Who’s in charge?

Amnesty International is complaining toda that “President Obama is reinstating the same deeply-flawed military commissions that in June 2008 he called an ‘enormous failure.’ In one swift move, Obama both backtracks on a major campaign promise to change the way the United States fights terrorism and undermines the nation’s core respect for the rule of law by sacrificing due process for political expediency.”

It raises a question that Bacevich poses: “The present-day officer corps, writes historian Richard H. Kohn, is ‘more bureaucratically active, more political, more partisan, more purposeful, and more influential than at any earlier time in American history.’ The resulting fractious, at times even dysfunctional, relationship between the top brass and civilian political leaders is one of Washington’s dirty little secrets – recognized by all of the inside players, concealed from an electorate that might ask discomfirting questions about who is actually in charge.”