October 15, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Coalition of the Reluctant

By ROGER COHEN
A senior Pentagon official has spent this month on a magical mystery tour of little-known European and Eurasian capitals trying to deliver a dribble of troops for Iraq and Afghanistan.

The low-profile trip reads more like a geography test than a geostrategic foray. It has whisked Debra Cagan, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for coalition affairs, from Tirana to Skopje, and on to Chisinau and Astana, among other luminous world metropolises.

In Chisinau — you guessed it; that’s the capital of Moldova — Cagan asked for more sappers in Iraq. Moldova currently has 11 bomb-disposal experts there. Yes, 11.

In downtown Tirana, hub of a 20th-century exercise in Communist folly and now a place in need of American money, Cagan pressed the Albanians to go beyond their 120-strong contingent in Iraq. Albania is considering an additional 125 to 150 troops.

As for Cagan’s stops in the Macedonian capital of Skopje and Kazakhstan’s Astana, it’s unclear what transpired. Macedonia has 40 troops in Iraq; the Kazakhs have 27 military engineers. Other states visited included Ukraine, which may offer a little help in Iraq, and the Czech Republic, which has 100 troops in Iraq and got promises of military equipment.

Cagan declined to comment and a Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Almarah Belk, said in an e-mail message: “It is premature to discuss the nature of her trip or any potential outcomes of her discussions with the various countries.”

It is not premature, however, to say the trip smacks of desperation. Keeping many flags flying in Iraq is critical to making talk of a “coalition” credible. The 168,000 U.S. troops already account for about 94 percent of the forces there. The largest other contributor, Britain, is to halve its presence to 2,500 next year.

Against this fraying backdrop, the strange idea of Pentagon brass spending two weeks hop-scotching continents to cajole countries — many economically hard-pressed — into sending a platoon or two looks less outlandish. That’s where we are seven years into the Bush administration: stretched to the limit.

The United States is as isolated in Iraq as a great power can be. A first term spent riding roughshod over friends and vaunting “coalitions of the willing” over alliances has not been righted by a second term of diplomacy rehabilitation. Wounds linger.

I don’t know Cagan and she wouldn’t talk to me, but the least that can be said is her reputation is more for Rumsfeldian bluntness than the discretion of his successor as defense secretary, Robert Gates. At a big NATO political-military conference in Brussels on Sept. 19-20, anxiety over her trip ran high.

A Europe-based U.S. NATO official who attended e-mailed me to say American diplomats are looking “for ways to limit the damage she is sure to leave.”

The note portrayed her as “John Bolton on steroids” with a tendency to be brusque with allies.

The Pentagon describes Cagan as a highly effective player in the securing of basing rights in Central Asia for the war on terror and a well-connected builder of international coalitions.

A biography says she “was critical in transforming NATO’s military forces to make them more responsive, agile and expeditionary.” Even critics say she gets results.

But at a Sept. 11 meeting in Washington with six visiting British parliamentarians, Cagan caused alarm similar to that expressed in Brussels a week later. The M.P.’s were briefed on the difficulty of dialogue with Tehran and U.S. concern that a British troop withdrawal from southern Iraq could benefit Iran.

At one point, according to a British press report, Cagan expressed hatred toward Iranians, prompting a formal call for her resignation from the National Iranian American Council, which represents about one million Iranian-Americans.

The Pentagon denied the remark. Alasdair McDonnell, a Social Democratic and Labor M.P. who was present, told me: “I won’t confirm or deny she said that. She might nuke me in the middle of the night. She’s not somebody I’d want to tangle with.”

Bernard Jenkin, a Conservative who was also present, said “Cagan is straightforward, and if you’re politically disposed to be put out by her, you would be.” He himself was not.

Colonel Belk said Cagan’s briefing emphasized “the U.S. administration’s position that a precipitous U.K. withdrawal from Iraq could lead to the forfeiture of some gains and would help Iran.”

Whatever Cagan’s exact words, this much seems clear: a U.S. administration casting around for soldiering scraps in Moldova and Macedonia should be careful about saber-rattling toward Iran.

U.S. hands are full in Iraq. Gates knows that. Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s point man on Iran, knows that. My reading of them is that predictions of war with Iran are overblown, however hawkish the likes of coalition-cobbling Cagan may be.

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Please comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages.

Nicholas D. Kristof is on book leave.

