More from WSJ on Batiste:
"...Gen. Batiste grew up on military bases, in the U.S., Europe and Iran. He followed his father, who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, into the military. One of his most powerful memories is of his father, then a colonel, returning from Vietnam in the late 1960s. "I remember picking him up with my mom and sister at Dulles Airport. He came home so unceremoniously," Gen. Batiste says. "The people in the airport could not have cared less."
Gen. Batiste speaks in the short, crisp sentences of a person accustomed to giving orders. He graduated from West Point in 1974 and joined an Army damaged by the Vietnam War. As he walked into his battalion headquarters building for his first day at Fort Hood, Texas, he recalls medics carrying out the corpse of a soldier who had overdosed on heroin. "I thought to myself, 'Holy s-t, what have we done to this Army?' " he says.
In 1977, he married his battalion commander's daughter. He rose quickly through the ranks, serving as the military aide to Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey at Fort Benning, Ga. "I wrote on his officer evaluation that I wished he could have replaced me and I could have worked for him. That's how highly I thought of him," says Gen. McCaffrey, who retired in the 1990s."
I suspect that Batiste got bogged down in a very cynical environment that prevails today everywhere. I've never been been in the military, but I've been in a position to observe and see the behavior of many so-called leaders of corporate America. When necessary they will lie, spin, flip-flop, cheat, steal and backstab to maintain and advance their careers. This is not breaking news to anyone aside from those who still believe in Santa Claus. Straight-shooters don't last long at the upper tiers of any organizational hierarchy, military not excepted. We don't have true leaders anymore.
First, that's just not true. Such cynicism just provides cover for the Zinnis and Batistes of the world. Second, there's a difference between tact and lying. When Batiste did his introduction (and presumably signed off on the Iraq War plan, unless Rummy and Meyers are liars, too) and then did a 180 as soon as he took off the uniform, he was either lying or too stupid to be leading troops.
As he walked into his battalion headquarters building for his first day at Fort Hood, Texas, he recalls medics carrying out the corpse of a soldier who had overdosed on heroin. "I thought to myself, 'Holy s-t, what have we done to this Army?' " he says.
The people who screwed up his army were some of the same people he's giving cover to by portraying Rumsfeld as some kind of scumbag.