John Batiste– liar, Bush ‘hater,’ or both:
My name is John Batiste. I left the military on principle on November 1, 2005, after more than 31 years of service. I walked away from promotion and a promising future serving our country. I hung up my uniform because I came to the gut-wrenching realization that I could do more good for my soldiers and their families out of uniform. I am a West Point graduate, the son and son-in-law of veteran career soldiers, a two-time combat veteran with extensive service in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, and a life-long Republican. Bottom line, our nation is in peril, our Department of Defense’s leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities. This is all about accountability and setting our nation on the path to victory. There is no substitute for victory and I believe we must complete what we started in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader. He knows everything, except “how to win.” He surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates who do not grasp the importance of the principles of war, the complexities of Iraq, or the human dimension of warfare. Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build “his plan,” which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace, and set Iraq up for self-reliance. He refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency, which was an absolute certainty. Bottom line, his plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today. Our great military lost a critical window of opportunity to secure Iraq because of inadequate troop levels and capability required to impose security, crush a budding insurgency, and set the conditions for the rule of law in Iraq. We were undermanned from the beginning, lost an early opportunity to secure the country, and have yet to regain the initiative. To compensate for the shortage of troops, commanders are routinely forced to manage shortages and shift coalition and Iraqi security forces from one contentious area to another in places like Baghdad, An Najaf, Tal Afar, Samarra, Ramadi, Fallujah, and many others. This shifting of forces is generally successful in the short term, but the minute a mission is complete and troops are redeployed back to the region where they came from, insurgents reoccupy the vacuum and the cycle repeats itself. Troops returning to familiar territory find themselves fighting to reoccupy ground which was once secure. We are all witnessing this in Baghdad and the Al Anbar Province today. I am reminded of the myth of Sisyphus. This is no way to fight a counter-insurgency. Secretary Rumsfeld’s plan did not set our military up for success.
Or is the problem he and the media are “ignoring most tales of valor and achievement by our troops.”
I sure hope someone at Blogs for Bush or Michelle Malkin’s website googles Open Secrets to find out who he contributed to in 2004, because unless he donated to a Democrat and we can prove he is a commie terrorist sympathizer, some of this shit might stick.
Richard 23
Another BDS sufferer who probably has a book deal.
t. jasper parnell
The video is even more damning
chopper
he’s just a disgruntled former employee.
seriously, he just isn’t gruntled anymore. and his lack of gruntility is making him a dishonest whacko leftist.
i read it in this pamphlet.
Punchy
Damm you Rich, you stole my line.
This won’t stick. None of the other (fill in the number, anything close to 8ish) retired generals and such who testified stuck. I find it AMAZING that finally, a CURRENT general is trying to stick it Rumsfeld by withholding a key budget request.
It will take a serving, active, Iraq-bound or Iraq-returnee general to speak up and make waves. And since we all know how that would destroy one’s career, it won’t happen.
I think the apropriate analogy is the guy with cancer, who goes to doc after doc, who all tell them he’s dying. But he ignores it, thinking he knows more medicine than the doctor. And while he can limp around alright, eventually he’s going to die from the cancer at the most inopportune time, like while driving a bus full of people, taking his life and a whole lot of innocents with him unfairly.
Darrell
What? Military officers disagreeing with commanders during a time of war? Budget disagreements over military spending priorities too? What is the world coming to?
Is it really possible, even for an experienced officer like Batiste, to know with any degree of certainty whether or not the insurgency could have been ‘crushed’ or minimized with more troops? After decades of having their jackboots on the throats of the Shia and Kurds, is it realistic to claim that the Sunni’s would give up their control without a fight if we just had more troops there? And that there wouldn’t be lots of payback reprisals from Shia and Kurds who had been brutalized for so long.. no matter what the troop levels?
Hey, Batiste may be right. But what he is asserting is in fact unknowable second guessing, rather than rock solid ‘proof’ of anything.
Pb
Well he probably knew that ‘less troops’ wasn’t the solution, for one…
Tsulagi
Hey, can we enemy combatantize this scum yet?! Just a little time with kinder, gentler alternative interrogation techniques will make him confess this was all sent to him by mind rays from Howard Dean. The truth always comes out.
jg
No they wouldn’t have given up, we would have had enough troops to thoroughly kick their asses.
SeesThroughIt
Surely, Batiste is proof the the terrorists have infiltrated our military! Next, they will be doing terrible things to our precious bodily fluids!
capelza
Cake?…or…Death? (I hope someone knows what I’m referring to…)
John…don’t you know you are a stinking, dirty, hippie LIEberal now…afflicted with BDS (the only term on the net more overused than that is Emo). Pretty soon, someone is going to “find” a picture of you at a sit-in singing Pete Segger songs with…..her.
