The Milley Circus Has Come To Town!

We're Watching A Replay of the Same Playbook Used Against General Flynn

Longtime Washington insider and serial fabulist Bob Woodward has come out with a new book making the usual explosive allegations that mostly evaporate on closer examination.  Woodward has done this repeatedly over the years to sell his books: make extravagant and inflammatory claims that later have to be scaled back or abandoned.  By the time the half-truths and lies are exposed, the book will have often made the best seller lists and Woodward will have pocketed a nice sum. 

In the book,  Woodward and co-author Robert Costa claim that somehow the current Joints Chief of Staff, General Mark A. Milley – who also served in this role under President Donald J. Trump – managed to make a series of secret phone calls to the Chinese military in which he promised he would tip them off if an increasingly unhinged Trump was about to launch a nuclear attack on China. 

The narrative promoted by Woodward’s book is that Trump was so upset at losing the November 2020 Presidential election that by January of 2021 he was melting down and being tempted to ‘wag the dog’ and start a war in order to stave off having to leave the White House. 

As Trump supposedly became more and more unstable, ranting and raving inside the White House, the book goes on to claim that Milley went to the Pentagon’s War Room and inserted himself into the chain of command by getting a personal assurance from each of the War Room’s top officials that they would report directly to him and cut the President out of the loop when it came to any military attack orders. 

If true, what Woodward and Costa are relating here would be the first military coup in the history of the United States.  The President -  a civilian elected by the people - is the Commander-In-Chief. The Joint Chief of Staff is not in the military chain of command.  So if Milley did in fact do this, it is a crime of the highest order. 

The problem is there are red flags all over the version of these purported events in Woodward’s new book.

Milley’s Not in the Chain of Command

First of all, people need to firmly understand that the Joints Chief of Staff is not anywhere in the U.S. military’s chain of command.  He is not a major decision maker or order-giver to the service branches or any of the officers in theater in any military zone. 

Somehow people have been given this absurd idea that the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan was done on Milley’s orders.  This is nonsense.  The Joints Chiefs are advisers to the President.  They don’t give the orders for anything close to a withdrawal from Afghanistan or anything of a similar nature. The dotted line in the graph above running from the Joint Chiefs of STaff to the Unified Combatant Commands is to signify that the JCoS has a provisional and advisory role only; they do not have command authority.

At best, Milley would have **advised** President Biden to do the Afghan withdrawal in the manner it was done.  Biden himself would have given the order – to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who would have sent the order down the chain of command to the officers in charge of theAfghan theater. 

So what’s the problem with that scenario?  Only that we’ve had multiple published news reports over the past two weeks that Biden’s military and intelligence advisers after hearing Biden’s plan, strongly urged him not to withdraw from Afghanistan in that fashion…and yet Biden overruled them and plunged ahead anyway. 

Biden has subsequently undermined his own advisers by loudly insisting he never overruled them or rejected their advice on how to perform this withdrawal.  Blinken, Austin and the intelligence officials have been forced to bite their tongues publicly and let Biden claim they never told him what they told him before this entire fiasco unfolded.  How long they remain team players with Biden throwing them under the bus remains to be seen.

Biden’s also been loudly arguing with our allies about the disastrous withdrawal. The British and others insist they were given no advance warning that the US forces were going to suddenly disappear. 

No Phone Call to China By the Joint Chiefs To a Foreign Government Is Ever Secret

Secondly, the narrative being told in Woodward’s book enthusiastically sells the idea that Milley believed he was having some sort of private or secret conversation with the Chinese government as he promised to tip them off about any US attack.

As with the General Flynn calls to the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak back in late 2016, nobody is supposed to remember how anything actually works, so that the false narrative may flourish and achieve the desired political effects. 

I’ve spent 5 years saying there was no way former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Flynn was trying to set up some kind of secret deal nobody would know about. He was a career military intelligence officer.  He knows these conversations are intercepted by numerous intelligence agencies.  He knew they are recorded, transcribed and place in intelligence reports. 

But the narrative being sold by the Russiagate leakers required you believe he somehow forgot all of this and came to believe he was having a private conversation with Kislyak where no one else was listening in. 

Well guess what? History is now repeating itself.

Once again, you are being asked to believe a new narrative that makes no sense whatsoever. 

There is simply no way General Milley thought he was making a private phone call to China where multiple intelligence agencies - both civilian and military - were not listening in. That right there was a nonstarter for me the moment I heard the narrative.

And now, it’s all coming apart. Milley was in a room full of other military officers when he conducted these communications with his Chinese counterparts. There was nothing clandestine or secretive about what he was doing.  He had informed the then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.  He knew full well his calls were being monitored and recorded. 

Increasingly Limited Shelf-Life

Back in the day, Woodward could publish a new book making extravagant and often outrageous claims knowing it would take several months at best for the truth to come out and debunk the false narratives he was peddling.

Thanks to the increasing technology of the Digital Age, the shelf-life of these fake narratives being peddled by corporate news propagandists such as Woodward is decreasing to the point they can often be debunked within hours of their being first rolled out. 

One problem with the current political atmosphere is that due to the very increased polarization of the country, many of those on the Left are now conditioned into seeing their own confirmation biases as good, acceptable and even laudatory. 

Woodward’s book enshrines a view of Trump that many on the Left prefer to believe: that he is an unhinged sore loser and a madman, and that’s all they really care about, that the book confirm their biases about Donald Trump. 

While even 20 years ago, a book like Woodward’s being debunked so quickly after it was launched would spell doom for the book’s sales, in this current climate Woodward and Costa are virtually assured of a handsome profit, as many of those who buy such books are now thoroughly conditioned not to care if the claims being proffered or true or not, as long as their cherished biases are reaffirmed. 

The Version of the Events In Woodward’s Book Smells of a Disinformation Campaign

Just on who’s behalf, we probably won’t ever know, or if we do, it won’t be anytime soon. Both Trump and his allies and his enemies engage in frequent leaks as part of their disinformation operations.

While Special Counsel John Durham has been well aware for some time now who it was who leaked the Flynn/Kislyak phone calls to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, and will likely be taking prosecutorial action on that - hopefully in the near future - any sorting out of who is responsible for this fake narrative in Woodward’s book and bringing accountability for it is almost certain to be far off on the horizon, should it ever happen.

The purpose of the disinformation leaking campaign targeting General Flynn back in January of 2017 was fairly obvious: it was to hang a target on his back so the FBI could respond to the leaking by moving to investigate him for supposedly violating the Logan Act. That disinformation operation resulted in Flynn being fired by President Trump and then subsequently charged with lying to federal agents about his phone calls with Kislyak.

Key parts of that disinformation campaign targeting Flynn was fully revealed last year thanks to a series of damning declassifications that were publicly disclosed to Flynn’s defense team during a series of document dumps by former US Attorney Jeffrey Jensen.

The purpose of a disinformation campaign are several fold:

1) To distract the enemy by making them think an illusion is real, staying their hand

2) To protect an ally by giving the enemy a false sense of what is happening to them

3) To goad an enemy into an action that will be revealing

4) To hide your own actions while the enemy is busy focusing on the disinformation

Which side is doing the leaking and which one of these 4 purposes the Milley Circus has come to town to promote, I think it’s too early to get any real sense of yet.

We’ll see what happens.