[WSMDiscuss] The chairman of the US’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Apologizes for Role in Trump Photo Op : ‘I Should Not Have Been There’ (Helene Cooper, the New York Times)

[Jai Sen]

Friday, June 12, 2020

Viruses in movement…, The US in movement…, Resistance in movement…, Butterfly wings in movement…

[The US is aflame, its people are afire… and important things are happening, the ground is moving.

[As they say, a butterfly flapping its wings can change the world.  No, Trump is not the butterfly; it is the sheer chance of the moment that is, and that just as much as the Chairman of the US’s Joint Chiefs of Staff has said he has no idea of what he was walking into, nor did Trump. 

[There is so much happening at the moment – and in a way we have all got used to absurdly huge things happening in the US (and all the more so, during Trump’s reign) - that I think it’s possible to not quite grasp the enormity of the top military official in the United States publicly apologising to the people of the country for doing something, which I would doubt has ever happened before, and may never happen again.  And beyond this, where this extremely senior government official did so knowing that this would be a huge public slap in the face of his egomaniacal president, and would set the socio-psychopath’s fuse on fire.  For the general’s doing this is surely not the end of this episode.  And where there will almost certainly be other, huge fallouts of this seemingly simple slip….

[And it is for this reason alone that I am posting this news here, and urge people to watch and listen to the video that comes with this article; in recognition of the enormity of what is happening, right in front of our eyes…

[I just want to add that as I see it anyway, what has happened here is just one more outcome of the breathtakingly enormous force that the corona virus is exercising on our worlds, distorting time and space; and where we’re now just at the early stages.  And so where we should brace ourselves for unexpected spectacles at scales that we may not have dreamt of :

In the tumultuous hours and days since the walk across Lafayette Square, General Milley has taken pains to mitigate the damage. Two days afterward, he released a letter <https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6990-milley-memo/fc4fb1c4459fbdbc87a7/optimized/full.pdf#page=1> that forcefully reminded the troops that their military was supposed to protect the right to freedom of speech. He added a handwritten codicil to his letter, some of it straying outside the margins: “We all committed our lives to the idea that is America — we will stay true to that oath and the American people.”

The Chairman of the US’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Apologizes for Role in Trump Photo Op : ‘I Should Not Have Been There’

President Trump’s walk across Lafayette Square, current and former military leaders say, has started a moment of reckoning in the military

Helene Cooper <https://www.nytimes.com/by/helene-cooper>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/politics/trump-milley-military-protests-lafayette-square.html?referringSource=articleShare <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/politics/trump-milley-military-protests-lafayette-square.html?referringSource=articleShare>
 

 

SEE VIDEO AT LINK TO ARTICLE

 

Gen. Mark A. Milley, the top military official in the United States, apologized for his role in President Trump’s walk across Lafayette Square after the authorities used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear peaceful protesters.  (Credit... T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times)


WASHINGTON — The country’s top military official apologized on Thursday for taking part in President Trump’s walk across Lafayette Square <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/trump-walk-lafayette-square.html> for a photo op after the authorities used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the area of peaceful protesters.

“I should not have been there,” Gen. Mark A. Milley <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/politics/protests-milley-trump.html>, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a prerecorded video commencement address to National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/us/politics/trump-polls-military-approval.html> involved in domestic politics.”

General Milley’s first public remarks since Mr. Trump’s photo op, in which federal authorities attacked peaceful protesters <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/politics/national-guard-protests.html> so that the president could hold up a Bible in front of St. John’s Church, are certain to anger the White House. Since the killing of George Floyd <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html> in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr. Trump has spent the days taking increasingly tougher stances against the growing movement for change across the country.

LIVE UPDATES
Follow the latest news on the George Floyd protests across the country <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/george-floyd-protests.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>.
The back-and-forth between Mr. Trump <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/us/politics/trump-polls-military-approval.html> and the Pentagon in recent days is evidence of the deepest civil-military divide since the Vietnam War — except this time, military leaders, after halting steps in the beginning, are positioning themselves firmly with those calling for change.

Associates of General Milley’s said he considered resigning, but he decided not to.

On Wednesday, the president picked another fight with the military, slapping down the Pentagon <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/politics/trump-rejects-renaming-military-bases.html> for considering renaming Army bases named after Confederate officers who fought against the Union in the Civil War. The Marine Corps has banned display of the Confederate battle flag, and leaders of both the Army and the Navy have in recent days expressed a willingness to move forward with renaming installations.

At the same time, the Senate Armed Services Committee, with bipartisan support, voted to require the Pentagon to strip military bases of Confederate names, setting up a possible election-year clash with the president.

Mr. Trump’s walk across Lafayette Square, current and former military leaders said, has started a critical moment of reckoning in the military. General Milley addressed the issue head-on.

“As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from,” General Milley said. He said he had been angry about “the senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd” and repeated his opposition to the president’s suggestions that federal troops be deployed nationwide to quell protests.

