Fallon didn't get it

The departing head of Central Command was wrong about the surge.

By Max Boot
March 12, 2008

To see why Tuesday's "retirement" of Navy Adm. William "Fox" Fallon as head of U.S. Central Command is good news, all you have to do is look at the Esquire profile that brought about his downfall.

Its author, Thomas P.M. Barnett, a former professor at the Naval War College, presents a fawning portrait of the admiral -- a service he previously performed for Donald Rumsfeld. But evidence of Fallon's supposed "strategic brilliance" is notably lacking. For example, Barnett notes Fallon's attempt to banish the phrase "the Long War" (created by his predecessor) because it "signaled a long haul that Fallon simply finds unacceptable," without offering any hint of how Fallon intends to defeat our enemies overnight. The ideas Fallon proposes -- "He wants troop levels in Iraq down now, and he wants the Afghan National Army running the show throughout most of Afghanistan by the end of this year" -- would most likely result in security setbacks that would lengthen, not shorten, the struggle.

The picture that emerges of the admiral -- "The Man Between War and Peace," as the overwrought headline has it -- is not as flattering as intended. "He's standing up to the commander in chief, whom he thinks is contemplating a strategically unsound war [with Iran]," Barnett writes. And:"While Admiral Fallon's boss, President George W. Bush, regularly trash-talks his way to World War III ... it's left to Fallon -- and apparently Fallon alone -- to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: 'This constant drumbeat of conflict ... is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions.' "

What Fallon (and Barnett) don't seem to understand is that Fallon's very public assurances that America has no plans to use force against Iran embolden the mullahs to continue developing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorist groups that are killing American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is highly improbable that, as the profile implies, the president had any secret plans to bomb Iran that Fallon put a stop to. But there is no doubt that the president wants to maintain pressure on Iran, and that's what Fallon has been undermining.

By irresponsibly taking the option of force off the table, Fallon makes it more likely, not less, that there will ultimately be an armed confrontation with Iran.

Barnett writes further: "Smart guy that he is, Robert Gates, the incoming secretary of Defense, finagled Fallon out of Pacific Command, where he'd been radically making peace with the Chinese, so that he could, among other things, provide a check on the eager-to-please General David Petraeus in Iraq."

It's doubtful that this was why Bush and Gates appointed Fallon. Why would they want to "check" the general charged with winning the Iraq war? But it's telling that Barnett would write this; it may be a reflection of Fallon's own thinking. Even if he wasn't appointed for this reason, Fallon has certainly seen his job as being to "check" Petraeus. The problem is that Fallon is a newcomer to the Middle East and Iraq, while Petraeus has served there for years and is the architect of a strategy that has rescued the United States from the brink of defeat.

This is not, however, a strategy that Fallon favored. Not only was Fallon "quietly opposed to a long-term surge in Iraq," as Barnett notes, but he doesn't seem to have changed his mind in the past year. He has tried to undermine the surge by pushing for faster troop drawdowns than Petraeus thought prudent. ("He wants troop levels in Iraq down now.") The president wisely deferred to the man on the spot -- Petraeus -- thus no doubt leaving Fallon simmering with the sort of anger that came through all too clearly in Esquire.

Like a lot of smart guys (or, at any rate, guys who think they're smart), Fallon seems to have outsmarted himself. He thinks the war in Iraq is a distraction from formulating "a comprehensive strategy for the Middle East," according to the profile. The reality is that the only strategy worth a dinar is to win the war in Iraq. If we fail there, all other objectives in the region will be much harder to attain; if we succeed, they will be much easier.

That's something that Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno -- the architects of the surge -- understood, but that Fallon never seemed to get. Let's hope that his successor will have a better grasp of the region and of his role. This president, any president, deserves a Centcom commander who carries out his policies rather than undermines them.

The Pentagon vs. Petraeus

Yesterday's resignation of Admiral William Fallon as Centcom Commander is being portrayed as a dispute over Iran. Our own sense is that the admiral has made more than enough dissenting statements about Iraq, Iran and other things to warrant his dismissal as much as early retirement. But his departure will be especially good news if it means that President Bush is beginning to pay attention to the internal Pentagon dispute over Iraq.

A fateful debate is now taking place at the Pentagon that will determine the pace of U.S. military withdrawals for what remains of President Bush's term. Senior Pentagon officials -- including, we hear, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, Army Chief of Staff George Casey and Admiral Fallon -- have been urging deeper troop cuts in Iraq beyond the five "surge" combat brigades already scheduled for redeployment this summer.

AP

Adm. William Fallon, during testimony on Capitol Hill in May, 2007.

Last month Mr. Gates agreed to a pause in these withdrawals, so that General David Petraeus could assess whether the impressive security gains achieved by the surge can be maintained with fewer troops. But now the Pentagon seems to be pushing for a pause of no more than four to six weeks before the drawdowns resume.

