Savior-General Petraeus wants more war in Afghanistan

Former Savior-General David Petraeus, the Surge Man for Iraq, who didn't have to take refuge in Russia or even serve jail time for leaking classified information to his girlfriend, thinks a time-unlimited military engagement in Afghanistan is just a dandy idea: Petraeus: We went to Afghanistan for a reason, and we need to stay PBS Newshour 06/16/2017:

Finding Jesus and cheering for war are two standard techniques for disgraced Republicans to rehabilitate themselves after scandals. I don't know if the Savior-General has got religion since he copped a plea or not. But he's a loyal war cheerleader.

The Man Called Petraeus (2)

Gareth Porter takes on The Petraeus Myth in this 12/11/2012 interview with The Real News:

The transcript can be found at The Petraeus Myth Truthout 12/12/2012. Gareth also has a four-part series at Truthout on our onetime Saviour-General Petraeus' military feats:

1. How Petraeus Created the Myth of His Success, Part One: How the Myth Began - Petraeus in Mosul 11/27/2012
2. How Petraeus Quietly Stoked the Fires of Sectarian War without Getting Burned 12/04/2012
3. Petraeus Rising: Managing the "War of Perceptions" in Iraq 12/14/2012
   
4. True Believer: Petraeus and the Mythology of Afghanistan 12/20/2012

He also has a recent article describing how Patraeus' girlfriend Paula Broadwell acted as his moutpiece in justifying the destruction of an Aghan village, another one of those destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it moments, Broadwell Defended Petraeus’ Village Destruction Policy Inter Press Service 11/15/2012. Unlike what one might conclude from reading Frank Rich in the article discussed in Part 1 yesterday, it wasn't just the local press around Tampa who was reporting faults in the Saviour-General. In a 2009 interview, Petraeus versus the President? The Real News 02/03/2009, Gareth was reporting critically on the Saviour-General, and the pressure Petraeus and the Pentagon were putting on newly-elected President Obama to extend the war in Iraq.

Gareth and others were making critical reports and analyses such as the following; Gareth Porter, The Surge and American Military Triumphalism Huffington Post 01/04/2008 Gareth Porter, Leaked Report, New Iraqi Alignment Reveal U.S. War Failure Inter Press Service 10/25/2010 Peter Baker, et al, Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting Washington Post 09/09/07. Michael Gordon, U.S. Command Shortens Life of ‘Long War’ as a Reference New York Times 04/24/07. (Caution: Gordon shared a byline with the infamous Judith Miller on some of her most notorious WMD-in-Iraq articles, so his reporting always has to be taken with caution.) Peter Baker, General Is Front Man For Bush's Iraq Plan by Washington Post 02/07/07 Tags: petraeus

The Man Called Petraeus (1)

Digby was the one who coined the title "The Man Called Petraeus" to refer to the Beltway's onetime favorite man in uniform. It's a shame that one of the biggest phonies in the history of American politics wound up falling from Beltway grace because of a sex scandal. But for our start pundits and reporters, that's their favorite kind of story. I hadn't exactly thought of it this way before I saw Charlie Pierce's write it down (Let's Not Talk About Hillary 2016 Just Yet Esquire Politics Blog 12/11/2012):

We now have an entire generation of pundits whose formative political experience was the endless pursuit of Bill Clinton's penis by various ambitious journalists, congresscritters, and interested parties of all sorts. That's the politics that generation knows. That's the politics they expect. I maintain that one of the reasons the current president gets so much heat for being "aloof" is that those are the politics his career has resolutely denied to them. Ginning up gotcha scandals against this guy is no fun because you look so damned ridiculous doing it.

But there were substantial reasons to be dubious of the claimed merits of The Man Called Petraeus long before he got caught going All In with his favorite hagiographer.

I have mixed feelings about Frank Rich's Suckers for Superheroes New York 12/09/2012. On the one hand, he chronicles how gullible the Beltway press and politicians of both parties were for the general's perceived charms. On the other, his comments about how "we" the American people fell for him are nails-on-the-blackboard stuff to me. He writes, "Once the country learned that the man in charge of guarding the nation’s secrets was too inept to hide his own, his directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency could no longer pass the laugh test." Here, in the article's opening paragraph, Rich resorts to the very common and very annoying pundit habit of referring to the Beltway Kool Kidz as "the country." Here in the real world, people like Digby, Juan Cole, MoveOn.org and just about everyone following the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars with a critical eye were considerably less impressed with The Man Called Petraeus than the Beltway Gossip Squad.

I've doctored the following quote from Rich's article at the underlined spots, as I'll explain below:

Perhaps it's the Beltway punditocracy we should be a bit concerned about instead. What’s really shocking about the Petraeus affair is not Petraeus's affair but the fact that once again, our vapid press corps were taken in by a secular plaster saint who turns out to bear only a faint resemblance to the image purveyed by the man himself and the mass media that abetted his self-glorification. (There were at least three book-length hagiographies before Broadwell’s and three Newsweek covers too.) The toppling of King David, as the Petraeus fanboys in the press anointed him, is just the latest in a string of such flameouts. ...

Though the star pundits and major media also lived of late through the scandals of the Catholic Church and Major League Baseball, the unmasking of mega­ministers and Wall Street titans, and the penile pratfalls of John Edwards and Tiger Woods, our Very Serious People's serial susceptibility to bogus heroes and their hoaxes remains undiminished. It’s as if there’s something in the painfully superficial outlook we star pundits take that makes us suspend disbelief once our icons are anointed. You’d think in our digital age, when even a highbrow Republican flack like David Brooks or a burnout case like Mark Shields can seemingly find out anything about anyone in a nanosecond — when transparency, thy name is Twitter — this pattern would have long since been broken and our sad excuse for a press corps wouldn't be so easily snowed. Instead, the Beltway Villagers' credulousness seems as entrenched as ever, if not more so, with the same myopia by the press and anyone misguided enough to take their hero-worshipping fawning as serious reporting alike recurring with scant variation, whether the instance be as chilling as [rape enabler Joe] Paterno or as farcical as Petraeus.

