To give you a sense of how non-partisan the military is, did you know that if you’re a soldier you can’t even wear your uniform to a political demonstration, pro-war, or anti-war?

Klasher, I think you’re way out of line in attacking Petraeus’s honor. He’s a Princeton graduate, a Ranger, and a distinguished combat veteran. Not only that, but he’s one of the finest military minds our country has produced.

Also, when you had the “general’s revolt,” of 2005, one thing that most of the generals had in common was that they were commanders of infantry and artillery units, which were the units taking the biggest cuts under Rumsfeld. Much of their criticism was legitimate, but I don’t see you attacking them on the basis of their integrity, even though these generals made a more overt foray into partisan politics than anyone else under the Bush administration.

Double standard, no?

If the Commerce Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the departments of Veterans Affairs and Transportation, the departments of Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, Treasury, Education, Agriculture and Energy, NASA, the Small Business Administration, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the U.S. Agency for International Development are fair game- why not the Pentagon?

Anybody who believes the US military (and particularly its leadership) has a non-political role is either quite ill-informed, or is playing politics. The military is the death-dealing arm of the United States government, which means it is mainly a partisan tool for “robust” political expression. That it is the most heinous such tool at the disposal of politicians is unquestionable, and to imagine that generals are not also politicians, and do not play politics (inside and outside their commands) is to imagine them hopelessly ignorant and inept about the reality of their situations.

That might be one way of explaining the gross incompetence we have witnessed by one US commander after another in Iraq, but it is more likely that Bush, by seeing to it that all generals critical of his policies have been dismissed (those generals after all had not displayed the political wits and will to survive), has insured that only the most dishonest or most deluded officers are still in command in Iraq.