Writing in the New York Times, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal has endorsed Kamala Harris for president over Donald Trump. This should surprise no one. Gen. McChrystal, one of the leading commanders in our ill-fated 20-year war in Afghanistan, supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump is the greatest threat to the military-industrial complex since President Dwight Eisenhower.
Ironically, McChrystal was fired by President Obama in 2010 after publicly insulting some top administration officials, including then-Vice President Biden. McChrystal is simply the latest graduate of the military-industrial complex to endorse Harris. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of two failed wars under President George W. Bush, also recently endorsed Harris. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: None Dare Call It a Hostage Crisis)
After his firing by Obama, McChrystal released a statement saying, “I strongly support the President’s strategy in Afghanistan and am deeply committed to our coalition forces, our partner nations, and the Afghan people.” McChrystal had previously urged Obama to provide him with more troops to finish the job in Afghanistan, reminiscent of some of the commanders during the Vietnam War who promised to win the war if Washington would just send them more troops to fight and die.
Obama later criticized McChrystal in his book A Promised Land, for acting with “the same air of impunity that seemed to have taken hold among some of the military’s top ranks during the Bush years: a sense that once the war began, those who fought it shouldn’t be questioned, that politicians should just give them what they asked for and get out of the way.”
Trump Disapproved of Their Wars
This is a trend that began in 2016, when Donald Trump criticized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, Tom Ridge (Homeland Security), Michael Chertoff (Homeland Security), Robert Zoellick (State Department, World Bank), Michael Hayden (CIA, NSA), John Negroponte (DNI) and other “deep state” veterans came out against Trump. Trump called them and Hillary Clinton “the owners of the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq, allow Americans to die in Benghazi, and they are the ones who allowed the rise of ISIS.”
McChrystal noted in his New York Times piece the importance of continuing to support the war in Ukraine. That was also a key reason why a group of 700 “National Security Leaders 4 America,” that included Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Victoria Nuland, Michael McFaul and Leon Panetta, and numerous retired military officers, endorsed Harris for president. They praised Harris’ “relentless diplomacy with allies around the globe [that] preserved a united front in support of Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression.”
“The message coming from Washington’s foreign policy elite, many of them directly responsible for the counterproductive and failed U.S. wars and interventions of the last 40 years, is loud and clear,” writes James Carden in Responsible Statecraft. “They do not like, trust, and indeed, perhaps even fear, the return of Trump to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” That is because, as John Feehery, a veteran of Capitol Hill politics has noted, Trump is the greatest threat to the military-industrial complex since President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against its growing, undue influence in our councils of government.
It is not as if Trump while he was president starved the Defense Department of money and weapons. He advocated and supported Defense increases, but like our greatest presidents — Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan — he sought to use our military strength to back diplomacy. He did not, to quote John Quincy Adams, go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Dick Cheneys and Stanley McChrystals did, and they seem convinced that Kamala Harris will, too. Trump, at least in the last two years of his presidency, focused on the real threat to U.S. national security — China.
More War?
In the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Far East, separate conflicts threaten to spark World War III. As Victor Davis Hanson has noted, World War II started out as separate conflicts in Europe and Asia that evolved and coalesced into the most destructive war in human history. (READ MORE: Hillary Clinton Stokes the Fires of Anti-Trump Demagoguery)
For more than two decades many of the civilian and military leaders who are now backing Kamala Harris were responsible for waging futile, costly, and long wars and interventions that have made America less secure while fueling the engines and filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex. Why should anyone listen to them?