To translate my underlined substitutions:

the Beltway punditocracy = "the country" in the original
our vapid press corps = "we" (the country) in the original
in the press - added
the star pundits and major media = "we've" in the original
Very Serious People's = added
the painfully superficial outlook we star pundits take = "the national DNA" in the original
even a highbrow Republican flack like David Brooks or a burnout case like Mark Shields = "everyone" n the original
our sad excuse for a press corps = "the country" in the original
the Beltway Villagers' = "our" in the original
anyone misguided enough to take their fanboy fawning as serious reporting = "public" in the original

Rich's piece does detail the national press' willing gullibility about The Man Called Petraeus. But even so, he does it in a noticeably odd way. First, he reports:

Even commentators who were critical of Petraeus’s warcraft rarely questioned his seriousness or maturity. Now it turns out that the man who had come to symbolize the ideal of a modern general—a Princeton-educated warrior-scholar who wrote the book on counterinsurgency—was actually closer in character to the preening Modern Major-General of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. We learned this not from the initial bombshell of his infidelity, a misdemeanor that indeed should be left to the jurisdiction of his immediate family, but from the larger, embarrassing backstory that has been filled in since. Belatedly, we now know that a leader heralded for his asceticism was so entranced with pomp, especially of the self-aggrandizing variety, that he gratuitously paraded his military medals on his civilian suit jacket in breach of Washington etiquette. We now know that in the Central Command Shangri-La of Tampa, he commandeered a 28-cop-strong motorcycle escort to speed him to a party at the waterfront mansion of the alleged “socialites” Scott and Jill Kelley. The motorcade was the Petraeus surge replayed as farce, deployed to achieve victory in the status wars presided over by central Florida’s answer to the Kardashians. For once we can say unequivocally, "Mission accomplished!"

The party that prompted Petraeus’s grand taxpayer-funded entrance was in honor of Gasparilla, an annual pirate-themed bacchanal that aspires to do for binge-drinking in Tampa what Mardi Gras does for New Orleans. A much circulated party photo shows a grinning Petraeus posing with Jill Kelley, both of them draped in gaudy Gasparilla beads. It is disconcerting to learn that a man tasked with smoking out the Taliban apparently had no clue that the Kelleys were well on their way to becoming major deadbeats who have provoked at least nine lawsuits, piled up six-figure credit-card debt, owe nearly $2.2 million to a bank that threatened to foreclose on a local office building they owned, and spent nearly all the assets of a short-lived family cancer foundation on expenses. A year after that Gasparilla blowout—an experience Petraeus described to a local reporter as “awesome”—he would personally award his hostess the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s second-highest civilian award, a silver medal whose citation vaguely lauded Kelley’s distinguished service in “community outreach.” This past September, Petraeus parachuted into the child-custody fight of Kelley’s twin sister, Natalie Khawam, another deadbeat, by writing an effusive letter praising her maternal virtues to the court. Luckily, the judge, unlike Petraeus, actually had the child’s welfare at heart and ruled against Khawam.

Then, after detailing all that stuff "that has been filled in since," he writes, "The general’s distracting adventures among the Real Housewives of Tampa on the home front were in the public domain, reported in the local press for anyone who wanted to look." And yet, "No one in the national media bothered until sex and a catfight between Broadwell and Kelley entered the story." In other words, the Beltway press was too busy glorifying the Great General and cranking out beat-sweetening stories on him than bothering to look at the local news reports "for anyone who wanted to look."

And he says basically that everyone around Petraeus knew there was something hinky about the role being played by his girlfriend Paula Broadwell: "Also hiding in plain sight, and also ignored, was Broadwell's own curious rise in the same media-think-tank Establishment that was glorifying Petraeus." Rich doesn't mention it here, but she was acting publicly as an unofficial spokesperson for Petraeus the CIA director.

This is not surprising. But it's yet another indictment of the irresponsibility, superficiality, laziness and general cravenness of so much of our national press including national security reporters that it deserved to be highlighted rather than softpedaled in the way Rich's article does it. Like putting that sentence, "The general’s distracting adventures among the Real Housewives of Tampa on the home front were in the public domain, reported in the local press for anyone who wanted to look," in the first and second paragraph instead of going on at the beginning with nonsense about "the national DNA."

Star Pundit Frank Rich's style in this piece of talking in broad generalities about how "we" the public see things collectively isn't unusual. But it's doggone annoying. He's mainly substituting the public for the conventional wisdom among the punditocracy, a conventional wisdom which typically isn't terribly bright or perceptive and is often driven by gossip and adolescent-style groupthink.

But using phrases like "the national DNA" is also obnoxious because it assumes that something like a "national character" exists. This is a lame concept, one that's basically cheap nationalism given a vaneer of intellectual content. He doesn't use that exact phrase. But he does give us, "that fundamental piece of the American character that makes us want to suspend disbelief well past the point we should." That phrase is followed immediately by:

We want to believe in magic, improbable comebacks, and aesthetically perfect heroes. We hold on to the frontier ideal of white hats vanquishing the black hats. If there’s one fixture in the American firmament—no matter how sweeping the other changes in cultural fashion—it is cartoon superheroes. Nearly 75 years after the first Superman comic, he and his brethren are bigger than ever, the masters of all media, analog and digital. We are always waiting for Superman and quick to assume there’s a new one just around the corner. When one turns out to be a fake, we immediately start looking for the next.

He concludes with this painful sentence, "This is America, and, if Broadwell got anything right, it's that once Americans fall for a guy, we just can't stop ourselves from going all in."

