SAN DIEGO: General Mark Milley walked into Afghanistan Senate hearings Tuesday with a record of burying a reckoning within the U.S. Army of the Iraq War. In the fall of 2013, Army chief of staff Ray Odierno commissioned an “unvarnished history” of the Army’s performance the Iraq War, based on the lack of a proper study of the Vietnam War. Little is known about that study brought to light by the Wall Street Journal in a series of articles after helping to draft the inquiry.
The study’s title was “The United States Army in the Iraq War.”
“The Wall Street Journal pieced together its history through dozens of interviews with former and current officials familiar with the effort, and from reviews of internal memorandums and emails,” says Wall Street Journal (WSJ). (The Army Stymied Its Own Study of the Iraq War)
“Our findings weren’t always flattering, including that American generals had offered inflated assessments of Iraqi military capability. Gen. Odierno’s successor, Gen. Mark Milley, attempted to bury the work and its lessons. Gen. Omar Jones, the Army’s senior public affairs officer who had tried to block a conference that aimed to draw lessons from the My Lai Massacre, supported Gen. Milley’s effort to quash the Iraq study,” says Wall Street Journal. (The Army Needs to Understand the Afghanistan Disaster)
WSJ stepped up to analyze what went wrong in Iraq. Will Senate hearings do the same for Afghanistan’s war?
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported in October 2018, that H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to President Trump, reviewed the tomes while a three-star general. He said [then] it was “by far the best and most comprehensive operational study of the U.S. experience in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.” (emphasis added)
Odierno retired before the study was finished. Successor Milley and other senior brass worried about the effects that would have on prominent officials’ reputations. Or the fallout for Congressional support for the Army service.
“The study also provides an unvarnished account of how the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 was followed by a rise in violence, sectarian tensions and, eventually, the rise of Islamic State,” says WSJ in (Army Releases a Critical History of the War in Iraq)
So what will be different on Sept 28 as a Senate committee questions Milley and Austin?
Gen. Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are due to testify about disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Now, you’re talking about not only the Army but the entire body of Armed services they control. Keep in mind, it took WSJ to help draw up a historical study on the Iraq War.
Then, Milley refused to draw lessons or share those lessons with the Army training command. Or release declassified archives to U.S. Army leaders and soldiers. Is he going to defend his job poorly done at the end of a 20-year war in Afghanistan?
“The [Iraq] study [drew] sharp conclusions about the U.S. failure to train Iraqi forces so they could become self-reliant; the limitations of coalition warfare; and Washington’s inability to deter Iran and Syria from giving sanctuary and support to militant groups,” adds WSJ. (Army Releases a Critical History of the War in Iraq)
How could Washington deter Iran when you are secretly airlifting millions to help them sponsor terror and nuclear development? What did the Senate do then? What did Milley do, already Army chief of staff by then?
US sent plane with $400 million in cash to Iran
He landed the appointment on August 14, 2015.
Why didn’t Milley go after Obama knowing Iran was killing our troops? Their deaths at the hands of Qasem Soleimani who led Iran’s Quds Force. Soleimani directed high-level foreign operations across the Middle East and trained Shiite militias in Iraq. To kill American and Iraqi troops. Crickets to Obama?
Yet, Milley had no problem overstepping Trump, commander-in-chief, before he left office.
He wanted to insure Trump didn’t engage in a conflict with meddling Iran in an attempt to overturn the fraudulent 2020 election and retain power, says The New Yorker.
“Milley repeatedly met in private with the Joint Chiefs. He told them to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump and not to carry out any such orders without calling him first,” reports the The New Yorker in July 2021.
“At one meeting with the Joint Chiefs, in Milley’s Pentagon office, the chairman invoked Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, saying they should all hang together.”
Milley also put out the word to Pelosi and McConnell in both the Senate and House:
“Trump might attempt a coup, but he would fail because he would never succeed in co-opting the American military. “Our loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution,” Milley told them, and “we are not going to be involved in politics.”
Milley is all about politics from Critical Race Theory to forced COVID vaccinations. To warning Beijing if President Trump decided to prepare a military strike against the communist nation, revealed in Bob Woodward’s new book “Peril.”
The Joint Chief elitist seems to have no problem overstepping authority of the Commander-in-chief and running his own military.
Along with no regrets in repeated mistakes of giving weapons to terrorists.
“Our government was shipping arms from Libya through Turkey to Syrian rebels before we realized they were al-Qaeda,” Independent Sentinel reported. (Stunner! Benghazi Was a Base for Illegal Arms Shipments to Syria).
“The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorized in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. [Many] were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida,” stated Seymour M. Hersh, the author of the book “The Red Line and the Rat Line.”
U.S. weapons in Libyan rebels hands killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, including Christopher Stevens our ambassador. Stevens warned the Whitehouse and asked for more security, prior to the fiery attack on the diplomatic compound. Maybe he had finally caught on to the Whitehouse weapons trade.
“The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ [a] former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’
What is different about giving arms to terrorists in Syria and Iran than Afghanistan?
Syria was kept secret. The mind-boggling weapons cache Milley gave to Taliban terrorists and their same al Qaeda networks was in plain sight. All under Milley’s watch as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Under the nose of the Senate and House.
Doubtful Milley or Austin will own up to the gravity of leaving that kind of firepower in a jihadist hands. They haven’t so far. And truly the accountability belongs to the American people, not a partisan Congress.
We need a Wall Street Journal study on this one. Again another fine example proving that all mainstream journalism is not a propaganda machine. There are those true to the profession everywhere.
As these two wearing the brass sit in the Senate hearings, the bitter fruits of their decisions haunt.
Like a deliberate missile strike on an innocent Afghan family. Of which Milley will surely defend at the Senate hearings. Or how the Taliban still meter out ‘justice’. Now our troops have departed, leaving Afghans defenseless.
The Taliban has not changed as Milley and Biden have reported.
They continue to execute anyone who does not conform to Islam or Taliban Sharia law. They enforce a violent system of punishment without trial. That would include American and Afghan allies who helped the U.S. if they find them.
The AP report cited eyewitnesses, including “Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi, who runs a pharmacy on the side of the square” who told the agency that “that four bodies were brought to the main square and three bodies were moved to other parts of the city for public display.”
The study of the war in Afghanistan needs to reckon, hold to a critical bar top leaders like Milley who agree to work with terrorists. Or snitch to our near peer enemies. Or breach the trust of the American people who were left behind enemy lines. Those abandoned lives are on Milley’s hands.
He needs to explain why he gave up the war dishonorably, denying a meaningful outcome to every single war veteran missing a limb or limbs. Robbing Gold Star families who lost loved ones of any peace.
We need to replace leaders who refuse to comply to the highest military standards or exhibit moral courage wearing the uniform. Leaders need to tell the truth.
Gen Milley never reconciled with the comprehensive WSJ Iraq War study.
In 2018, “After a high-level review last month, Army officials issued instructions to remove a foreword noting the [Iraq War] study had been “commissioned” by the Army and to scrub it of other signs that it had top-level sponsorship. You can now find Volume 1 of it here:
The future predicts it will be painfully obvious as the Senate hearings unfold that Milley has difficulty in self-criticism to improve military performance. Yet he’s all about criticizing his ‘racist’ troops. The U.S. military needs to steer clear from the same mistakes in the last two decades of war. And regain its status of military honor, might, and respect in the world again.
