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Resign, Retire, RenounceWhat should generals do if Bush orders a foolish attack on Iran?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007, at 7:17 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

This is why no U.S. general has resigned in more than 40 years—and the last one to do so later asked, without success, for reinstatement.

Yet Wong and Lovelace argued that mere retirement "should not be an option when the threat to national security is high. … It may be personally satisfying to leave the distasteful aspects of a policy battle, but it ignores a responsibility to the nation and the [military] profession to do what is right."

In other words, if generals want to protest an impending decision, and if that decision affects (in the generals' view, if it gravely harms) national security, they should fall on their swords, and falling on swords unavoidably hurts. If it doesn't hurt, it's not really falling on a sword. Wong likens it to civil disobedience: Those who engage in that act do so knowing they face jail. Similarly, if an officer decides that he cannot in good conscience carry out the obligations of his commission, he should give up the commission and the benefits that go with it. Ducking out quietly—giving up the responsibilities but not the rewards—is a cop-out.

Generals who stop short of considering resignation are not necessarily selfish. For there is another distinction to draw between the generals' revolt over Iraq and a hypothetical revolt over, say, a decision to attack Iran.

The retired generals who spoke out in 2006 criticized not so much the decision to invade Iraq but rather the way that the invasion was planned and carried out—specifically, Rumsfeld's refusal to send what they considered enough troops.

To many officers, these generals—and many other officers who said nothing—had the right, even the obligation, to speak their minds on troop levels, tactics, and strategy. However, in disputes that involve policy, many of those same officers believe they have no business speaking out in public or even speaking out at all.

Retired Col. Don Snider, a professor at the Army War College who has written extensively on civil-military relations, says officers can engage in dissent only on very narrow grounds. "Officers are the servants, not the masters," he said in a phone interview. "If they can't accept that, they should get out." However, he emphasized, they should get out quietly—that is, they should retire (and maybe explain their actions a few years down the road, after the crisis has blown over). To resign in protest would mean injecting themselves into issues—of policy, politics, and foreign policy—that go beyond a military officer's professional expertise and ethos.

One officer who often thinks about these issues, but who asked not to be identified, agrees with Snider to a point—officers, he says, shouldn't go "outside the lane" in their dissent—but adds that there's a "fine line" between political policy and military judgment. For instance, if a president goes to war on the basis of faulty or jiggered intelligence findings, the decision isn't strictly "policy," since intelligence analysis is also among an officer's professional tasks.

These are the sorts of fine lines that senior officers are mulling and skirmishing over with great intensity right now. If the run-up to Iraq were somehow replayed, it's a fair bet that one or two generals would resign—or retire, then speak out more promptly than they did. (Gen. Greg Newbold, who was the Joint Staff's director of operations at the start of the Bush administration, retired shortly before the invasion but didn't speak out for three years—a lapse that, he later wrote, he regretted.)

If there is a run-up to an Iranian war, what would the generals do? This is not an easy question. But here is my proposal (an easy proposal, some would charge, correctly, since I'm not in the military): If the top officers up and down the chain of command all agreed that an attack on Iran would be a disaster, on whatever grounds, they should do all they can to sway the president—and anyone who has influence over the president—against it. They should arrange to be called before congressional committees and to be asked awkward questions, which would elicit their critical replies. At the final hour, they should threaten to retire or resign en masse and, if that didn't work, they should follow through. (Even if they quietly retired, the fact that three or four or six or eight generals did so at once would have some impact.)

This is a dangerous business. It shouldn't be undertaken often (and even on this outing, it should be done only in coordination with, perhaps at the behest of, civilian officials who agree with their positions—say, the secretaries of defense and state). But if the bombing led to disaster, as many of these officers now believe it would, they must realize—and, given the experience in Iraq, they probably do realize—that they would share the responsibility. The question is: Will anticipation of this responsibility lead them to do something beforehand, if only as recompense for having done too little before the disaster of Iraq?

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
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