"All in" all, to keep with the dumb phrase-making, Rich's article winds up being a compilation of pop psychology speculation that misses a critical, qualitative aspect of this. Worshiping sports heroes may be silly. Idolizing generals and, along with them, war and killing, has a whole different level of consequences. Idolizing generals is closely connected to turning politics into a celebrity spectacle. Neither is good for democracy.

Tags: petraeus

The bad Petraeus legacy that matters

Our star reporters and pundits love them a sex story. Without the David Petraeus scandal, they might have to sort through government reports and talk to economists about what is really up about this "fiscal cliff" thing and whether Social Security really is going bankrupt as its opponents like to falsely claim.

I'm sure the Petraeus story already has scriptwriters for Law and Order SVU, Covert Affairs (!) and Nikita at work on their own versions of it. A movie version is sure to come along. But unless it turns out that US intelligence was seriously compromised, the story's salacious interest for our press corps will be its main significance to the larger public.

Michael Hastings takes a look at The Sins Of General David Petraeus, the ones that affected many more lives than this affair seemingly did (Buzzfeed 11/11/2012):

There’s his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He’s more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption, and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as “Iraqi death squads.” On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called "surge," he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war.

He did it by papering over what the surge actually was: We took the Shiites' side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we’d help them out too. It was a brutal enterprise — over 800 Americans died during the surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus’ policies fueled. Then he popped smoke and left the members of the Sunni Awakening to fend for themselves. A journalist friend told me a story of an Awakening member, exiled in Amman, whom Petraeus personally assured he would never abandon. The former insurgent had a picture of Petraeus on his wall, but was a little hurt that the general no longer returned his calls.

And he spread his bad policies and destructive leadership to Afghanistan:

Petraeus was so convincing on Baghdad that he manipulated President Obama into trying the same thing in Kabul. In Afghanistan, he first underhandedly pushed the White House into escalating the war in September 2009 (calling up columnists to “box” the president in) and waged a full-on leak campaign to undermine the White House policy process. Petraeus famously warned his staff that the White House was "fucking" with the wrong guy.

The doomed Afghanistan surge would come back to bite him in the ass, however. A year after getting the war he wanted, P4 [a Petraeus nickname) got stuck having to fight it himself. ...

The Afghan war was a loser, always was, and always would be — Petraeus made horrible deals with guys like Abdul Razzik and the other Afghan gangsters and killed a bunch of people who didn’t need to be killed. And none of it mattered, or made a dent in his reputation. This was the tour where Broadwell joined him at headquarters, and it’s not so shocking that he’d need to find some solace, somewhere, to get that daily horror show out of his mind.

Hastings describes ways in which "Petraeus more or less had journalists from many major media outlets slurping from the Pentagon’s gravy train."

Spencer Ackerman tells his own story of being (journalistically) seduced by the famous general in How I Was Drawn Into the Cult of David Petraeus Danger Room 11/11/2012. Glenn Greenwald discusses the problem of US press worship of our glorious generals in Petraeus scandal is reported with compelled veneration of all things military The Guardian 11/10/2012:

... military worship is the central religion of America's political and media culture. The military is by far the most respected and beloved institution among the US population - a dangerous fact in any democracy - and, even assuming they wanted to (which they don't), our brave denizens of establishment journalism are petrified of running afoul of that kind of popular sentiment.

Jeremy Schahill also writes of Petraeus' accomplishments at the CIA in The Petraeus Legacy: A Paramilitary CIA? The Nation 11/14/2012:

... the scandal opens a window onto a different and more consequential relationship—that between the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. In a behind-the-scenes turf war that has raged since 9/11, the two government bodies have fought for control of the expanding global wars waged by the United States—a turf war that JSOC has largely won. Petraeus, an instrumental player in this power struggle, leaves behind an agency that has strayed from intelligence to paramilitary-type activities. Though his legacy will be defined largely by the scandal that ended his career, to many within military and intelligence circles, Petraeus’s career trajectory, from commander of US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to the helm of the CIA, is a symbol of this evolution.

Retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former senior defense intelligence official, says that Petraeus’s arrogance—“smoothly concealed beneath the appearance of the warrior scholar”—made him deeply unpopular among the military’s high-ranking officers. Dismissing the media’s portrayal of Petraeus as a “super soldier” and great military leader as “phony bullshit,” Lang describes him as the product of a military promotion system that encourages generals to think of themselves as “divinely selected.” “In fact, he didn’t write the COIN manual, the surge was not the main thing in improving the situation in Iraq…. They sent him to Afghanistan to apply the COIN doctrine in the same glorious way he did in Iraq, and it hasn’t worked. So, if you look beneath the surface from all this stuff, it’s just a lot of hot air. There are great generals, but this guy is not one of them.” Arriving at the CIA, Lang says, Petraeus “wanted to drag them in the covert action direction and to be a major player.”

As for Petraeus’s future, the State Department liaison said, “There will be a lot of profits to be made by him and his immediate circle of advisers, as they’re given a soft landing, whether it’s in academia or within the nexus of the military-industrial complex.”

Speaking of Col. Lang - who once had occasion in an online discussion over neo-Confederate history to let me know he thought I was a prick myself - writes about The Lebanese Factor in the generals' downfall at his Sic Semper Tyrannis blog:

Lebanese society circles in the larger cities, especially Beirut, are centers of intense social and political intrigue at all levels. Both Christian and Muslim communities are devoted and obsessed with conspiracy as a way of life. "Plotting" is to the Lebanese as Sunday TV football is to most "gringo" Americans. There are circles within circles within circles. For the city Lebanese power and influence are to be acquired through association with the politically, militarily and financially powerful. To that end they scheme endlessly and the seductiveness of their culture and frankly, their women, are powerful tools. Whether or not that seduction is carried to fulfilment is a sometimes thing

This culture driven behavior has been exported to the world with the Lebanese diaspora. In the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, there is a large, prosperous, well educated and politically active Lebanese "colony" distributed along the Gulf littoral. It is no surprise to me that there is an attractive, socially prominant [sic] and pretentious Lebanese American woman [Jill Kelley] at the heart of this melodrama. ...

