In The End, It's Always A Liberal's Fault

John Yoo applied his legal gymnastics to l'affaire McCrystal and comes up with "Liberals in the observatory with the candlestick" claiming that it's Democrats that undermined the civilian authority of the Commander-In-Chief.

Congressional Democrats spent the Bush years undermining this fundamental principle of constitutional government. True, civilian-military relations had already been on the wane. Generals overtly fought President Bill Clinton's effort to integrate gays in the military. Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, published a 1992 editorial opposing intervention in Bosnia. Other military officers successfully resisted a large intervention in Haiti in 1994 to stop human rights abuses and blamed civilian leaders for the humiliating 1994 withdrawal from Somalia after the deaths of 18 American soldiers. 

Military resistance reached a crescendo under President George W. Bush. Fueled by Democrats eager to add kindling, generals openly feuded with Defense Department officials over the number of troops needed for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In 2006, in what has come to be known in the American military as the "revolt of the generals," dozens of senior retired officers publicly called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Military lawyers publicly opposed the administration over the use of military commissions to try al Qaeda leaders and whether the Geneva Conventions governed counterterrorism operations.

Liberals in the media and Congress eagerly joined the chorus for Mr. Rumsfeld's head. They manipulated the generals' revolt to support their opposition to the administration's Iraq and terrorism policies. They undermined the president's ability to receive forthright, confidential military advice. Presidents won't trust generals who may run to Congress or the press at the first sign of disagreement with the military's consensus advice. They traded short-term political gains against Mr. Bush for the Constitution's promise of long-term political stability.

Now the bill is coming due, and it will cost Democrats more dearly than Republicans. Scholars have observed that the officer corps has become increasingly conservative in the last few decades, the result of self-selection and the end of the draft, Republican Party outreach, and the disappearance of the national security wing of the Democratic Party. Soldiers who have risked their lives for their nation on the fields of Afghanistan and Iraq do not like to hear elected politicians calling their wars unjust or devising the fastest way to withdraw. 

Yoo's projection fantasies are impressive, but they boil down to "When the Generals said that it was a bad idea to go to war, the Commander-In-Chief has total power and to hell with the generals, when the generals make fun of Joe Biden, clearly they know better than the President."

I also like how John Yoo speaks for all soldiers when he says "Soldiers who have risked their lives for their nation on the fields of Afghanistan and Iraq do not like to hear elected politicians calling their wars unjust or devising the fastest way to withdraw. "  I know soldiers who have been to the Sandbox and back who say just that, the the wars are complete bullcrap, that good people died for no good reason, and that we need to get the hell out as soon as possible.

Oh, and Yoo still doesn't have any idea how to "win" Afghanistan...nor does he have any idea what victory or even a metric towards victory is supposed to look like.  Nobody does.  That's the main reason why we need out.