Resigning in Protest

The other Times says:

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”

This is probably even kinda sorta true. There's an interesting political theory question about how officers should behave in these situations. Clearly, there's some range of orders such that an officer thinks the order is unwise and nevertheless he has a duty to follow it. At the same time, an officer's oath is to the country and its constitution, and there are also going to be circumstances under which it's better for the country to resign and call attention to poor choices being made rather than to go along. Where to draw the line seems . . . very hard to say.

Comments

But what effect would the resignations have, really? If Bush/Cheney decide it's time to attack Iran, they're really not going to all of a sudden care about public or world opinion. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were a Saturday Night Massacre-style series of resignations/forced retirements until they get to a general/admiral willing to go through with the plan.

Posted by jkd | February 25, 2007 3:27 PM

A series of high-level resignations in response to an atack on Iran would be a very serious thing. I don't think anything like that has ever happened before. Correct me if I'm wrong!

Posted by Korha | February 25, 2007 4:13 PM

the wait for constitutional protest expressed through voluntary mass resignation could be long and fruitless if the seemingly unconflicted unchallenged decision to reprosecute watada(sp?) is any barometer.

Posted by r | February 25, 2007 4:14 PM

Mmm... I think mass resignations would have an effect. To have even a small percentage of sudden resignations at the very top would seriously disrupt the operational capacity of such a rigidly hierarchical organization as the military, which relies so much on an unbroken chain of command. (What's more, I think some high profile resignations would precipitate others.)

I know it's been said a bunch of times over the last six years, but the fact that we are even having this conversation and that it doesn't seem in the least bit hypothetical is scary enough.

Posted by ANM | February 25, 2007 4:17 PM

Or, to pick up where jkd ended, would officers resign once a decision was made but before it was made public. This would create a lot of problems politically and militarily. As we saw with Iraq the decision to go to war was made long before we started to "debate" it.

Posted by Carl | February 25, 2007 4:20 PM

1. The reisgnations would have an effect. Stop the attck? maybe not. But they would be noticed.

2. It seems -- and as Matt says, this is a hard question -- that resignations do not raise the issue of civilian control fo the military that other forms of political action by senior officers might. On the face of it, it seems that generals/admirals always retain the right to resign their commissions. (BTW: Does this get them out of the military, or just mean a demotion to more junior rank?)

3. At some point, the factor of "it's just the right hting to do" should not be ignored. Healthier for our republic -- and surely consequential in teh long run -- if people in authority are willing to publicly oppose a catastrophic policy, regardless of the short-term consequences.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | February 25, 2007 4:54 PM

This makes it all the more imperative that congress assert and re-assert as clearly and publicly as possible the warmaking power bestowed upon it by the constitution. If the generals and admirals were to stage a walk out it would not be, and should not be seen as, a rejection of civilian control of the military, but rather as an act of loyalty to the constitution, one of whose most important principles would be violated were the Bush admin to start a war without congressional consent.

Posted by J | February 25, 2007 5:06 PM

Man, you guys read the comments to that article? Scary. One would hope that they do not represent a cross section of American Public opinion.

I personally think that an attack on Iran would be both monsterous and disasterous (and, moreover, would put people of concience in the uncomfortable position of being forced to be where the deranged right has in the past wrongly claimed the anit-war left to be - that is, on the other side). But I have the horrible sinking feeling that a pure air attack on Iran would be wildly popular, at least initially.

Posted by Larry M | February 25, 2007 5:20 PM

How is it that generals can retire? I mean, if I'm a private, or a captain, and I'm ordered to raid Fallujah, can I retire on the spot? What's the rule here?

Posted by chris | February 25, 2007 5:27 PM

The generals have completed their service commitment; essentially, they are not under contract.

Also, all four star (and three star?) generals are political appointees and serve at the pleasure of the President. They're at-will; they can resign at any time or be fired at any time.

Did MacArthur resign because he thought Truman was giving bad orders?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | February 25, 2007 5:36 PM

In fact, I think members of the armed forces should be permitted to resign whenever they want. Why should they be any different than policemen and firemen and others who have to do dangerous jobs?

Posted by Dan Kervick | February 25, 2007 6:12 PM

Well, Matt, as to where to draw the line, this has been almost entirely a theoretical discussion.

People who become generals and admirals, and colonels and captains, are by and large extraordinarily good at what they do, and enjoy military life. They're not given to just resigning over orders they don't like.