General Milley’s friends said that for the past 10 days, he had agonized about appearing — in the combat fatigues he wears every day to work — behind Mr. Trump during the walk, an act that critics said gave a stamp of military approval to the hard-line tactics used to clear the protesters.

During his speech on Thursday, General Milley, after expressing his disgust over the video of the killing of Mr. Floyd, spoke at length about the issue of race, both in the military and in civilian society.

“The protests that have ensued not only speak to his killing, but also to the centuries of injustice toward African-Americans,” General Milley said. “What we are seeing is the long shadow of our original sin in Jamestown 401 years ago, liberated by the Civil War, but not equal in the eyes of the law until 100 years later in 1965.”

He called on the military to address issues of systemic racism in the armed forces, where 43 percent of the enlisted troops are people of color, but only a tiny handful are in the ranks of senior leadership.

“The Navy and Marine Corps have no African-Americans serving above the two-star level, and the Army has just one African-American four-star,” he said, referring to officers who are generals and admirals. “We all need to do better.”

After protesters were cleared from areas opposite the White House on June 1, General Milley believed he was accompanying Mr. Trump and his entourage to review National Guard troops and other law enforcement personnel outside Lafayette Square, Defense Department officials said.

In the days after the photo op, General Milley told Mr. Trump that he was angered by what had happened. The two had already exchanged sharp words last Monday, when General Milley engaged the president in a heated discussion in the Oval Office over whether to send active-duty troops into the streets, according to people in the room.

General Milley argued that the scattered fires and looting in some places were dwarfed by the peaceful protests and should be handled by the states, which command local law enforcement.

Mr. Trump acquiesced, but he has continued to hold out the threat of sending active-duty troops.

Last week, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/esper-milley-trump-protest.html> called a news conference to announce that he, too, opposed invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty troops across the country to quell protests, a line that a number of American military officials said they would not cross.

Although Mr. Esper’s comments at the Pentagon made clear that a rise in violence in cities nationwide could prompt a change in his stance, his statement was clear. Saying that the Insurrection Act should be invoked only in the “most urgent and dire of situations,” he added that “we are not in one of those situations now.”

The president, aides say, has been furious with both Mr. Esper and General Milley since then. Defense Department officials say they are unsure how long either will last in their respective jobs, but they also note that Mr. Trump can ill afford to go into open warfare with the Pentagon so close to an election. And the uproar comes days before the president is to give the commencement address at West Point.

Since last Monday, General Milley has spoken with lawmakers, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, both Democrats. He has also spoken with many of his predecessors, as well as with Republican congressional leaders, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. In most of the exchanges, General Milley said he deeply regretted the park episode.

The Lafayette Square events brought extraordinary public criticism from a number of high-profile former military officials, including Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Jim Mattis, Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary before he resigned in December 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/us/politics/jim-mattis-defense-secretary-trump.html>.

In fact, the episode prompted Mr. Mattis, who had avoided publicly criticizing Mr. Trump, to write a statement denouncing his former boss <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/jim-mattis-trump-protests.html>.

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” wrote Mr. Mattis <https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6991-mattis-statement/5ce1ea06ba0f4fc8eeb3/optimized/full.pdf#page=1>, a retired Marine four-star general. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander in chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

A combat veteran who peppers his speech with references to the history of warfare, General Milley has usually gotten along with Mr. Trump, mixing banter and bluntness when he speaks with his boss, officials say. The general went against the wishes of his own father — who fought at Iwo Jima as a Marine — when he joined the Army.

In the tumultuous hours and days since the walk across Lafayette Square, General Milley has taken pains to mitigate the damage. Two days afterward, he released a letter <https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6990-milley-memo/fc4fb1c4459fbdbc87a7/optimized/full.pdf#page=1> that forcefully reminded the troops that their military was supposed to protect the right to freedom of speech. He added a handwritten codicil to his letter, some of it straying outside the margins: “We all committed our lives to the idea that is America — we will stay true to that oath and the American people.”


____________________________

Jai Sen

Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa

jai.sen at cacim.net <mailto:jai.sen at cacim.net>
Now based in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325) and in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900) 

CURRENT / RECENT publications :

Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press <http://www.pmpress.org/>
Jai Sen, ed, 2018b – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ? (Indian edition). New Delhi : AuthorsUpfront, in collaboration with OpenWord and PM Press.  Hard copy available at MOM1AmazonIN <https://www.amazon.in/dp/9387280101/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1522884070&sr=8-2&keywords=movements+of+movements+jai+sen>, MOM1Flipkart <https://www.flipkart.com/the-movements-of-movements/p/itmf3zg7h79ecpgj?pid=9789387280106&lid=LSTBOK9789387280106NBA1CH&marketplace=FLIPKART&srno=s_1_1&otracker=search&fm=SEARCH&iid=ff35b702-e6a8-4423-b014-16c84f6f0092.9789387280106.SEARCH&ppt=Search%20Page>, and MOM1AUpFront <http://www.authorsupfront.com/movements.htm>
Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?.  New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press.  Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press <http://www.pmpress.org/>
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