Who Watches The Watchdogs?
What does Media Matters for America have against Harper’s Magazine? Apparently nothing. That would seem the problem considering that the so-called “non-profit progressive research and information center” missed the magazine’s Q&A with military experts discussing the possibility of an “American coup d’etat.”
Coup D’Etat Column Leaves Discussion Wanting
WASHINGTON, D.C. — What does Media Matters for America have against Harper’s Magazine?
Apparently nothing.
That would seem the problem considering that the so-called “non-profit progressive research and information center” missed the magazine’s Q&A with military experts discussing the possibility of an “American coup d’etat.”
But when an award-winning former newspaper editor who worked in two presidential administrations published an opinion piece explaining that it’s not “unrealistic” for the U.S. military to stage a coup “to resolve the Obama problem,” Media Matters released its hounds.
It’s not like Media Matters didn’t have enough resolve to perform a little background research into the discussion.
The Harper’s feature “Military thinkers discuss the unthinkable” came out in April 2006 — smack-dab in the middle of second leg of President George W. Bush’s administration.
John L. Perry’s column ran online at conservative website Newsmax on Sept. 29, 2009 — not even a year since a certain young U.S. senator from Illinois became President Barack Obama.
Leaving aside the partisan ideological rhetoric, so who is correct? Is it possible that the U.S. military would overthrow the current executive branch so easily?
We’ll probably never know now that Newsmax withdrew the coup column from its website on account of its readers’ responses.
In distancing itself from Perry, Newsmax made a bigger blunder when its spokesperson said he “has no official relationship with Newsmax other than as an unpaid blogger.”
Talking Points Memo (TPM) noted that Perry was indeed a former senior editor working for the site from late 1999 until October 2001 who has contributed a regular column “nearly every single week” since November 1999, a year after the site’s founding.
However, both Media Matters and TPM failed to point out Perry’s other credentials. According to his Newsmax biography, he served:
· President Lyndon B. Johnson “as deputy under secretary of commerce and was a White House speech writer and race-relations trouble-shooter for President Johnson;”
· President Jimmy Carter “as executive assistant to the under secretary of Housing and Urban Development and was interim director of public information for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
Perry’s biography on Newmax’s website also stated that he served an academic fellow at the now-defunct Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif. This think tank, according to Wikipedia, “attained some controversy with its conference of student radical leaders in 1967, and with a suggested new United States Constitution proposed by Fellow Rexford G. Tugwell.”
Perry’s biography also stated, “The Associated Press Managing Editors Association named him one of the 12 best newsroom managers among the AP’s member newspapers.”
But rather than test Perry’s perspective by the strength of his journalism chops, TPM (the Polk Award-winning “web-based political journalism organization”) and Media Matters took the political route by claiming that Newsmax is merely a propaganda wing of the Republican National Committee.
Which it probably is.
One could even chalk up Perry’s diatribe to a right-wing version of Gore Vidal’s recent ramblings to The Times UK when he said, “We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the U.S.”
Of Obama, Vidal told The Times, “I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”
And this is same “man of letters” who switched allegiances from Sen. Hillary Clinton to Obama in the Democratic primary last summer.
Still, this discussion is in want: Would a military coup d’etat — non-violent or otherwise — ever taking place on Washington?
All evidence suggests, if we are to apply the experts’ analysis from Harper’s magazine, that Obama sits safe and sound just as Bush did three years ago.
Asked if a coup were possible, Edward N. Luttwak, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said,
“I’ve done it for other countries. But it just wouldn’t work here.You could go down the list and take over these headquarters, that headquarters, the White House, the Defense Department, the television, the radio, and so on. You could arrest all the leaders, detain or kill off their families. And you would have accomplished nothing.”
He continued, “You would sit in the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the first place where you wouldn’t be obeyed would be inside your office. If they did follow orders inside the office, then people in the rest of the Pentagon wouldn’t. If everybody in the Pentagon followed orders, people out in the military bases wouldn’t. If they did, as well, American citizens would still not accept your legitimacy.”
Luttwak literally wrote on the subject, “Coup D’Etat: A Practical Handbook.” He explained to Harper’s that even if a force controlled the media, that doesn’t mean it could rule because the missing ingredient is acceptance. He gave Saddam Hussein as an example of a unpopular leader with a minimum group of security that accepted his rule; however, the United States is different than Iraq, he said.
As long as public option favors the president, the military chiefs and veterans have seats at the political table by which to negotiate and seek benefits, and no strings of cataclysmic events happen on American soil, a military (or non-military) coup d’etat is impossible, And right now, the president is popular, the military gets what it wants, though the veterans not as much, and as bad as the war in Afghanistan, healthcare reform, the financial crisis, and unemployment levels are, it’s all being managed.
Plus, if the anti-war group CodePink has anything to say about it, they would probably be happy with the U.S. military hanging out in Afghanistan for the time being. After a recent trip to the war-torn region, CodePink members now want U.S. and NATO troops to remain there to support the native women from the Taliban.
“So many people are saying that, ‘If the U.S. troops left, the country would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that,” Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin told the Christian Science Monitor last week.
As a point of order, consider the last time the U.S. military was in “open revolt” against the civilian leaders that the military culture is bound to obey. It happened during the Clinton Administration, according to Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, the author of “The New American Militarism,” and an officer in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1992.
The issue? Gays in the military, which enflamed the top brass to the lowest potato peeler.
“Now, Clinton’s actions were ill-advised, to put it mildly. But what we got was something like rebellion. Two Marines published an op-ed in the Washington Post, warning the Joint Chiefs that if they failed to stop this policy from being implemented, they were likely to lose the loyalty of junior officers. I mean, holy smokes,” Bacevich said.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if Congress ever tries to defund and demobilize the standing U.S. military as an government institution “— i.e., if the military were suddenly, radically cut back — it could lead if not to a coup then to very severe civil-military tension,” said Richard H. Kohn, the chair of the curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and editor of the book “The United States Military Under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989.”
In other words, take away the military’s political seat, then its members will feel threatened and rely on the support of its constituencies located around its military bases in all 50 states as well as its wide-spread popularity among average civilians.
