THE CRAVENHAWK

Josh Marshall relunctantly became a hawk when Clintonite Kenneth Pollack convinced him of the need to remove Saddam. Then, about a week out from actual combat, Marshall retracted his support for war with Iraq--to position himself as one who could credibly snipe at the Bush administration once hostilities began. That's how I see it. By having once been a hawk, Marshall has made it impossible to criticize him as simply an anti-war lefty. By recanting his support once war became inevitable, he has shown what is most important to him: Between politics and national security, he'll take politics. He's a good Democrat, in other words. And a cravenhawk--a false hawk trading on his craven notions politics and patriotism.

UPDATE: To be a bit more specific about things, Marshall has lately gone ballistic on the Sy Hersh anti-Rumsfeld hit piece, and others, centering on how SecDef Rumsfeld is "meddling" in the war plans, and how he's constantly irritating the top Pentagon brass, and how the war is going badly, etc etc. First, it's the left that's always blasting away at the Pentagon in peacetime for eating up too much of the US budget, and for being a nest of warmongers and so forth. But suddenly since a Republican administration is in charge and attempting to "tranform" (or, rebuild, after the Clinton years of deprivation) the military, they're bad and the Pentagon is good. Rumsfeld irritates many generals for precisely the right reasons--his hoped-for transformation amounts to an implicit threat against many officers' careers. They're digging in to oppose him, not necessarily to save the military, but to save themselves. And since when is it considered "meddling" for a Secretary of Defense with years of experience in and out of government to suggest, tweak, and work out war plans? Isn't it Rumsfeld's job to manage what the military is doing, to oversee its planning, and to make suggestions based on the political realities that generals often ignore? That's part of why we have civilian control of the military in the form of a cabinet secretary who reports to the President. Also, the war plan currently in use in Iraq is essentially the generals' plan--Rumsfeld reportedly wanted a much smaller force to conduct an Afghanistan-style campaign to oust Saddam. To now blame the non-debacle in Iraq on Rumsfeld makes no sense, since his preferred plan was ruled out months ago.

For more on Hersh's piece, I'd suggest taking a look at this site. Its writer reminds us that Hersh breathlessly reported a story during the Afghan campaign that turned out to be a Debka-esque pile of nonsense, and that Hersh's suggestion that that war was going badly was refuted by the stunning allied victory a few weeks later. Hersh was wrong then, and probably wrong now.

As for Marshall, I'll paraphrase Gen. H. Norman Schwartzkopf. Marshall has never served in the military, knows nothing of military planning, logistics or strategy. Other than that, he's perfectly suited to comment on the success or failure of a given strategy which he's neither been privileged to view nor qualified by experience to judge.