Submitted by: Edward Moore
George W. Bush, Mark Milley and Violent Extremists What are America’s domestic threats?
James Freeman, WSJ.com
[EXCERPT below: To read it all, subscribe to WSJ.]
There are of course different types of domestic threats. Today the Washington Post’s Isaac Stanley-Becker writes about his Post colleagues’ allegation that in the final months of the Trump administration, America’s senior military officer delivered a remarkable message to China:
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa…
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley told him. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Strategists can debate whether assuring Gen. Li should ever be a U.S. strategic priority, but if this story is true it’s hard to see how Gen. Milley could have been effective. Promising to provide warning of an attack right after one has just promised that such an attack won’t occur isn’t a good way to assure anybody.
Not reassuring at all to Americans who treasure our Constitution and the role of the duly-elected President as commander-in-chief is the following passage in which The Post claims:
Milley also summoned senior officers to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons, saying the president alone could give the order — but, crucially, that he, Milley, also had to be involved. Looking each in the eye, Milley asked the officers to affirm that they had understood, the authors write, in what he considered an “oath.”
Alexander Vindman, one of the country’s foremost experts in the field of undermining presidential authority, responds on Twitter to the Post claims about communications with China:
If this is true GEN Milley must resign. He usurped civilian authority, broke Chain of Command, and violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent. You can’t simply walk away from that.
When you’ve lost Alexander Vindman . . .
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