US military will not be involved in election crisis, top general claims
By Patrick Martin
31 August 2020General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking US military officer, issued a statement Friday declaring that the US military would have no role in resolving any disputes that arise from the 2020 presidential election.
On June 1 Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and send the military onto the streets of American cities to suppress the protests. After encountering resistance from Esper, Milley and top military officers, both active and retired—because they regarded a military intervention as unprepared politically and practically—Trump pulled back and did not invoke the 1807 law, although he did have troops deployed to Washington, D.C. for several days.
That the top general should feel it necessary to issue a declaration “for the record,” so to speak, that the military will not decide the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, is an extraordinary manifestation of the political tensions in the United States.
Trump has repeatedly suggested that he will not accept an unfavorable outcome of the November 3 vote, and his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, has said that the military might have to remove Trump from the White House on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021, should he refuse to leave.
Biden’s comments and the posture of his supporters like Slotkin and Sherrill make the military, not the American people, the final arbiters of the 2020 election. This by itself demonstrates that neither capitalist party, Democratic or Republican, has any serious commitment to the preservation of democratic forms of rule.
CIA Democrats, as the WSWS has termed them, have played an increasingly prominent role in party affairs, first in providing a decisive push in favor of impeaching Trump over his delaying military aid to Ukraine for its war with Russian-backed separatists, then in backing Biden for the presidential nomination against more liberal rivals.
Slotkin, a longtime CIA officer who deployed three times to Iraq, cited her experience with the agency in making an assessment of how “the president, since late April or early May, has been laying down these seeds of doubt in the outcome of our elections,” adding, “There’s a long history and a dark history of having law enforcement, or uniform military present at the polls ...”
In other words, what the CIA has helped to organize in dozens of countries around the world—the use of the military and police to suppress democratic rights and overthrow governments—the former CIA agent now describes as the direction of US government policy under Trump.
The conflict between Trump and Slotkin is not about democracy vs. dictatorship, but about which form of authoritarianism is to be imposed on the American people: the personalist dictatorship of the would-be Mussolini, or a Democratic administration based on the backing of the military-intelligence apparatus and oriented toward war with Russia, China or both.https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/31/mili-a31.html
