McPeak Speaks

...but will anybody listen? And if so, why?

But if you want McPeak quotes, hell, we're milbloggers - you know we have McPeak quotes.

February, 2003, Immediately before the invasion of Iraq...

On the realtive difficulty of the upcoming war:

The man who headed the U.S. Air Force during Desert Storm will tell you, over black coffee in a Lake Oswego cafe, that the potential attack on Iraq is "the fight you dream about, a wonderful kind of war to have."
<...>
"Everybody's going to get decorated out of this thing," says Tony McPeak, a four-star general who retired to Oregon in 1995. "Everyone comes home. It has a lot of appeal to me."

"If we go in there and occupy the place for 50 years, which is my prediction, we'll have to rebuild it."

Close combat in Baghdad would be stupid, he says, despite what Army generals may advocate.

And yet McPeak will tell you, before the next coffee refill, that President Bush has botched the crucial process of building a coalition, of enlisting the United Nations and of rebuilding Afghanistan as a model of reconstruction. McPeak, who served four years on the Joint Chiefs of Staff advising Bush's father and then President Clinton, says the younger Bush should publicly admit personal failure and start the diplomacy over.

"The world would breathe a sigh of relief, and we'd go back and do it right," says McPeak, 67, brown eyes flickering from a weathered face. "I mean, the world would fall in love with this guy. It's not that hard to fix."

McPeak and some other retired generals caused controversy by abandoning their officers-corps' neutrality during the last presidential campaign and supporting Bush, an endorsement he regrets. Aside from Powell, whom he still respects, McPeak dismisses members of the current administration as ideologues who favor big business over the middle class, boost the federal deficit and damage the environment.

March, 2003, one week after US troops crossed the border:

On how long we'd be in Iraq:

"We'll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right".

Is there an alternative to urban warfare in Baghdad?

We could put Baghdad under siege and sit on the outside.

Would you really think so three years down the road, with stories from Baghdad of people dead and emaciated kids?

Yes. The impact on world opinion is an argument against that approach. It's an argument for finishing this thing quickly. But, nevertheless, it's a decision we can make. And we've already made decisions that said, 'World opinion's not very important to us.'

I never made a plan that relied on the courage of my own troops. You hope that -- and they generally will -- fight bravely. Your plan ought to be predicated on more realistic assumptions.

After the fall of Baghdad, June 2003 (writing in The Washington Post) McPeak scorned those so-called "experts" who predicted difficulties in taking Baghdad rapidly with minimum troops:

For all but the resolutely sightless, it is now obvious that air combat determines the outcome in modern war. In the early hours of March 20, the salvo aimed at [Saddam Hussein] himself was preceded by nearly a month of air attacks in and around Baghdad -- to say nothing of a decade or so of bombing in connection with enforcing the no-fly zones. <...> Because of this aerial preparation, Iraq's air defenses stayed mostly silent and our aircraft were able to begin reducing opposing ground forces immediately. Army and Marine Corps formations, judged by "experts" to be much too small for the job, captured Baghdad in just 22 days, and with comparatively light casualties. Not only did coalition air power systematically disorganize Iraq's ground forces, it did so at small cost.

In 2004, as a military advisor to John Kerry, McPeak wanted to double the number of troops in Iraq:

"We need to about double the size” of our contingent of forces in Iraq.

McPeak maintained that position in 2006 (a personal record for consistency?)

Gen. Merrill McPeak, retired Air Force chief of staff, says if anything the number of US troops there needs to be doubled - to around the figure Shinseki predicted would be needed three years ago - if Iraq is to become truly secure and democratic.

General McPeak lost friends when he started speaking out against the war several years ago. Now, he says, "everybody is sending me e-mails and cards and letters saying 'I wish I had seen it the way you saw it from the beginning,' and I've gotten some of those friends back."

Which brings us to the present day.

"As a combat pilot and Air Force chief during Desert Storm, lives depended on the judgments I made," McPeak says in the spot. "And judgment is what we need from our next commander in chief. Barack Obama opposed this war in Iraq from the start, showing insight and courage others did not."

One could argue that an equally valid statement could be made on behalf of Natalie Mains - but not for Merrill McPeak.