Such outreach programs exist at most bases and are an understandable product of military desire to have friendly relations with surrounding civilian communities. These are communities with which the military on the base would usually have little contact because so many military personnel and their familes [sic] live on the base, shop on the base and send their children to school on the base. Civilian elites react well to such programs because they have the chance to develop contacts and friendships with senior officers that are prestigious in places like Tampa. The chance that such contacts might lead to business opportunities on the base or "the inside track" in a variety of matters adds to the attraction. For the senior officers involved, such programs build relationships that are likely to be useful if they choose to retire from the military in that area.

These two generals are a case study in juvenile irresponsibility. Their emotional vulnerability to the two women who are "showing" thus far in this drama is ridiculous, and they are ridiculous. Their absurdity calls into question the process by which they were repeatedly selected for promotion and assignment to the highest ranks and commands the country possesses. The sense of entitlement that they have displayed to the public through their foolishness is breathtaking. There may well be a lot more to be learned of the circle of intimacy that surrounded this queen bee in Tampa.

Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman point to some possibly serious security concerns in this business between Petraeus and his girlfriend Paul Broadwell in Mistress Revealed CIA Ops as Petraeus’ Mouthpiece ("mistress" has an old-fashioned and odd ring to me) Danger Room 11/12/2012.

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, petraeus

Reuters: "The risks and rewards of the Afghan withdrawal"; and, our glorious generals scramble to lay down their alibis

A short Reuters report of 06/23/2011 on the Afghanistan War:



So much of this war is reminiscent of problems that developed in the Vietnam War. The US/NATO presence is injecting large amounts of money into the economy. But without the NATO presence, Afghanistan is unlikely to be able to generate anything close to this level of economic activity to sustain the boom

Also, it sounds like much of the training of both police and soldiers NATO is doing assumes the presence of a NATO-like support infrastructure. And the Afghans are not going to be able to duplicate that on their own either.

The Pentagon will probably never recommend a full withdrawal. Like JSOC Chief Admiral Mike Mullen in this report, they will want to leave a CYA trail to claim that they recommended an allegedly more cautious, prudent and effective course if things go south in Afghanistan. They have their own version of a "once in, never out" policy. The following from Troop exit plan means hard choices for US commanders in Afghanistan Christian Science Monitor 06/23/2011 shows a familiar Pentagon position:

Pentagon officials have warned that drawing down US troops before Afghan forces are ready to take over the fight against radical Islamist insurgents could threaten the "fragile and reversible gains" that the US military says it has made against the Taliban, particularly in southern Afghanistan.

But the president's timetable offers some flexibility for US commanders. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who had lobbied for a more modest drawdown of 3,000 to 5,000 troops by year’s end, made that point in a statement supporting Obama’s plan.

"Over the past 18 months our troops have made tremendous progress degrading the capability of the Taliban while enhancing the Afghan security forces. It is critical that we continue to aggressively prosecute that strategy," he said. "I support the President's decision because it provides our commanders with enough resources, time and, perhaps most importantly, flexibility to bring the surge to a successful conclusion." [my emphasis]

Stars and Strips carries a story by Robert Burns of the A********* P****, Troop cuts herald shift in US approach, in which he writes:

Are the Taliban under enough military pressure to compel them to enter serious peace talks with Kabul? Robert Gates, the soon-to-retire defense secretary, thinks not - at least not before the end of this year. But recognizing that Afghans and Americans alike are weary of war, Gates concedes that the current troop-intensive U.S. approach is not sustainable.

So the U.S. troop withdrawal will accelerate next year, with all 30,000 of the "surge" troops that Obama ordered to Afghanistan expected to be gone by September 2012, leaving about 68,000 U.S. troops and a few tens of thousands from other coalition countries. As the force shrinks, so will the scope and ambition of the U.S.-led military campaign. ...

The shift is a setback for the war's current commander, Gen. David Petraeus, the author of the military's guidebook for counterinsurgency. A year ago, Petraeus and the likeminded commander he replaced, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, were talking about a "fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign" in Afghanistan as the key to turning around a stalemated war. [my emphasis]

Kevin Baron reports for Stars and Stripes in Petraeus: Drawdown plan 'more aggressive' than military leaders wanted 06/23/2011 that our Savior-General Petraeus is laying down his own prospective alibis. He probably is right to assume that his boss in the White House won't retaliate against him in any way for publicly undercutting the Administration he is soon to start serving as the CIA Director:

Gen. David Petraeus said President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan drawdown plan was "more aggressive" than military commanders recommended, but he supported the president’s decision.

Petraeus’ remarks came Thursday during his Senate confirmation hearing to be the next CIA director, less than 24 hours after Obama announced he would remove 33,000 surge troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer. ...

For days leading to the announcement, reports had surfaced that Obama would reject the advice of his generals by favoring a quicker withdrawal.

Petraeus said Obama's decision removes troops faster than he, Mullen and Central Command’s Gen. James Mattis had wanted, but he presented the president with a range of options.

Petraeus told Sen. Carl Levin, D.-Mich., that some had called for him to resign in opposition to the president’s decision.

"Our troopers don’t get to quit. And I don’t think commanders should get to consider that," he said, speaking more passionately and asking for more time to make a statement. [my emphasis]

But will Obama punish him in any way for publicly trashing him as a quitter, which is how I read that comment? I'll believe it when I see it. Certainly Dianne Feinstein gushed over him as the incoming CIA Director. "My own view is you're going to be a terrific asset," she told him.