October 15, 2007
First Lady Raising Her Profile Without Changing Her Image

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
CRAWFORD, Tex., Oct. 14 — This Saturday, a military jet with the code name “Bright Star” will take off from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, bound for a diplomatic mission in the Middle East. It will carry an increasingly outspoken and quietly powerful White House emissary: Laura Bush, the first lady of the United States.

The official purpose of the trip is to promote breast cancer awareness; nobody expects the president’s wife to engage in bare-knuckle negotiations over war and peace. Yet in the twilight of her husband’s presidency, the woman who once made George W. Bush promise she would never have to give a speech is stepping out in a new and unusually substantive way.

At the United Nations General Assembly in late September, Mrs. Bush was in the audience while her husband criticized the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators by the military junta in Myanmar, formerly Burma. But three weeks earlier it had been the first lady, not the president, who picked up the phone to call the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.

She is now the administration’s leading voice on the matter, denouncing the junta in official statements, Congressional testimony and, last week, an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.

“I think that this is sort of one of those myths,” she told reporters after the call to the secretary general, sounding surprised at the stir she created, “that I was baking cookies and then they fell off the cookie sheet and I called Ban Ki-moon.”

Her comment was reminiscent of another famous cookie remark, the one uttered by Mrs. Bush’s activist predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who once told reporters she was not one to stay home and bake cookies. Mrs. Bush is no Mrs. Clinton; she does not head up independent policy initiatives, has no interest in a West Wing office and would not be caught dead running for the Senate, much less the presidency. But at age 60, she has evolved in the job, and is hardly the traditional first lady Americans once expected.

“She’s always been what she is,” said Elsie Walker Kilborne, a cousin of President Bush who introduced Mrs. Bush to the plight of Myanmar’s opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest. “But she is coloring herself in bolder colors.”

The White House makes calculated use of Mrs. Bush; the Middle East trip is a good example. On the surface, it will stick to familiar, noncontroversial first lady terrain: women’s health. But it is hardly a coincidence that Mrs. Bush is being deployed to the region as a good-will ambassador just as her husband is trying to salvage his legacy there, with a conference next month on peace in the Middle East.

The trip is Mrs. Bush’s 14th solo overseas excursion, the third so far this year. The itinerary, to be announced Monday by the White House, includes stops in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait, countries where her husband’s critics say she has more credibility than he does. She will pay courtesy calls on at least two heads of state, the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

At home, she is inserting herself more forcefully into the issues she cares about. Most people know Mrs. Bush as a vocal supporter of her husband’s signature education bill, No Child Left Behind. What they do not know is that she has been waging a quiet lobbying campaign to persuade Congress to reauthorize the bill by inviting key lawmakers to the White House for coffee — with her, not the president.

The policy charm offensive has extended to the White House press corps. Last month, Mrs. Bush took the unusual step of inviting its female members to the White House residence for an off-the-record lunch, with a curator-led tour of the newly renovated Lincoln Bedroom. Admission carried a price: a policy briefing on No Child Left Behind, led by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Mrs. Bush.

“It is a noticeable difference in her role,” said Michael Green, an Asia expert who provided briefing papers for Mrs. Bush when he worked at the National Security Council under her husband. “She’s becoming much more public, and more proscriptive. She’s not just following; she’s leading.”

Still, her signature issues are limited and she is careful never to step too far out in front, lest she cross the line into Hillary Clinton turf. Feminists have criticized her for not being assertive enough. Her public persona remains that of supportive wife, the steadying influence who got her husband to quit drinking at age 40, the witty conversationalist with the practiced smile and perfect hair who once regaled official Washington with “Desperate Housewives” jokes at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

She is the one who, with some gentle arm-twisting from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, persuaded her husband to don white tie for a dinner to honor the British queen. On the rare occasions when he slips into self-pity over Iraq, she is said to snap him out of it.

“I tell you,” said Secretary Spellings, a close friend, “she can knock him upside the head pretty much on anything and get his attention.”

Whether she does is hard to discern. By some accounts, Mrs. Bush has chafed at the confining nature of the first lady’s role, and over the years snippets have emerged to suggest daylight between her and her husband on issues like abortion. But she is careful not to appear to be making policy.

“She did say that she has made known her opinions to the president on a handful of issues,” said Robert Draper, who interviewed Mrs. Bush for his new biography of the president, “Dead Certain.”

“But she would not enumerate or characterize which those issues were, no matter how much I pressured her,” Mr. Draper said. “When I asked her about the lead-up to Iraq, she said the president never spoke to her about the issue.”

