get Senate confirmation quickly.

And then what? The problems in Iraq-Nam, and to a lesser degree in Afghanistan, remain intractable. The White House still has no long-term plan, nor can it even articulate what success might look like. The problems will go away when the Iraq-Namese government sorts itself out, or is replaced by an authority capable to acting. Until then, America’s new war tsar is as doomed to fail as Nicholas II.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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