As far as I know, this has been mostly been discussed in the wake of Vietnam as a way that the military could or should have protested the prosecution of the war. It's a view associated with Army Major HR McMaster's "Dereliction of Duty," which came out in 1997.

McMaster explained why he wrote the book: "Much of the conventional wisdom associated with Vietnam was highly inaccurate. Far from an inevitable result of the imperative to contain communism, the war was only made possible through lies and deceptions aimed at the American public, Congress, and members of Lyndon Johnson's own administration. Contrary to Robert McNamara's claims of ignorance and overconfidence during the period 1963-1965, the record proves that he and others were men who not only should have known better, but who did know better. These men and the decisions they made during those crucial months mired the United States in a costly war that could not be won at a cost acceptable to the American public."

"Dereliction of Duty" is often cited today by military folks who are unhappy with Bush-era management of the military. It's on people's minds.

It's extremely tough to draw that line between obeying an order and resigning in protest. Only a confluence of very unusual circumstances would lead any substantial number of high-level officials to decide to resign.

Given what I've read and heard from current and former military people, I am unsurprised that an attack on Iran would lead to resignations.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | February 25, 2007 6:15 PM

And I'm like totally resigning from posting on Matt's blog then you'll be sorry.

Posted by Linus | February 25, 2007 6:26 PM

"I don't think anything like that has ever happened before. Correct me if I'm wrong!"

The obvious example would be 1861 . . . rather different circumstances, though.

"Did MacArthur resign because he thought Truman was giving bad orders?"

No--Truman fired him.

Posted by rea | February 25, 2007 6:44 PM

While I remember hearing coverage on the radio and TV at the time, I don't really understand all the wars and semi-wars that were going on in the fall of 1956, but I believe it is true that the commander of the Anglo-French battleship force off Alexandria refused a direct order to bombard the city on the grounds that firing 14" and 15" shells into a million or so civilians at close range was murder, not warfare, and that the British government retaliated by ordering all the battleships (foolishly including the beautiful and full modern Vanguard).

If this is so (anyone know?), it's fairly obviously relevant.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | February 25, 2007 6:58 PM

Gene, please finish and extend your fine example. Thank you.

Posted by Jennifer | February 25, 2007 7:12 PM

I engaged in a lengthy thread on this topic over at
www.intel-dump.com last week (starting from discussion
of Lt Watada's court-martial). I can summarize here:

1) In recent decades, the President has often claimed
the right to start a small war (e.g. Grenada, Panama,
Kosovo) without prior Congressional authorization.
And provided he wins quickly, *or* gets later
Congressional authorization (for which a vote on
funding is often considered enough), then nothing
happens. This works for smallish wars. For really
big wars, long-standing policy allows the President
to authorize a nuclear strike at 20 minutes notice
with no Congressional involvement. So it's hard to
see much remaining of the Constitution's grant of
war-declaration power exclusively to Congress.

2) After Nuremberg, the US military operates under the
UCMJ which requires soldiers to refuse "illegal"
orders. At Nuremberg the position taken was that "just
following orders" was no defense if the orders were
"manifestly illegal" - notably genocide and systematic
torture - but that criminal responsibility for starting
an "illegal war" attached only to the political leaders.

3) Of course, what's been going on at GTMO and elsewhere falls
under the "manifestly illegal" category of systematic
torture; but the US military mostly saluted and followed
the orders.

4) As for declaring a whole conflict to be an "illegal war" -
which Lt Watada wanted to use as his defense - there are
numerous, mostly Vietnam-era, precedents that US courts are
never going to seriously consider this question.

5) The UN Charter - ratified by the US - makes it quite clear
that any use, or even threat, of force, other than self-defense
or UNSC-approved action, is a treaty violation. But there's
no mechanism for enforcement against a member with a UNSC veto.
In a recent interview with Kofi Annan, he agreed that the Iraq
invasion was illegal under international law. But the general
view among the US military is "so what ?".

6) Most discussion of war powers seems to assume that a President
will not to choose to pursue, or prolong, a war without
Congressional support. That seems a terrible assumption given
Bush's public statements. Th ultimate sanction is impeachment
and removal from office - but that needs 67 Senators, and it
seems to me that the military will continue to follow Presidential
orders in the event of disagreement with Congress right up to the
point of removal from office. Which ain't gonna happen.

All in all, this can get really ugly.

Posted by Richard Cownie | February 25, 2007 8:01 PM

Jennifer, I'm afraid that's all I'm confident in saying about it. I wish I was more sure of what happened.