Most first ladies pick a signature issue and stick with it. Nancy Reagan had “just say no” to drugs; Betty Ford spoke about her battle with breast cancer. Mrs. Bush, by contrast, has broadened her policy reach, from literacy and historic preservation to AIDS in Africa and the plight of women in Afghanistan. (She made a heavily guarded trip there in 2005.)

An early turning point came in November 2001, when Karen P. Hughes, who ran Mr. Bush’s communications shop at the time, suggested to the president that his wife join him in a radio address, to focus on the Taliban’s oppression of women. “He looked at me,” Ms. Hughes recalled, “and said, ‘What do you need me for?’”

At home, Mrs. Bush’s approval ratings have consistently been double that of her husband; during last year’s midterm elections, Republicans who did not want to be seen with their unpopular president asked his wife to campaign for them instead. That same dynamic is at work overseas; Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, calls the first lady “a foreign policy asset to the president.”

As with all her trips, the Middle East swing will be carefully coordinated with Mr. Hadley’s office. “This is a pretty knit-up operation between the West Wing and the East Wing,” he said.

Knit up or not, such journeys can be politically perilous, as Mrs. Bush has discovered. During her last Middle East trip, in 2005, she praised President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt for his “very bold step” toward democracy. Two days later, Mubarak supporters beat up their opposition in the Cairo streets.

“It really stirred up a hornet’s nest,” said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who has written extensively about first ladies. But Mr. Anthony says he believes that, beyond the embarrassment it caused the White House, there is a deeper reason people reacted so strongly to it: “It didn’t fit in with the Christmas cookie idea of Laura Bush.”

October 14, 2007
Turkish General Warns U.S. on Resolution

By SEBNEM ARSU
ISTANBUL, Oct. 14 — The chief of the Turkish armed forces has warned that military relations with the United States would take a negative turn if Congress approved the Armenian genocide resolution that was passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week.

Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the armed forces chief, was quoted by the Turkish newspaper Milliyet on Sunday as saying that the resolution, which condemns the killings of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks beginning in 1915 as an act of genocide, has caused considerable disappointment in Turkey.

General Buyukanit called the passage of the resolution by the committee “sad and sorrowful,” in light of the strong links the two NATO allies have shared.

Further, if it were to be passed by the full House of Representatives, “Our military relations with the U.S. would never be as they were in the past,” he said.

“We could not explain this to our public,” he said. “The U.S., in that respect, has shot itself in the foot.”

In another situation that is increasing tension between Turkey and the United States, Turkey’s military on Sunday fired dozens of artillery shells across Iraq’s northern border, hitting frontier villages in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, said Col. Hussein Rashid of the Iraqi Border Protection Forces. Colonel Hussein said the Turkish strikes damaged structures in several villages in the northern reaches of Iraq’s Dohuk Province, which borders Turkey, but caused no casualties because the villages had been evacuated.

General Buyukanit said he had conveyed his disappointment to Gen. Peter Pace, who stepped down earlier this month as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an official letter and in a telephone conversation.

The Bush administration is continuing intensified efforts to prevent passage of the resolution, which Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, is promising to bring to the floor.

Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman and Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, arrived in Ankara in a last-minute visit on Saturday in an apparent effort at damage control and to express the administration’s eagerness to stop the resolution from reaching the House floor.

“We have to be realistic about the difficulties of defeating this resolution but we intend to keep fighting it and make our points as clear and strong as we can,” Mr. Fried said in a telephone interview.

Some political analysts here, however, say that irreversible damage has been done to the already strained relations between Turkey and the United States.

In a random sample survey of more than 1,000 adults conducted throughout Turkey in person early this year by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based nonprofit group, 73 percent of Turks surveyed said that if the House passed the resolution, their opinion of the United States would decline, while 83 percent said that they would oppose Turkey assisting the United States in Iraq. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

NATO’s Incirlik Air Base in eastern Turkey serves as a strategic logistics and transfer center for the American military operations in Iraq, and Turkish trucks carrying supplies for allied forces pass across the Habur border gate into Iraq on daily basis.

Military analysts say they expect that such activity will be slowed, if not halted completely, should relations between the countries worsen.

Violent attacks in southeastern Turkey by separatist Kurdish rebels operating from bases in northern Iraq have intensified in recent months, increasing the tension and the pressure on the United States from Turkey over the situation.

Mr. Fried refused to talk about whether there were any plans to curb the rebel activity but said that Mr. Edelman, who was en route to Baghdad at the time of the interview, would convey the sense of Turkish outrage strongly to the Iraqi authorities.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kirkuk, Iraq.

