Placing blame

The retired Air Force general, fresh from playing golf in Colorado Springs with generals still on active duty, explained why President Bush has disillusioned every officer he knows: The commander in chief is allowing two Air National Guard pilots to be charged as criminals for mistakenly bombing Canadian troops during the war in Afghanistan.

"This is the first time in his reign that he has let the politicians make scapegoats of the guys who go in harm's way," the general said of Bush, who himself was a pilot for the Texas Air National Guard. "It will take a generation for officers to get over this. We would have expected it of Clinton, but not of Bush."

In the lower ranks, there is also fury and indignation at the top brass for saddling its juniors with all the blame for the friendly-fire tragedy. On September 13, the Pentagon announced that Maj. Harry Schmidt, the wingman on a two-plane mission of F-16 fighter-bombers, had been charged with four criminal counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of assault in the unintentional killing of four Canadian soldiers and wounding of eight others. He is accused of dropping a 500-pound bomb on the Canadians the night of April 17 near Kandahar after being ordered to hold fire.

Schmidt said he felt threatened by the firing he saw below; investigators later concluded that the ground fire was part of Canadian training exercises. Maj. William Umbach, the lead pilot on the mission, was charged with criminal negligence for violating flight procedures and rules of engagement. The next step is an Article 32 hearing, similar to a civilian grand jury investigation, to determine whether the pilots should be court-martialed.

"To lay blame solely on the pilots ignores the greater issue of a command structure that failed both the pilots and the ground forces," an Air Force Academy graduate wrote his classmates in an e-mail typifying the building anger circulating through the military. "The investigative board sought to cover up the ultimate failures of the Coalition Air Operations Center [which directed the bombing of Afghanistan] and, therefore, the commander, [Lt.] Gen. [T. Michael] Moseley, and lay blame at the lowest expendable level: the air crew."

John P. Russo, an Army artillery sergeant in the Korean War and the commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1302 in Springfield, Ill., told National Journal: "Nobody is going into any of the services if they have to worry about being charged with manslaughter." To date, his post has raised $40,000 to help pay for the legal defense of the two accused fliers, who are from the 170th Fighter Squadron based in that city. "War is about killing people," Russo said.

"This case is tearing people up over here," said one Pentagon official familiar with the thinking at the top of the Defense Department. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered American military officials to conduct the investigation in cooperation with their Canadian counterparts. The order resulted in a combined U.S.-Canada investigation board. Umbach has retained David Beck, a defense lawyer who defended Marine aviators who flew their EA-6B plane into a ski gondola in Aviano, Italy, on February 3, 1998, an accident that killed 20 people. (The pilot was acquitted of major charges.) Beck called the criminal prosecution of warriors in wartime "unprecedented."

Unprecedented or not, this friendly-fire incident seems to have cracked Bush's solid military support more than anything else that has happened on his watch so far. Yet Bush could not in good conscience have refused to order an investigation. Nor could Bush or his deputies-once Rumsfeld launched the uncomfortable investigation-interfere or even say anything much without defense lawyers accusing them of "command influence." So neither Bush nor his spinners can safely engage in damage control as this drama unfolds.

In retrospect, it appears that American military leaders went too far in carrying out Rumsfeld's orders to cooperate with the Canadians. A Canadian brigadier general became co-president of the investigative board with a U.S. Air Force brigadier general. This joint command clashes with the U.S. tradition of not letting other countries try American service members. If the U.S. Air Force had alone investigated its own, while keeping the Canadians fully informed, the Pentagon might have avoided the current perception in the American military that junior U.S. officers were sacrificed for diplomatic reasons.

But the U.S.-Canadian board has spoken. The only sliver of light for the Bush administration in this dark picture is that the media are largely ignoring the commander in chief's troubles with this usually supportive constituency. Newspapers and TV stations are focused on a sniper who is terrorizing the nation's capital and on the prospect of a war in Iraq.

This criminal case will not stay out of the spotlight for long, however. And in one sense at least, the attention will be good for the country. Assuming this polarizing case continues to move forward, its arguments will force the military, the administration, Congress, and the American public to confront the fact that waging war-despite all the ballyhooing about wonder weapons-still amounts to trying to perform brain surgery with an ax. This is an important lesson to relearn now, during an administration that has embraced pre-emptive warfare.