Tags: afghanistan war,, obama administration, petraeus

Change in Afghanistan War command

Stephen Walt in A 'do over' in Afghanistan? Foreign Policy 06/24/2010 links to the following analysis by Gareth Porter, Switch to Petraeus Betrays Afghan Policy Crisis Inter Press Service 06/23/2010.

Walt is reserved about the signs that Porter sees of high-level discontent with Obama's Afghansitan strategy. Both pieces are well worth reading. Here I want to call attention to this aspect of Porter's article:

Obama will certainly be put under pressure by the Republican Party, led by Sen. John McCain, to agree to eliminate the mid-2011 deadline for the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal and perhaps even for yet another troop surge in Afghanistan.

But accounts of Obama administration policymaking on the war last year make it clear that Obama caved into military pressure in 2009 for the troop surge of 2010 only as part of a compromise under which McChrystal and Petraeus agreed to a surge of 18 months duration. It was clearly understood by both civilian and military officials, moreover, that after the surge was completed, the administration would enter into negotiations on a settlement of the war.

Petraeus's political skills and ability to sell a strategy involving a negotiated settlement offers Obama more flexibility than he has had with McChrystal in command.

Contrary to the generally accepted view that Petraeus mounted a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, his main accomplishment was to make the first formal accommodation with Sunni insurgents. [my emphasis]

He also gives an account of McChrystal's management/leadership style that reinforces the disturbing, cowboyish picture conveyed by Michael Hastings' now-famous Rolling Stone article:

As commander in Iraq, Petraeus chose staff officers who were sceptics and realists rather than true believers, according to accounts from members of his staff in Iraq. When one aide proposed in a memorandum in the first weeks of his command coming to terms with the Shia insurgents led by Moqtada al Sadr, for example, Petraeus did not dismiss the idea.

That willingness to listen to viewpoints that may not support the existing strategy stands in sharp contrast to McChrystal's command style in Afghanistan. McChrystal has relied heavily on a small circle of friends, mainly from his years as Special Operations Forces (SOF) commander, who have been deeply suspicious of the views of anyone from outside that SOF circle, according to sources who are familiar with the way his inner circle has operated.

In an interview with IPS, one military source who knows McChrystal and his staff described a "very tight" inner circle of about eight people which "does everything together, including getting drunk".

"McChrystal surrounded himself with yes men," said another source who has interacted with some of those in the inner circle. "When people have challenged the conventional wisdom, he's had them booted out," the source said.

The McChrystal inner circle has been accustomed to the insularity that Special Operations Forces have traditionally had in carrying out their operations, the source added.

It's not against the regs for officers to drink alcohol. But is it really a good idea for the whole leadership team of a war commander to get blasted together at the same time?

Porter's analysis at least shows a way that Obama could use the Petraeus appointment as a way to unwind US commitment to this disaster of a war and nation-building effort in Afghanistan. As Walt puts it:

Contrary to what many (but not all) commentators seem to think, the firing of Stanley McChrystal and his replacement by General David Petraeus is not that significant. To be more precise, it will only be a significant event if Obama uses this shift as an opportunity to move towards withdrawal. Otherwise, we'll just rearrange some deck chairs and watch the war effort continue to founder.

And Obama's initial statement on the matter was:

I do not make this decision based on any difference in policy with General McChrystal, as we are in full agreement about our strategy. ...

We need to remember what this is all about. Our nation is at war. We face a very tough fight in Afghanistan. But Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths or difficult tasks. We persist and we persevere. We will not tolerate a safe haven for terrorists who want to destroy Afghan security from within, and launch attacks against innocent men, women, and children in our country and around the world.

So make no mistake: We have a clear goal. We are going to break the Taliban’s momentum. We are going to build Afghan capacity. We are going to relentlessly apply pressure on al Qaeda and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same.

That’s the strategy that we agreed to last fall; that is the policy that we are carrying out, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. ...

Let me say to the American people, this is a change in personnel but it is not a change in policy.

Tags: afghanistan war, petraeus

Iraq War: warnings against complacency

David Petraeus of The Surge: "Progressive" hero?

British Middle East expert Toby Dodge writes that Despite the optimism, Iraq is close to the edge by Toby Dodge The Observer12/21/08:

I have been travelling back and forth to Iraq for the last seven years. I witnessed the violent aftermath of the invasion in the spring of 2003 when looting and lawlessness descended into an all out insurgency. I returned in 2007 to see a country in the midst of civil war. On my last trip to Iraq this year, the population was holding its breath, waiting to see if the internecine strife had finished or simply stalled while all sides rearm. ...

With an end to the occupation in sight, both Bush and [British Prime Minister Gordon] Brown are attempting to put the best possible gloss on a military adventure that has seen 178 British and 4,209 Americans troops killed and anything between 90,000 and 650,000 Iraqi deaths.

Anglo-American declarations of progress and stability need to be treated with caution. Even today, Iraq is far from peaceful; an average of 500 people are murdered each month, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Baghdad at the end of 2008 is a deeply divided city. Neighbourhoods that were religiously and ethnically cleansed by the wave of violence that engulfed the city before 2007 are now fortified by row upon row of concrete blast walls. ...

Bush and Brown are loathe to use the term "civil war" to describe what took place in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 but this is exactly what happened. [my emphasis]

An escalation in violence or a return to civil war is not a reason to delay US or British withdrawal. Virtually all parties, with some possible exceptions among the Kurds, are demanding that the US leave. Both the specific conditions in Iraq and past experiences in places like Algeria when the French left strongly suggest that there will be some increase in conflict when US forces are withdrawn, if not before. There will be lots of debts to settle among hostile parties. And the approach that became part of The Surge that involved arming Sunni militias to fight "Al Qa'ida" has already made long-term sectarian reconciliation even more problematic than it was before. But the United States needs to get itself out of this disaster, sooner rather than later.