There has been a tendency historically for some people in the Navy (Bill Halsey, of all people, for one) to protest against some of the extensions of "modern" warfare and the targeting of civilian populations; I don't know how much, if at all, this is still true, and I don't know how much is genuine moral sentiment and how much is inter-service rivalry -- not a term I'm very fond of. Perhaps as the child of two World War II Naval officers I'm a little inclined to distrust the whole notion of "Victory Through Air Power."

Posted by Gene O'Grady | February 25, 2007 9:32 PM

Even supposing that the resignations have "an effect" - so what? Is that "effect" really going to be getting Bush and Cheney to start caring about what other people think, or say? No. They'd go ahead and do it, to catastrophic effect for all involved.

That being said, resignation would likely be the only honorable - and legal - thing for the generals/admirals to do under the circumstances, and would at least save them the shame of being up in the brig in Den Haag. Other perpetrators of an unprovoked attack on Iran might not be quite as lucky, in the long run.

Posted by jkd | February 25, 2007 9:43 PM

Where to draw the line seems . . . very hard to say.

Is it, really?

After the C-in-C fires everyone in theater who disagrees with him, replaces them with synchphants and uses every means possible to provoke a conflict with a(nother) country that presents no threat to the US?

Posted by chuck | February 25, 2007 9:50 PM

How about resigning now, guys -- when your resignation could still make a difference by provoking public discussion? Like that's going to happen... Maybe that's why I want to scream -- or is it that I’m hearing a scream echoing back to us from the future? The latest Seymour Hersh story in the New Yorker has more to do with the world of Thomas Pynchon than with the world of last week’s cover kid Eustace Tilley. "A screaming comes across the sky." Is Bush trying to bluff and threaten the Iranians into submission? Maybe. Who knows? But as we saw in the buildup to the Iraq war, the threat of force by these guys has a way of turning into the use of force. We're rapidly approaching an apocalyptic future that has a screaming written all across the sky -- unless there's a real screaming right here, at home, on the ground.

Posted by Madison Guy | February 25, 2007 10:07 PM

Gene, the problem is that there's a verb missing from "British government retaliated by ordering all the battleships."

Posted by Matt Weiner | February 25, 2007 10:10 PM

Thank you, Gene.

Posted by Jennifer | February 25, 2007 10:12 PM

I think resigning is always a legitimate alternative to carrying out an order (given that you don't have an enlistment contract anymore). The order doesn't have to be illegal, or immoral. Plain stupid, or just something you don't want to live with having done, is plenty of reason. The chain of command is not God.

Posted by SqueakyRat | February 25, 2007 10:31 PM

Don't overdramatize

There would only be a moral dilemma (as opposed to a dilemma of career interests vs morality) for commanders of units actually engaged in operations against the enemy. They indeed could not just up and resign in the middle of operations without causing potentially severe disruptions and dislocations. But this article presumably refers to generals at or near the Joint Chiefs level, not operational commanders. Dozens of them could resign without putting our soldiers and Marines at any risk. In fact, vetting what the political authority orders the operational commanders to do for practicability is the chief reason for the existence of their positions as intermediaries between the field and the politicians. When reason fails, resigning, or theatening to do so, is the ultimate way, short of Caligulating the politicians, of preventing foolish orders from being issued under their signatures. Their entire job is to deploy the threat of resignation judiciously to insure that foolish or criminal orders do not go forth to the trigger pullers.

The bit about "criminality" brings us to the stronger consideration at work here. It isn't at all clear that the generals in this article were mainly concerned for the lack of wisdom of our attacking Iran, in their resistance to carrying out orders to attack that country. It is illegal and unconstitutional to engage in acts of war without Congressional authorization. All soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, not just the Joint Chiefs, have the positive duty to actively resist illegal orders, a duty that does not stop just at refusing to carry them out oneself, but which extends to doing what is possible to restrain others from carrying them out. This is a very straighforward duty, with no moral dilemmas whatsoever.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | February 25, 2007 11:37 PM

Sorry -- The word missing is "scrapped."

Posted by Gene O'Grady | February 26, 2007 12:14 AM

thanks for the answer. I guess that makes sense.