It's possible the surge has so degraded the insurgency -- both of the al Qaeda and Shiite varieties -- that the U.S. can reduce its troop presence to some undetermined level without inviting precisely the conditions that led to the surge in the first place. The withdrawal of one combat brigade from Iraq in December hasn't affected the stunning declines in insurgent attacks and Iraqi civilian deaths over the past year.

Then again, a spate of recent attacks -- including a suicide bombing Monday that left five GIs dead in Baghdad and a roadside bombing yesterday that killed 16 Iraqis -- is a reminder that the insurgency remains capable of doing great damage. An overly hasty withdrawal of U.S. forces would give it more opportunities to do so. It could also demoralize Iraq forces just when they are gaining confidence and need our help to "hold" the areas gained by the "clear, hold and build" strategy of the surge.

This ought to be apparent to Pentagon generals. Yet their rationale for troop withdrawals seems to have less to do with conditions in Iraq and more with fear that the war is putting a strain on the military as an institution. These are valid concerns. Lengthy and repeated combat deployments have imposed extraordinary burdens on service members and their families. The war in Iraq has also diverted scarce funds to combat operations rather than investment -- much of it long overdue -- in military modernization.

But these concerns are best dealt with by enlarging the size of the Army and Marine Corps and increasing spending on defense to between 5% and 6% of gross domestic product from the current 4.5% -- about where it was at the end of the Cold War. By contrast, we can think of few things that would "break" the military more completely -- in readiness, morale and deterrent power -- than to leave Iraq in defeat, or in conditions that would soon lead to a replay of what happened in Vietnam.

This Pentagon pressure also does little to help General Petraeus. The general is supposed to be fighting a frontal war against Islamist militants, not a rearguard action with Pentagon officials. We understand there is a chain of command in the military, and General Petraeus is precisely the kind of team player who would respect it.

That's why as Commander in Chief, Mr. Bush has a particular obligation to engage in this Pentagon debate so that General Petraeus can make his troop recommendations based on the facts in Iraq, not on pressure from Washington. It was Mr. Bush's excessive deference to the Army's pecking order that put lackluster generals such as Ricardo Sanchez in charge when the insurgency was forming, and that prevented General Petraeus from assuming command in Iraq until it was nearly too late. Having successfully resisted pressure from Congressional Democrats for premature troop withdrawals, it would be strange indeed for Mr. Bush to cave in to identical pressure from his own bureaucracies.

As a political matter, an overly rapid drawdown would also only complicate the choices the next President will have to make about troop levels, whether that's John McCain or one of the Democratic contenders. Mr. Bush owes it to his successor to bequeath not only a stable Iraq, but also policy options that don't tempt disaster. Preserving a troop cushion that allows for future withdrawals without jeopardizing current gains would do just that.

That's a decision that rests with Mr. Bush alone, who in seven years as President has often proved more adept and determined in fighting enemies abroad than imposing discipline on his own, so often wayward, Administration.

China's War on Terror

In democratic states, officials fighting terrorism are held accountable by a watching public for the choices they make between national security and transparency. In China, however, where a terrorist plot against the Beijing Olympics and an attempted airplane bombing made international news this weekend, everything is more murky.

On Sunday, the governor of Xinjiang, a western province of China, announced that a China Southern Airlines plane had been forced to divert its flight after passengers attempted to crash the aircraft. At the same press conference, another Party official said that a January police raid -- in the same province -- had killed and nabbed terrorists targeting the Olympics.

Scary stuff, and yet given the way China operates, it's hard to judge these claims or the seriousness of a threat they may represent. The identity of the attackers, their methods and the potential victims' names were all kept under wraps. No local media -- or we -- have been able to confirm details of the airplane story by speaking with airplane passengers, airline authorities or police, although a plane apparently was diverted from Beijing. Xinjiang's Communist Party chief, Wang Lequan, is the only person to have mentioned the Olympics plot -- which is unrelated to the plane incident -- and as we went to press no other government official had confirmed his claims.

China's Communist Party also has a troubled history in Xinjiang, home to Muslim Uighurs, a minority ethnic group. The government there has routinely rounded up peaceful dissidents and conducted closed trials. Beijing has subsidized the mass migration of ethnic Hans into Xinjiang to sinify the region, and has banned some public expressions of religion -- including fasting during Ramadan for students.

It is true that Xinjiang separatists have resorted to violence in the past, if rarely. And in the war on terror, it is important for governments to exercise discretion over information they disclose about counterterrorism activities. But given China's opaque and unaccountable justice system, were this weekend's roundups crackdowns on violent militants or just more cases where the government uses the fear of terrorism to justify arresting peaceful dissidents? We may never know.