Paul Flieder reports in German for Die Zeit about his experiences in Iraq in Ein Monat in der Hölle (A Month in Hell) 17.12.2008. His grim description of Baghdad outside the Green Zone, as well as other parts of the country, are consistent with Dodge's warnings.

These are good reminders, when liberal Web publications are producing stuff like this article from Rachel Kleinfeld, Petraeus the Progressive: The surge in Iraq is a success, and we must claim it as our own Democracy Journal Winter 2008. Yes, you read that title right. And the "we" refers to Democrats. And it isn't an Onion-style joke. Kleinfeld is ignoring the solid reporting on this situation and trying to put a pro-Democratic spin on a Republican faith-based version of The Surge. She writes of the period of The Surge, when Petraeus the Magnificent arrived on the scene:

During that time, Iraq metamorphosed from killing fields to a functioning society. Robinson makes a strong case that these changes would not have taken place without the shift to counterinsurgency strategy, and that the strategy would not have worked without the extra manpower of the surge.

It may sound counterintuitive, but for progressives, Petraeus’s victory is our victory. His strategy bucked traditional ideas, lauded by many conservatives, that we could win by outgunning and outmanning the enemy. Instead, Petraeus incorporated insights, such as the importance of legitimacy and privileging civilian life in order to gain hearts and minds, that progressives have been promoting for years. However progressives feel about the decision to enter the Iraq War, we should own its success.

That's just sad.

Her version of The Surge could have been written by a Pentagon PR office. Something like that had to have been a major source for this stuff. I won't belabor a silly article too much. But her treatment of the Sunni Awakening is typical. She portrays it as a brilliant triumph of "progressive" counterinsurgency masterminded by Petraeus the Great. She seems completely oblivious to the fact that by arming and backing Sunni militias against the Salafi extremists that Petraeus the Awesome likes to call "Al Qa'ida", her "progressive" hero Petraeus was trading short-term gains in reducing violence against long-term intransigence in national reconciliation.

And while she rattles off peppy boilerplate, she doesn't seem to have noticed that a huge part of the reduction in violence was due to the fact that the Shi'a won that round of the civil war, in particular by successful sectarian cleansing of Baghdad, along with the creation (over years, not just in The Surge) of millions of refugees. When you run out of handy enemies to kill because they are either dead or gone, it tends to reduce violence, at least in the short run.

Declaring it as successful counterinsurgency is not even premature. It's just plain foolishness, based on dishonest claims by apologists for the Cheney-Bush administration like Petraeus the Conqueror.

And when she writes neocon-style slimebag polemics like this: "Unwilling to grant Bush a political victory, many progressives rationalized away their belief in principles such as preventing genocide" - you have to wonder why a journal pretending to be liberal and/or Democratic is printing her crap at all. Praising the alleged success of The Surge, a success based on the Shi'a Arabs winning that round of their civil war against the Sunni Arabs, and then accusing the "many progressives" (unnamed of course!) of being indifferent to genocide really is Cheney-level cynicism.

Tags: iraq war, petraeus, surge

War and the Presidential election

Monday's Democratic Presidential debate provided a Clinton/Obama squabble that gave the Establishment press a good "horse race" story. But, as Juan Cole points out in Iraq Dominates Testy Dem Debate Informed Comment blog 01/22/08, the Iraq War was very much on the candidates' minds and agendas, because it's very much on the minds and agendas of the Democratic base and the public at large. Even though the lords of the press corps keep repeating that nobody cares about it any more, that it's disappeared as an issue.

But The Surge, aka the McCain escalation, hasn't worked those miracles that the war fans fantasize that they see. Andrew Bacevich has some pointed comments on the topic in the Washington Post 01/20/08 in Surge to Nowhere:

As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the "surge" is working. ...

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction.

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that the United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in Germany and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina.

Patrick Cockburn reports on some very recent violence in Iraq toll mounts as forces fight cult The Independent 01/21/08:

Some 276 people were killed, wounded or captured by government forces fighting a millenarian Shia cult in southern Iraq over the past three days, the Iraqi Ministry of Defence said in Baghdad yesterday.

The heavy losses in gun battles between the 'Supporters of the Mahdi' group and the police and army in Basra and Nasiriya underlines how swiftly violence can explode in Iraq where everybody is heavily armed. In Nasiriya three senior officers were among the dead.

The movement, led by Ahmad al-Hassani, also known as Ahmad al-Yamani, believes in the imminent return of the Messiah but exactly why its members should have taken to the streets in several cities remains unclear. In Basra they reportedly first killed several traffic policemen and commandeered six empty vehicles and two police cars. They later captured an oil facilities building and a hospital. At one point there was fighting in 75 per cent of Basra, a city of two million people, according to the police chief Abdul Jalil Khalaf.

It is a measure of the lack of information on what is happening outside central Baghdad that casualty figures vary widely with one source claiming that 97 died and 217 were wounded in Basra alone. In Baghdad the National Security Adviser Muwafaq al-Rubaie was trapped in a Shia mosque in the Sh'la district in west Baghdad but it is not clear if his attackers were also from the 'Supporters of the Mahdi' movement, that appears to have supporters in every Shia city. (my emphasis)

Basra is a key port city that is on the route US troops would need to use in a large-scale withdrawal from Iraq. That 75% of the city could be engulfed in what sounds like serious fighting can't be comforting news to US commanders.

But what about the idea of Petraeus '12 (The American Prospect Online 01/22/08)? Spencer Ackerman thinks he sees a glimmer of a Presidential campaign in four years by the Savior-General himself!