The Guldimann Memorandum
The Iranian "roadmap" wasn't a roadmap and wasn't Iranian

by Michael Rubin
Weekly Standard
October 22, 2007

As relations between Washington and Tehran deteriorate, critics of the Bush administration are seeking to cast blame for the rocky relationship not on Iran's nuclear program or support of terrorism, but on President Bush's intransigence. At the root of the attacks is the administration's supposed rejection of a May 2003 Iranian offer of a grand bargain to settle all outstanding disputes. "Basking in the glory of 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq, the Bush administration dismissed the Iranian offer," Peter Galbraith, a Democratic party activist and former ambassador to Croatia, wrote in the October 11 New York Review of Books.

The problem is that this argument is rooted in a fraud. The "Iranian Roadmap," which was posted online by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on April 28, was not an Iranian overture but the work of a disgruntled Swiss diplomat, Tim Guldimann.

I first met Guldimann at a 1999 dinner party at his Tehran residence, and he spoke of his desire to repair U.S.-Iranian relations. The Swiss ambassador in Tehran is charged with representing U.S. interests--basically passing messages between the governments--but Guldimann was more ambitious. He saw an opportunity to facilitate rapprochement, which he said was hampered not by Iran's support for anti-U.S. terrorist groups and violent opposition to the Camp David II process, but by the Clinton administration's inflexibility.

Fast forward four years: Guldimann was nearing the end of his posting. With Iranian reform in retreat, he had little to show for his time--and blamed Bush and Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei equally.

Guldimann developed the one-page "roadmap" in conversation with Sadeq Kharrazi, the Iranian ambassador in Paris. It suggests Tehran would address Washington's concerns about its weapons programs, its embrace of terrorism, its efforts to destabilize Iraq, and its opposition to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In exchange, Washington would refrain from pressing regime change, abolish sanctions, recognize Iran's "legitimate security interests," crack down on the militant Mujahedin al-Khalq (MKO), and give the Islamic Republic access to "peaceful" nuclear, biological, and chemical technology.

Kharrazi circulated the paper to senior Iranian officials with the caveat that it did not come from Washington, and Guldimann tried to use the Iranian response as "the basis for opening bilateral discussion." The paper went nowhere; it was clear to all involved that it was Guldimann's proposal and had little to do with Tehran. Guldimann said in his cover memo and in meetings with a range of U.S. policymakers that the Iranian leadership agreed with 85 to 90 percent of the proposal, though he did not know which 10-15 percent they disputed.

Guldimann's suggestion that the proposal came from Iran was bizarre. The United States and Iran were already deep in dialogue, with British foreign secretary Jack Straw as the high-level intermediary. In 2003, Iran's U.N. ambassador, Mohammad Javad Zarif, met U.S. diplomats Zalmay Khalilzad and Ryan Crocker in Paris and Geneva. Indeed, Khalilzad met Zarif the day before Guldimann delivered his Iranian "breakthrough."

Guldimann's ignorance of these ongoing discussions exposed his fraud. John Bolton, then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, suggested to Colin Powell that the Swiss be formally asked to recall Guldimann for freelancing. The Swiss foreign ministry keeps a discreet silence, but Guldimann has quietly left the foreign service.

The facts notwithstanding, a coterie of former officials and lobbyists have seized upon the Guldimann memo. Flynt Leverett, a Condoleezza Rice appointee who left the National Security Council to campaign for John Kerry in 2004, has compared it to Mao Zedong's 1972 opening of China. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff, affirmed the Iranian offer to credulous journalists. Iran lobbyist Trita Parsi, a former aide to disgraced congressman Bob Ney, insists he alerted White House political strategist Karl Rove to the Iranian proposal. But Parsi, who trades on his close ties to the Tehran regime, was also unaware that the United States was already in talks with the Islamic Republic.

Journalists at the Financial Times and the Guardian used the Guldimann memo to bash Bush's alleged diplomatic ineptitude, the plotting of the neoconservatives, and the dark hands of Cheney and Rumsfeld. From there, it crossed the Atlantic. On April 29, 2007, Nicholas Kristof penned a column in the New York Times labeling the Bush administration's rejection of the Iranian offer "diplomacy at its worst":

A U.S.-Iranian rapprochement could have saved lives in Iraq, isolated Palestinian terrorists and encouraged civil society groups in Iran. But instead the U.S. hard-liners chose to hammer plowshares into swords.

