Media, MDC formations and knowledgeable ignorance about civil-military relations

MADZIMBAHWE in early December 2017, were presented with a hilarious drama in which representatives of the MDC formations and NGOs in Zimbabwe went to the USA to complain, among other things, that there were too many generals in President Mnangagwa’s administration and that the US and other western powers must demand security sector reforms to ensure civilian control of the military ahead of the 2018 harmonized elections.

This unwarranted drama was buttressed by local media stories and columns represented by the following, for example:

“Zim a de-facto military state,” Nqobani Ndlovu, NewsDay/Southern Eye, 29 December 2017; and Opposition frets over securocrats,” Jeffrey Muvundusi, Daily News, 29 December 2017.

Based on supposed legal opinion from Mr Douglas Mwonzora and Dr Alex Magaisa of the MDC-T, The Standard for 31 December took the same issue of civilian control of the military to another level, arguing that President E D Mnangagwa’s assignment of Vice President Retired General Contantino G.N. Chiwenga to oversee the Defence portfolio was a violation of the Constitution. The opinion was based on deliberately mixing up the meanings of “assignment” as opposed to “appointment.”

As Dr Masimba Mavaza pointed out in his Bulawayo 24 News rebuttal, the two MDC-T lawyers were merely using legal garb to push a purely political agenda.

The opposition’s real fear is the emergence of a truly competent, effective and efficient government administration led by Cde Mnangagwa. Vice President Chiwenga’s assignment to oversee the Defence portfolio, as I shall demonstrate further in this article, will mean effective civilian control of the military; and an effective Mnangagwa administration will leave the entire opposition with no meaningful election agenda. Back to the drama of the opposition’s US trip:

This drama was hilarious because the US administration to which the opposition parties were ignorantly appealing has many, many more generals in it than Zimbabwe could ever imagine.

Georgetown University Professor Rosa Brooks published an article in Foreign Policy magazine (2 December 2016) which began as follows:

“Generals, generals, generals! These days you can’t shake a stick around Chateau Trump without hitting a retired general — and you can’t shake a stick around America’s major media outlets without hitting an op-ed [opinion] on the perils of appointing retired generals to cabinet positions.” Professor Brooks titled her article: “Don’t Freak Out About Trump’s Cabinet Full of Generals: It’s time we rethink our outdated concept of civilian control of the military.”

Still in the United States, one national correspondent for Atlantic magazine, James Fallows, published an even more thorough study than Professor Brook’s in the January/February issue of the same publication. It was entitled “The Tragedy of the American Military.”

Fallows made several points worth noting in the current Zimbabwe debate:

First, the US military has become too technical and too remote from ordinary people for civilians to exercise control over it. At the same time, the same military has inherited a legacy of heroism and patriotism which is so intimidating to any aspiring politician that the military tends to be glorified from the distance and to be given what it asks for in terms of budgets which do not benefit the people as such but is required by the military-industrial complex, the arms industry. So, for most of the time the military gets massive budgets without actually achieving commensurate military and strategic objectives for national security. This view is also confirmed by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Second, according to James Fallows, the glorious legacy of the US military and the myth of its civilian control have created what the author calls the chicken-hawk nation, where civilian politicians who understand little about the military glorify the same in vague terms and from the distance and tend to confuse patriotism with giving the military whatever budgets and expensive toys they ask for.

Therefore, in the third place and quite paradoxically, the only civilians who could ever come anywhere close to the ideal of civilian control of the military are those who have become civilians by retiring from the military. Fallows points out that the one US President who was the most realistic appraiser and critic of the institution of the US military was Dwight Eisenhower, a decorated five-star general who became President on retirement from the military.

Both James Fallows and Professor Brooks point out that academia, the NGO sector and journalists have glorified and pushed the concept of civilian control of the military without taking it apart in terms of actual day-to-day practice. The ordinary civilian politician in fact would not know where to start in exercising that vaunted control, hence the growth of the chicken-hawk mentality and chicken-hawk nation.

In other words, civilian presidents and legislators who have exercised meaningful engagement with the military on behalf of tax-payers have done so by employing former commanders and generals who have retired to become civilians.

History

The US chicken-hawks and our opposition and NGOs here share one thing in common: ignorance of the real history of the military.

Donald Trump is the 45th President since the American Revolution of 1776 and the inauguration of George Washington as first President on 30 April, 1789.

Out of the 45 US Presidents who have served since Washington, 21 served in the armed forces either as professional soldiers or as volunteers. That figure represents a rounded proportion of 47 percent.

The first, the fifth and the seventh presidents of the US were veterans of the Revolutionary War which freed the North American colonies from Britain. This fact demonstrates that the United States has shunned the “regime change” and “transitional politics” which it routinely foists or imposes upon other nations. US history consistently demonstrates the public demand for regime continuity rather than regime change. That is also one reason why from independence in 1776 to 1952, that is for a long 176 years, there was no constitutional limit on the number of terms a President could serve if re-elected.

The significance of these facts can be illustrated further. Let me ask the reader to look at the following US Dollar notes: $1, $5, $20 and $50.

The US $1 note is the most circulating and most used note in the entire United States. Now, whose face is on that note? It is that of George Washington, founder of the United States and Commander of the Continental Revolutionary Army which freed the North American colonies from Britain. It is the same Washington after whom the US capital is named. His name appears almost everywhere in the United States. Washington DC, means Washington District of Columbia. But there is a whole state in the 50-state union called Washington State, which joined the union as number 42.

The next denomination worth examining is the US$ note. It bears the image of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was not a soldier.

He was a lawyer. But he is the US President who as commander-in-chief of the federal forces put down the secession of the seven Southern states known as the Confederate States.

The seven broke away from the federal union on 8 February and started a civil war on 12 April 1861. ◆ Read full article on www.herald.

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