Tags: andrew bacevich, iraq war, patrick cockburn, petraeus

Andrew Bacevich on our Saviour-General Petraeus

Andrew Bacevich gives his take on Saviour-General David Petraeus, that divine presence whom it would be blashphemy to criticize in any way (at least according the the Republican Party line of the day) in Sycophant Savior The American Conservative 10/08/07 issue (accessed 10/02/07).

Bacevich opens with a pragmatic account of the organizational politics that senior military leaders have to practice:

George Washington, U.S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were all “political generals” in the very best sense of the term. Their claims to immortality rest not on their battlefield exploits - Washington actually won few battles, and Grant achieved his victories through brute force rather than finesse, while Ike hardly qualifies as a field commander at all - but on the skill they demonstrated in translating military power into political advantage. Each of these three genuinely great soldiers possessed a sophisticated appreciation for war’s political dimension.

I have my reservations about his comment on Grant's "brute force". Grant's great contribution was to recognize the central importance of destroying enemy forces as opposed to seizing territory. But that's not my focus in this post.

He contrasts that with Saviour-General Petraeus:

David Petraeus is a political general. Yet in presenting his recent assessment of the Iraq War and in describing the "way forward," Petraeus demonstrated that he is a political general of the worst kind - one who indulges in the politics of accommodation that is Washington’s bread and butter but has thereby deferred a far more urgent political imperative, namely, bringing our military policies into harmony with our political purposes.

Bacevich, who has been a genuine critic of the Iraq War from the start and who lost a son in that war earlier this year, argues that in his recent performance in Washington, "Petraeus issued everyone a pass" on doing their own jobs to make responsible decisions about the war.

Bacevich explains how Petraeus' announced plan to ramp down the number of US troops in Iraq is not consistent with his own highly questionable assessment of The Surge as having been a great success. Bacevich favorably cites the article Learning From Our Modern Wars: The Imperatives of Preparing for a Dangerous Future Military Review Sept-Oct 2007 by Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli for it discussion of what Bacevich calls "the contradiction between our military efforts in Iraq and our professed political purposes there to persist."

Bacevich focuses on how the Cheney-Bush administration's approach to the Iraq War exposes the fake nature of their "global war on terror (GWOT)".

In effect, he is allowing the president and the Congress to continue dodging the main issue, which comes down to this: if the civilian leadership wants to wage a global war on terror and if that war entails pacifying Iraq, then let’s get serious about providing what’s needed to complete the mission - starting with lots more soldiers. Rather than curtailing the ostensibly successful surge, Petraeus should broaden and deepen it. That means sending more troops to Iraq, not bringing them home. And that probably implies doubling or tripling the size of the United States Army on a crash basis.

If the civilian leadership is unwilling to provide what’s needed, then all of the talk about waging a global war on terror - talk heard not only from the president but from most of those jockeying to replace him - amounts to so much hot air. Critics who think the concept of the global war on terror is fundamentally flawed will see this as a positive development. Once we recognize the global war on terror for the fraudulent enterprise that it has become, then we can get serious about designing a strategy to address the threat that we actually face, which is not terrorism but violent Islamic radicalism. The antidote to Islamic radicalism, if there is one, won’t involve invading and occupying places like Iraq.

This defines Petraeus’s failure. Instead of obliging the president and the Congress to confront this fundamental contradiction—are we or are we not at war?—he chose instead to let them off the hook.

Bacevich concludes by offering his assessment of Saviour-General Petraus: "he has broken faith with the soldiers he commands and the Army to which he has devoted his life. He has failed his country. History will not judge him kindly."

Tags: andrew bacevich, iraq war, petraeus

Lakoff on the We Adore Our Saviour-General Resolution

The political-linguistic guru Robert Lakoff weighs in on the key aspect of the Republicans' phony outrage over anyone insulting the divine presence of our Saviour-General Petraeus, in The Senate Votes on Tropes and the Troops Huffington Post 09/20/07.

The Republicans are trying to establish their theme that anyone who criticizes Saviour-General Petraeus, at least so long as he's publicly and willingly defending the Cheney-Bush war policies, is attacking The Troops. I'm guessing they're doing this partly out of political strategy, partly out of ideology and partly out of habit.

Glenn Greenwald discusses a closely related subject, with a bitter comment added as an update specifically on so many Senate Democrats falling for the "bitch slap" maneuver on the General Petraeus Is Our Saviour resolution, The art of neoconservative innuendo Salon 09/20/07..

Tags: authoritarianism, george lakoff, petraeus, republican party, treason-baiting

Paying homage to the Saviour-General

Europa and the [White] Bull - Gustave Moreau, 1869)

It really is remarkable how dysfunctional our Establishment media have become. Glenn Greenwald in Limitless wrongness Salon 09/18/07 chronicles some of the press atrocities surrounding the long-awaited testimony of our Saviour-General David Petraeus before Congress.

There is, of course, David Broder, The Dean Of All The Pundits, who is no doubt looking for a new outburst of moderation. Greenwald cites his column Bush Regains His Footing of February 15 of this year in the Washington Post as an example of the basic Big Pundit script:

Like President Bill Clinton after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, Bush has gone through a period of wrenching adjustment to his reduced status. But just as Clinton did in the winter of 1995, Bush now shows signs of renewed energy and is regaining the initiative on several fronts.

More important, he is demonstrating political smarts that even his critics have to acknowledge. ...

With the public eager for some bipartisan progress on all these fronts, Bush is signaling that he, at least, is ready to try.

More evidence than Broder snoozes through most of the actual news.

Dean Broder doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that the Republicans in Congress stubbornly refuse to put any limits at all on Bush's Iraq War. But in the Church of High Broderism, "moderation" is the highest virtue. And in that denomination's version, "moderation" means that Democrats go along with Bush's most fool ideas and attack other Democrats who are opposed to doing so.

