Times article on Batiste
The NYT has an article about retired general John Batiste, who made an ad criticizing the president and was fired from CBS as a consultant for doing so (Batiste still works as the president of the Rochester company Klein Steel). Funny that CBS — and apparently the White House, who surely asked CBS to fire him — are so upset about this, when no one in the military seems to be:
General Batiste says he has received no phone calls, letters or messages from current or former officers challenging his public stance, although he occasionally gets an anonymous e-mail message with the heading “Traitor.†Having quit the Army in anger at what he calls mismanagement of the Iraq war, he says he chose a second career far from Washington and the Pentagon so that he could speak freely on military issues.
“I am outraged, as are the majority of Americans,†General Batiste said over sandwiches in a blue-collar diner here. “I am a lifelong Republican. But it is past time for change.â€
It’s well worth listening to what General Batiste says about how the war has been conducted:
General Batiste said he chose to go public with his critique of the war effort only after 30 years of honoring the Army’s rules of silence. He said it was that time commanding 22,000 troops in combat, in 2004 and 2005, that convinced him that American fighting in Iraq was short of vision as well as troops.
“There was never enough. There was never a reserve,†he said. “Again and again, we had to move troops by as many as 200 miles out of our area of operations to support another sector. We would pull troops out of contact with the enemy and move them into contact with the enemy somewhere else. The minute we’d leave, the insurgents would pick up on that, and kill everybody who had been friendly.â€
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[...] this post about General Batiste and the Votevets ads. Recall, Exile wrote a couple of posts here and [...]