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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 10/23/08

Petraeus Opts Out of Politics -- or Does He?

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Message Andrew Bacevich
In a recent exchange with a reporter, General David Petraeus volunteered the following:
You know, I made a private decision some years back when I was promoted to Major General that I was just going to stop voting. And I did that, again, not for public consumption, although it's subsequently become public consumption. I did it because I thought senior leaders should be apolitical.

Pressed to expand on that comment, Petraeus went on to say, "I'm certainly not the first to do it. General (George C.) Marshall obviously quite famously did that as well."

Petraeus is right about Marshall. Chief of staff of the U. S. Army throughout World War II and still today the great paladin of military professionalism, Marshall believed that for officers -- especially very senior officers -- voting itself constituted a partisan act. It signified a preference for one party over the other. In Marshall's view, such preferences were at odds with an officer's obligation to serve as a disinterested servant of the state -- regardless of who happened to occupy the White House or which party happened to control the Congress. Committed to the proposition that the officer corps should remain above politics, Marshall therefore decided as a matter of principle to refrain from exercising the franchise. He understood that in all respects officers remained citizens. They could vote. He simply believed that as military professionals they should choose of their own volition not to do so. Marshall was leading by example.

General Petraeus -- easily the most influential military officer of his generation -- has now signaled his adherence to the tradition of General Marshall.

There is good news and bad news here.

The good news derives from the bad news. In the aftermath of Vietnam, the officer corps lost sight of the values to which General Marshall adhered. It took on a partisan cast. In the 1980s and 1990s, a military that increasingly saw itself as a bastion of "conservative values" in an increasingly "liberal" society began to identify its own interests with those of the ostensibly conservative Republican Party.

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Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.
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