Via David Codrea, this piece at Defense One is breathtaking in its presumptuousness and stupidity.
Dear General Milley:
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you are well aware of your duties in ordinary times: to serve as principal military advisor to the president of the United States, and to transmit the lawful orders of the president and Secretary of Defense to combatant commanders. In ordinary times, these duties are entirely consistent with your oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
We do not live in ordinary times. The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system, threatening to remain in office in defiance of our Constitution. In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath. We write to assist you in thinking clearly about that choice. If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.
Due to a dangerous confluence of circumstances, the once-unthinkable scenario of authoritarian rule in the United States is now a very real possibility. First, as Mr. Trump faces near certain electoral defeat, he is vigorously undermining public confidence in our elections. Second, Mr. Trump’s defeat would result in his facing not merely political ignominy, but also criminal charges. Third, Mr. Trump is assembling a private army capable of thwarting not only the will of the electorate but also the capacities of ordinary law enforcement. When these forces collide on January 20, 2021, the U.S. military will be the only institution capable of upholding our Constitutional order.
There can be little doubt that Mr. Trump is facing electoral defeat. More than 160,000 Americans have died from COVID 19, and that toll is likely to rise to 300,000 by November. One in ten U.S. workers is unemployed, and the U.S. economy in the last quarter suffered the greatest contraction in its history. Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. The Economist estimates that Mr. Trump’s chances of losing the election stand at 91 percent.
Faced with these grim prospects, Mr. Trump has engaged in a systemic disinformation campaign to undermine public confidence in our elections. He has falsely claimed that mail-in voting is “inaccurate and fraudulent.” He is actively sabotaging the U.S. Postal Service in an effort to delay and discredit mail-in votes. He has suggested delaying the 2020 election, despite lacking the authority to do so.
The stakes of the 2020 election are especially high for Mr. Trump; in defeat, he will likely face criminal prosecution. The Manhattan District Attorney is investigating the Trump Organization for possible bank and insurance fraud related to the overvaluation of financial assets. New York’s Attorney General is conducting similar investigations, having successfully subpoenaed Trump’s financial records from Deutsche Bank. Mr. Trump allegedly pressured the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain to pressure the British Government to move the British Open golf tournament to Trump Turnberry Resort in Scotland. This incident is but one of many examples of self-dealing that may lead to federal criminal charges against the president.
Given this dizzying array of threats not merely to his political prospects, but also his liberty and wealth, Mr. Trump is following the playbook of dictators throughout history: he is building a private army answerable only to him. When Caesar faced the prospect of a trial in Rome, he did not return to face his day in court. He unleashed an army personally loyal to him alone on the Roman government. No student of history, Mr. Trump nevertheless appears to be following Caesar’s example. The president’s use of militarized Homeland Security agents against domestic political demonstrations constitutes the creation of a paramilitary force unaccountable to the public. The members of this private army, often lacking police insignia or other identification, exist not to enforce the law but to intimidate the president’s political opponents.
These powerful crosscurrents—Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat, his assault on the integrity of our elections, his impending criminal prosecution, and his creation of a private army—will collide on January 20. Rather than accept the peaceful transfer of power that has been the hallmark of American democracy since its inception. Mr. Trump may refuse to leave office. He would likely offer as a fig leaf of legitimacy the shopworn lies about election fraud. Mr. Trump’s acolytes in right-wing media will certainly rush to repeat and amplify these lies, manufacturing sufficient evidence to provide a pretext of plausibility. America’s greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War will come about by a president who simply refuses to leave office.
[ … ]
At this moment of Constitutional crisis, only two options remain. Under the first, U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne. Under the second, the U.S. military remains inert while the Constitution dies. The succession of government is determined by extralegal violence between Trump’s private army and street protesters; Black Lives Matter Plaza becomes Tahrir Square.
As the senior military officer of the United States, the choice between these two options lies with you. In the Constitutional crisis described above, your duty is to give unambiguous orders directing U.S. military forces to support the Constitutional transfer of power. Should you remain silent, you will be complicit in a coup d’état. You were rightly criticized for your prior active complicity in the president’s use of force against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. Your passive complicity in an extralegal seizure of political power would be far worse.
Well now, consider yourself lectured by your self-righteous betters. Isn’t this lovely?
Okay, so let’s get a few things out of the way. First of all, I don’t usually like to lift prose out like this from other sources, at least not to this degree. Sending traffic to the source is usually considered the respectful thing to do.
In this case I did it because I have no respect for either of the two authors or the publication. I lifted enough prose for you to get the gist of this awful preening without sending traffic their way. Second, I note that both authors were well-respected at the leftist website Small Wars Journal, in fact, in some cases heralded as heroes.
Third, they run in certain circles, from the Center for a New American Security (which gave Obama some of his folks), to Andrew Exum and others of their ilk. I have no doubt they are pandering for a position in a new administration they are sure will be, come hell or high water.
With that said, consider what they’ve said and how logically problematic it is. On the one hand, they swore an oath to the constitution of the U.S., but on the other hand take this deep dive into American politics to the point that they are advocating military intervention in the presidency.
On the one hand, they blame Covid on Trump, but on the other hand their own bureaucratic tools they find so charming, like Anthony Fauci, are the ones responsible for this mess for the very well-known reason of gain of function research on American tax dollars from Fauci’s own section at NIH (NIAID), dollars sent to the virology lab in Wuhan.
On the one hand, they blame Trump for the deaths because apparently he should have locked down America even further, and on the other hand, blame him for the loss of jobs that the lockdown entailed.
But the cognitive dissonance means nothing to them, apparently. The rest of it is just drama, emotion and screeching, as if written by teenage girls in a High School civics class, suitable only for a D- grade in Freshman High School. The worst part, of course, is that they want to deploy American forces against a president on the suspicion that he might have a standing army himself.
Good Lord. What have these boys been smoking? Their politics and utter hatred for Trump gets in the way of clear thinking. They could not answer, for example, for Obama’s program Fast and Furious. Remember that? Where the ATF forced FFLs to illegally sell to traffickers to transport weapons across the Southern border in the hopes that they would be the catalyst for increased gun control in America? And Holder and Obama both knew it. And we’re not finished yet. After that explosive episode of stupidity, they actually had the gall to prosecute that FFL for crimes, thing they forced the FFL to do.
They could not answer, for example, for Obama’s having weaponized the IRS against his political opponents, or intentionally leaving good men to perish in Benghazi, the lying that undergirded Obamacare, spying on journalists (e.g., James Rosen), Hillary’s secret server, the Solyndra scandal, Uranium One, or any other other massive problems of the Obama administration – because you see, they agreed with him politically, and they don’t agree with Trump.
This is what happens when presidents like Obama force officers out of the military and replace them with loyalists. Perfumed princes indeed.
For me this has nothing to do with Trump. As readers know, I’m not his biggest fan. They wall isn’t built, immigration hasn’t slowed, bump stocks are illegal by the stroke of a president’s pen, red flag laws got much needed wind from him, and I could go on and on.
The problem this all points to is the use of former military rank to press politics. This is a disgraceful, shameful, dishonorable, contemptible display of lack of scruples or values. My son, who served honorably in OIF in hard combat in Fallujah earning his CAR, is a much better man by orders of magnitude.
Oh, and one more thing. David Codrea asks, “Anybody see a “Comments” section over there?” No, there isn’t. Comments are open on my web site. As I’ve said many times before, if you have a web site with no possibility of comments or feedback, or at least a way to reach out to the authors via email, the authors are cowards.