In her new book, USA Today's Iran beat reporter Barbara Slavin suggests Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith are to blame for scuttling the offer.

Regardless of who wins the White House in 2008, Iran will dominate the diplomatic agenda of the next few years. But policy must be based on reality: There was no Iranian offer in May 2003, but rather a Hail Mary pass thrown by an activist ambassador and pitched by limelight-seeking former officials to a receptive press. Almost seven years into the Bush administration, Tehran has yet to offer a single confidence building measure. Relying on a foundation of falsehoods only distracts from efforts to resolve disputes before they escalate into military action.

Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was an Iran country director at the Pentagon between September 2002 and April 2004.

This item is available on the Middle East Forum website, at http://www.meforum.org/article/1764

Unedited.

One of the striking things about America, is that we have freedom of speech.
I found it very interesting when I interviewed General Yassim, former General under Saddam Hussien and current head of the Iraqi Army last time I checked. Under Saddam, General Yassim, offered his advise to Saddam Hussein about the wisdom of invading Kuwait. He was thrown in jail for 18 months.

By contrast Colonel Yingling, had the courage to speak out against General in the US for their lack of leadership and candor to the civilian leadership in the time leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. There was much debate in the Pentagon during that run up time in which (then) General Tommy Franks went into SEC DEF Don Rumsfeld told said he needed 475,000 troops to do the Iraq job. Being thrown out of the office and being told that ‘is Clinton era’ thinking, Franks reportedly came back with some number less, but not much less than the original. Being thrown out of the SECDEF’s office, General Franks then went to Rumsfeld and said ‘ok, Mr. Secretary you give me the number’. This according to retired Four star General Joe Hoer whom I interviewed on camera.

The article below is a great example of how our Army is evolving and serious about lessons learned. According to Dr. Tom Barnett, Author of THE PENTAGONS NEW MAP and BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION, Iraq was essentially necessary to cause the pain to create change. The conversation around this great institution which is under going a whole new look at its mission and the need for a very disparate skill set to accomplish not only the winning of the war, but the winning of the peace and the establishment of a civil society when we leave. As Barnett’s star rises, his famous ‘BRIEF’ well known in the Pentagon and also to political and foreign leaders, we see the forecasting of an institution that will be biforcated in a Department of War and also a Department of Peace.

We allow that freedom in this great nation. While the painful mistakes and in many ways arrogance that didn’t have to happen, it is the very pain of these mistakes that cause the evolution of the military.

Below is a good article in which dissent and re-examination is encouraged in order to IMPROVE, to get better for the evolving task at hand.

Enjoy.

“The article has been required class reading at Leavenworth, where young officers debate whether Colonel Yingling was right to question senior commanders who sent junior officers into battle with so few troops.”

New York Times
October 13, 2007
At Army Base, Officers Are Split Over War

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Here in this Western outpost that serves as the intellectual center of the United States Army, two elite officers were deep in debate at lunch on a recent day over who bore more responsibility for mistakes in Iraq — the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, or the generals who acquiesced to him.

“The secretary of defense is an easy target,” argued one of the officers, Maj. Kareem P. Montague, 34, a Harvard graduate and a commander in the Third Infantry Division that was the first to reach Baghdad in the 2003 invasion. “It’s easy to pick on the political appointee.”

“But he’s the one that’s responsible,” retorted Maj. Michael J. Zinno, 40, a military planner who worked at the headquarters of the Coalitional Provisional Authority, the former American civilian administration in Iraq.

No, Major Montague shot back, it was more complicated: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top commanders were part of the decision to send in a small invasion force and not enough troops for the occupation. Only Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff who was sidelined after he told Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, spoke up in public.

“You didn’t hear any of them at the time, other than General Shinseki, screaming, saying that this was untenable,” Major Montague said.

As the war grinds through its fifth year, Fort Leavenworth has become a front line in the military’s tension and soul-searching over Iraq. Here on the bluffs above the Missouri

River rising young officers are on a different kind of journey — an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq.

Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days — all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world — showed a divide in opinion.

Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: sending in a small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation.

But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army’s internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth’s senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.

“You spend your whole career worrying about the safety of soldiers — let’s do the training right so no one gets injured, let’s make sure no one gets killed, and then you deploy and you’re attending memorial services for 19-year-olds,” said Maj. Niave Knell, 37, who worked in Baghdad to set up an Iraqi highway patrol. “And you have to think about what you did.”