Seriously, thank you for the posts lately…you are on fire. Hopefully the serious conservatives (or liberals for that matter) will listen to you and know that one can be true to themselves.
VidaLoca
Nope. He’s shrill, much too shrill. And not serious.
DougJ
Is it really possible, even for an experienced officer like Batiste, to know with any degree of certainty whether or not the insurgency could have been ‘crushed’ or minimized with more troops?
Look, for all we know this is all part of God’s great plan for the End Times: have the US send in too few troops so that Iraq spirals into a huge disaster which ultimately leads to the final battle between Good and Evil. Does any of you know for a fact that isn’t the case? You don’t, do you? So why not just shut your traps and support the plan to stay the course?
DougJ
Free Republic is reporting that Batiste helped Joe Wilson kill Vince Foster. And that, in the 70s, he dressed up as George Allen and ran around using the n-word and stuffing deer head’s into people’s mailboxes. Developing…
KC
VidaLoca,
Totally agree with your assessment. The guy is shrill, no doubt a Democrat hack. We need to be vigilent about watching these trait–I mean, people.
VidaLoca
Oh. My. God. I can see it now. John doing a reprise of Jane Fonda, only with Ms. Sheehan and that anti-aircraft gun. The intertrons will go crazy! Blogger of the year!
I can’t wait!
What she said. Good work, sir.
capelza
Doug J…aren’t you forgetting…Gaugamela was in Iraq. Rummy probably figured that if young Alexander could do it on the cheap..so could he. Too bad Rummy wasn’t on his horse leading the charge. Or Bush.
Funny ain’t it…all the end time religions lying fallow or otherwise in the ME…Judaism, Christianity, Shiite Islam (in particular but also Sunnis)…and that ancient underpinning…Zoroasterism. The great battle of good and evil! Makes sense. It is the only explanation I can figure..except maybe hubris, cocky insane hubris.
F. Authoratah
You’d think someone would ask those questions before starting a war. And if they didn’t, or were wrong about it, there would be some accountability.
Not in Darrells world.
Tsulagi
Seriously, officers like Batiste saying this along with so many others is huge. It’s about as close to open rebellion as you get in the military. Even after they leave, they remain fiercely loyal and love those in service damn near as much as their own children. What they are doing in some measure is speaking for those in uniform who honorably do not openly voice disagreement.
One such officer, Marine LTG Greg Newbold, in line to become the next Marine Corps Commandant said this in April…
He had more to say.
So come on patriot warriors, line up behind Michele Malkin. Slap on another Purple Heart bandaid and buy another bumper sticker. Show us your steel.
Andrew
I bet he’s gay. Or pro-choice. There MUST be some explanation.
scarshapedstar
Angry, bitter, shrill, and totally unserious and uncivil.
Did I mention how shrill his shrill is?
DougJ
is it realistic to claim that the Sunni’s would give up their control without a fight if we just had more troops there?
Obviously, it is. It might have required more troops than we could possibly muster, mind you, but pretty much anything can be accomplisehd with enough troops.
EL
Darrell, you’re oversimplifying again, and assuming Batiste is stupid. Very few military people reach his rank by being stupid.
More troops would make it far easier to “impose security” and “set conditions for the rule of law” instead of the whack-a-mole strategy imposed by too few troops. Classic counterinsurgency dictates getting most of the populace on your side. If the average Iraqi, whether Sunni or Shia, saw the occupation bringing security, electricity, and better conditions than they saw under Saddam, many of them would prefer to see us succeed. What would that mean? That they would be far more willing to give us info. As it stands now, anyone who cooperates with the American forces is likely to wind up dead when the troops have to move to a different area to whack the next mole.
Simply put, a large percentage of the population has lost confidence that we can and will improve their lives.
Cassidy
Heh…an oversimplifying, usually dishonest, partisan hack questioning a career military officer’s assessment of a military situation…only in America.
Richard 23
C’mon fellas, gals. I want to hear more about what Darrell, Mac Buckets, Par R, Sherard, scs and Stormy70 has to say about this most important issue.
scs, just pretent whoever we’re talking about is brain dead, or nearly.
lard lad
Oh, I’ll have cake, please.
farmgirl
oh yeah. love me some Action Transvestite!
HyperIon
This part caught my eye.
Hmm…do the citizens of this country really have the gumption to do what he proposes….stay and secure the country and then restore the infrastructure? It will require actual sacrifice. So I guess I agree that we CAN do anything but I sort of doubt we WILL.
Cole%9Johns
gr8 story bro