Michael Flynn felled by media bias

OPINION:

In the anti-Trump media war, it is nearly impossible to keep the names straight without a scorecard. Barely had Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s name faded from the news cycle than he was replaced by H.R. McMaster, another lieutenant general most Americans have never heard of. Will this latest general be any more fortunate than his predecessor? Only if he can overcome the frenzied machinations of the Obama deep state.

When I wrote in these pages last week that the attack against my friend and former Washington Times colleague Monica Crowley was not plagiarism but little more than a crude media “hit job,” the first congratulatory note to arrive was from Gen. Flynn. Both of us tacitly recognized that the earlier assault on Ms. Crowley — his prospective deputy — was nothing more than a preliminary assault on him. Sure enough, only hours later he entered that same crucible himself, a fate that had been prepared with exquisite cunning by deep-state enemies who were determined to punish an upstart maverick.

If you were naive enough to believe either the grim media headlines or the push-me-pull-you spin doctors at the Trump White House, then you may have also missed Richard Pollock’s instant replay in the Daily Caller:

Rather than incompetence or a lack of candor, “Flynn’s sacking was a result of intelligence insiders at the CIA, NSA and National Security Council using a sophisticated ’disinformation campaign’ to create a crisis atmosphere.” Whether you call it disinformation, fake news or merely a vendetta, Mr. Pollock’s insiders insisted that the campaign’s larger strategic objective was intended “to discredit not only General Flynn, but [also] the entire Trump administration through him. He just happened to be the first scalp.”

If that seems like a far-fetched conspiracy theory, then remember that in 2014, Gen. Flynn was forced from his job as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. James Kitfield described his awkward retirement ceremony in a Politico piece titled “How Mike Flynn Became America’s Angriest General”: “Among those present to honor Flynn were James Clapper, the nation’s top intelligence officer — who was a master of ceremonies for the event — and Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. It wasn’t an easy moment. Together, Clapper and Vickers had forced Flynn out as the head of DIA.”

Because Gen. Flynn had directly challenged the what-me-worry orthodoxies of the Obama White House, it isn’t difficult to imagine him being set up by such recently retired pooh-bahs or their allies in the intelligence bureaucracy. Those nearly invisible second-tier officials are the permanent parts of government, their shadowy powers so subtle that elected officials are often seen as minor impediments to the constitutional sovereignty of the staff. Even before he headed the DIA, those bureaucrats knew they had plenty to worry about if Mike Flynn was turned loose to reform the intelligence establishment under Donald Trump.

Remember that after Sept. 11 we didn’t purge our intelligence bureaucracy — or even fire anyone. Instead, we simply “reorganized,” adding new bureaucratic layers that grew like Topsy and somehow became even more sclerotic. That bureaucratic nightmare was confronted by the determined fanaticism of Michael Flynn, first as a colonel and then as a rising young brigadier. Beyond all reason, he insisted that the Washington bureaucracy should support soldiers sent off to Third World hellholes to hunt down al Qaeda or the Taliban. Especially if that meant working nights or weekends, opening the “green doors” of their top-secret vaults or even tweaking their expensive, delicate machinery to perform such mundane chores. How could any self-respecting bureaucrat reason with such a man?

But the books written by Gen. Stan McChrystal, “My Share of the Task” and “Team of Teams” — are military classics, first-person testimony to the revolution in tactical intelligence wrought on the battlefields by him and Gen. Flynn. That revolution compares favorably with what Lawrence did in Arabia — all despite the intelli-crats.

Those rear-echelon moles eventually got even with their old adversary Michael Flynn, but the story doesn’t end there. Although most Americans have no idea who he is, H.R. McMaster is also a maverick and a most unlikely general. A West Point rugby player and Silver-Star winner in the first Iraq War, his leadership helped to spark the Anbar Uprising that turned around the second conflict. He survived the even-greater dangers of earning a doctorate in history and publishing a book, “Dereliction of Duty,” harshly critical of the Vietnam-era Joint Chiefs of Staff. As soldier and scholar, he thus understands the dangers of leaving Obama dead-enders unmolested and free to obstruct: Because their ultimate strategic target is Donald Trump himself.

So let the investigations, the interrogations and the polygraphs begin. The purges will follow in due course.

• Ken Allard, a retired Army colonel, is a military analyst and author on national-security issues.