On one level, second-guessing is institutionalized at Leavenworth, home to the Combined Arms Center, a sprawling Army research center that includes the Command and General Staff College for midcareer officers, the School of Advanced Military Studies for the most elite and the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which collects and disseminates battlefield data. (The center publishes a handbook for soldiers with strategies to help keep them alive for their first 100 days in combat, a response to the high percentage who died in their early months in Iraq.)

At Leavenworth, officers study Napoleon’s battle plans and Lt. William Calley’s mistakes in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top American commander in Iraq, wrote the Army and Marine Corps’ new Counterinsurgency Field Manual there. The goal at Leavenworth is to adapt the Army to the changing battlefield without repeating the mistakes of the past.

But senior officers say that much of the professional second-guessing has become an emotional exercise for young officers. “Many of them have been affected by people they know who died over there,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the Leavenworth commander and the former top spokesman for the American military in Iraq. Unlike the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the conflicts in the Balkans and even Somalia, General Caldwell said, “we just never experienced the loss of life like we have here. And when that happens, it becomes very personal. You want to believe that there’s no question your cause is just and that it has the potential to succeed.”

Much of the debate at the school has centered on a scathing article, “A Failure in Generalship,” written last May for Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago.

“If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results,” Colonel Yingling wrote.

The article has been required class reading at Leavenworth, where young officers debate whether Colonel Yingling was right to question senior commanders who sent junior officers into battle with so few troops.

“Where I was standing on the street corner, at the 14th of July Bridge, yeah, another brigade there would have been great,” said Maj. Jeffrey H. Powell, 37, a company commander who was referring to the bridge in Baghdad he helped secure during the early days of the war.

Major Powell, who was speaking in a class at the School for Advanced Military Studies, has read many of the Iraq books describing the private disagreements over troop levels between Mr. Rumsfeld and the top commanders, who worried that the numbers were too low but went along in the end.

“Sure, I’m a human being, I question the decision-making process,” Major Powell said. Nonetheless, he said, “we don’t get to sit on the top of the turrets of our tanks and complain that nobody planned for this. Our job is to fix it.”

Discussions nonetheless focused on where young officers might draw a “red line,” the point at which they would defy a command from the civilians — the president and the defense secretary — who lead the military.

“We have an obligation that if our civilian leaders give us an order, unless it is illegal, immoral or unethical, then we’re supposed to execute it, and to not do so would be considered insubordinate,” said Major Timothy Jacobsen, another student. “How do you define what is truly illegal, immoral or unethical? At what point do you cross that threshold where this is no longer right, I need to raise my hand or resign or go to the media?”General Caldwell, who was the top military aide from 2002 to 2004 to the deputy defense secretary at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, would not talk about the meetings he had with Mr. Wolfowitz about the battle plans at the time.

“We did have those discussions, and he would engage me on different things, but I’d feel very uncomfortable talking,” General Caldwell said.

Col. Gregory Fontenot, a Leavenworth instructor, said it was typical of young officers to feel that the senior commanders had not spoken up for their interests, and that he had felt the same way when he was their age. But Colonel Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf war and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president in a nation where civilians control the armed forces.

For the sake of argument, a question from the reporter was posed: If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?

“Yeah, we’d call it a coup d’etat,” Colonel Fontenot said. “Do you want to have a coup d’etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you’re willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be O.K.? I don’t think so.”

Some of the young officers were unimpressed by retired officers who spoke up against Mr. Rumsfeld in April 2006. The retired generals had little to lose, they argued, and their words would have mattered more had they been on active duty. “Why didn’t you do that while you were still in uniform?” Maj. James Hardaway, 36,asked.

On the other hand, Major Hardaway said, General Shinseki had shown there was a great cost, at least under Mr. Rumsfeld. “Evidence shows that when you do do that in uniform, bad things can happen,” he said. “So, it’s sort of a dichotomy of, should I do the right thing, even if I get punished?”

Another major said that young officers were engaged in their own revisionist history, and that many had believed the war could be won with Mr. Rumsfeld’s initial invasion force of about 170,000. “Everybody now claims, oh, I knew we were going to be there for five years and it was going to take 400,000 people,” said Maj. Patrick Proctor, 36. “Nobody wants to be the guy who said, ‘Yeah, I thought we could do it.’ But a lot of us did.”

One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should the war have been fought?

“I honestly don’t know how I feel about that,” Major Powell said in a telephone conversation last week after the discussions at Leavenworth.

“That’s a big, open question,” General Caldwell said after a long pause.

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