Posted by chris | February 26, 2007 2:51 AM

High level military resignations would effect the entire military and American body. Soldiers in the field and their families at home may think first of the President when considering why they are where they are but they know that he was barely a vet and never saw combat and if a bunch of generals from Korea and Vietnam and Gulf I and II suddenly walked, transmitting, "Not a chance you can pin more of this shit on me," the entire military would feel it. The soldiers and their families and their supporters. The voters who keep races 50:50 lately.

It would be one of the best and most patriotic things those men could do. Wouldn't be a bit bad if they didn't wait for a possible Iran episode. Most of them know the situation now is plenty bad. Dissenters just keep getting fired or moved out one at a time. That gets absorbed by the media and doesn't sting as much as a real "walk-out" would.

Posted by Ashley | February 26, 2007 2:51 AM

It isn't at all clear that the generals in this article were mainly concerned for the lack of wisdom of our attacking Iran, in their resistance to carrying out orders to attack that country. It is illegal and unconstitutional to engage in acts of war without Congressional authorization.

I'm not saying I have anything to base this on, but I very much doubt these resignations have anything to do with the generals' viewpoint concerning the constitutional role of Congress and all that. Occam's Razor says if they protest the decision, it's because they think it's a stupid one, not because they've all read Marty Lederman's latest takedown of the unitary executive theory or whatnot.

Posted by Steve | February 26, 2007 3:28 AM

High level military resignations would effect the entire military and American body.

A fairly large number of State Dept. officers and others have resigned over the past 5 years without causing more than a momentary flutter. Once you resign, you give up access information and you surrender the role that made you important to the press. The retired generals and admirals, all extremely high-ranking (William Odom, Anthony Zinni) who have been decrying Bush Administration policy for the past year plus have had only an intermittent impact on public opinion, and none on policy.

One protesting former official to have had a sustained impact on policy (getting staffers fired and indicted, etc.) is Tony Wilson, because he brought embarrassing information into play. This recalls an incident in 1971 when Rep. Pete Wilson forced the Nixon administration to admit it was bombing Laos, and had indeed lied to its own Secretary of the Air Force about it; Wilson gathered the sworn testimony of acting Air Force pilots and showed it to Pentagon personnel who believed this was not happening. Officers who resign will have much more of an impact if they bring with them damaging information about political manipulation of intelligence and political interference in military decisions.

Posted by mattsteinglass | February 26, 2007 4:30 AM

Oh, duh, it was of course Rep. Pete McCloskey; Pete Wilson replaced him in '82 I think.

Posted by mattsteinglass | February 26, 2007 4:33 AM

$50 says not a single military officer resigns when orders come down to initiate hostilities with Iran.

Posted by steve duncan | February 26, 2007 6:13 AM

Thanks Gene.

For the rest of my thread, I agree with SqueakyRat and Glen Tomkins that it isn't really a moral issue, and think Richard Cownie and Steve Duncan are probably right that it wouldn't happen anyway.

Posted by Matt Weiner | February 26, 2007 8:58 AM

$50 says not a single military officer resigns when orders come down to initiate hostilities with Iran.

I'll take that bet.

Posted by Korha | February 26, 2007 12:08 PM

Korha, you're on with one clarification (or caveat, if you will) regarding the bet. The officer has to publicly state his resignation is in direct response to orders to participate, organize or otherwise execute an invasion or other hostile acts towards (and inside) Iran. Resignations not publicly acknowledged as having this impetus are excluded.

Posted by steve duncan | February 26, 2007 12:43 PM

Steve,

The issue of obeying an illegal order to bomb Iran is certainly not a purely theoretical one to these generals and admirals. Planning and executing wars of aggression is a criminal offense under both our own law, and under international law. We hanged Admiral Raeder for this 60 years ago. And we know this is still a sensitive issue because our generals and admirals are very, very unkeen on the idea of our signing on to international war crimes tribunals that would institutionalize what happened at Nuremberg.

Of course practical issue enter into the question of how worried a general officer needs to be that he might one day face a court martial or an international tribunal. While perhaps not terribly high (I certainly don't see UN forces fighting their way into Washington to extract Dubya from his bunker beneath the WH.), how high does it have to be to get someone's attention? If a Democrat wins the WH in 2008, he is going to find it very difficult, because of the Right Wing noise machine, to end either the war or the American gulag that Dubya will leave behind as his legacy, without fighting head on and winning a public relations Armageddon over the criminality of both. I can think of no forum for this battle more advantageous to the new President than the courtroom, and you can bet that some generals and admirals would have to share the docket with the ex-President, unless they put some serious distance between him and themselves.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | February 26, 2007 9:27 PM