Greenwald treats us some classic moments from the Chris Matthews show of guys drooling over our Saviour-General Peraeus' manly uniform. Here's advertising executive Jerry Della Femina:

Well, they're doing a good job of it this week. Let me tell you, they couldn't find anyone better than Petraeus. I mean, you just can't beat a man in full uniform speaking to - well, I'll give you Ollie North facing the Congress. You know, you stand up there, and he's wearing a uniform. And boy, you can't take a guy in uniform versus six overweight senators. ...

And Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (not to be confused with Dana Priest, who generally does more solid reporting):

MILBANK: Bush had a terrible August down on the ranch and then has explosive Septembers. And I think he's won this battle already.

MATTHEWS: How so?

MILBANK: Petraeus - it's no accident he had a Latin name. It looked like he was the Roman general returning to the republic in his gold and purple toga, and they were celebrating him and slaying white bulls. They could not get enough of this man. And anybody's who's even critical of the war wouldn't dare criticize...

MATTHEWS: Right.

MILBANK: ... except in the most polite way, General Petraeus because then you appear to be criticizing the troops. I think it's game, set and match here.

Celebrating him and slaying white bulls? You stand up there - and our Saviour-General is wearing an uniform!!

It reads like a comedy routine. That's because our mainstream press is to a shocking extent a sad joke.

Greenwald observes that according to the poll results, our Saviour-General Petreaus had virtually no effect on public opinion on the war, slain white bulls notwithstanding. David Kurtz has more polling results along the same lines in Petraeus Barely Registers TPM 09/18/07.

Greenwald argues:

Most of the media still believes - based in part on how they have been trained and in part on their hopes - that the Bush movement, any day now, will re-discover its glory and magic and get the country back on its side with regard to the war. It took them a long time to accept the reality that the country had abandoned the Leader and the War, and ever since then, they have continuously been predicting a reversal. ...

In their world, the Republicans are always ascendent [sic], Bush is always the Strong Leader, Democrats are always the sorry losers captive to their destructive Leftist extremists, and Americans are aching to support the War. They have been predicting endlessly that, any day now, all of this will be true again.

It's not that the Establishment media are being intentionally so crassly partisan; it's a more deep-seated and disturbing phenemenon than that, it appears.

And I would find it hard to argue with this conclusion of Greenwald's:

They haven't been this in awe of anyone as they are of Gen. Petraeus since Oliver North proudly justified his lawbreaking, nor as outraged as they are over the MoveOn ad since Bill Clinton had oral sex.

If only they had managed to muster even a small fraction of the outrage and offense over the war itself, or the radicalism and lawlessness of this administration. But that would have proven how Unserious they are. It is much more rewarding to show that they are the Serious, Responsible establishment members who lavish the General with the honor and reverence he deserves while scorning the insufficiently respectful leftist radicals.

"Leftist radicals" in this case being the majority of the country who want the United States out of this war sooner rather than later.

Tags: dana milbank, david broder, glenn greenwald, iraq war, jerry della femina, petraeus

Treason-baiting and Republican projection

Joe McCarthy, another political saint high in the pantheon of today's Republican Party

Dave Neiwert, one of the leading journalistic experts in the far-right and on how its messages become mainstreamed into the Republican Party, writes in Identifying the enemy at his Orcinus blog on 09/11/07:

Everywhere you turn, it seems, Republicans are repeating what's clearly going to be their main theme for the 2008 election: Democrats are traitors. They want us to lose in Iraq because they hate Bush so much they're willing to let the terrorists win. Next thing you know, Al Qaeda's gonna be blowing up the Peoria mall.

For understandable if regrettable reasons, Democrats have been reluctant to proceed on the assumption that the Republican Party has become an authoritarian organization that no longer considers itself legitimately constrained by the law or the Constitution, much less long-established political conventions.

This is not the same as saying that the Republicans are able to operate completely outside the Constitution and the law. But it does mean that they are willing to do so. And they have succeeded to a stunning extent in areas like launching a preventive war in Iraq, implementing an illegal and sadistic torture program whose only real purpose is to spread terror among the target populations, Executive secrecy, massive warrantless spying, blatant defiance of Congress, the outing of Valerie Plame. The full list would be much longer.

But they are going to have to face the fact that such treason-baiting in very likely to be a main part of the Republicans' political strategy all the way through the 2008 elections and beyond. And we all need to understand what a damned ugly strategy it is.

Neiwert has often pointed out that one characteristic of today's Republican Party is a remarkable degree of projection. Ordinary hypocrisy is presumably as old as politics itself. But it has become striking that when Republican spokesmen official and unofficial accuse the Democrats of indulging in some kind of particularly unworthy political tactic, it's very likely that the Republicans themselves are intending to indulge in that very tactic in a massive way.

The Republicans in the "Pet Crock" hearings (Petraeus and Crocker) this week almost to a person indulged in theatrics about how much they were shocked! shocked! that MoveOn.org had questioned the absolute integrity and all-round wonderfulness of our Saviour-General Petraeus in an ad in the New York Times. Wonky Muse gives an able summary of the controversy and its political context in this post.

The Reps focused their partisan outrage in particular on the ad's play on the Saviour-General's name: General Petraeus or General Betray Us?. An image and PDF file of the ad is available at the linked MoveOn.org site, along with there own defense of the ad, which continues in Our ad on General Petraeus.

Here I want to talk about this particular instance of projection. So first, this is the entire body of the MoveOn.org's text:

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2004, just before the election, he said there was "tangible progress" in Iraq and that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward." And last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq, said, “We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress.”

Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there. We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.

Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war. We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops. But we won’t hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.

You can check MoveOn.org's own links above for their defense of their ad.

Here's my basic take on this flap. To repeat what Wonky Muse said in my own way, I wouldn't have picked that "betray us" theme around which to organize the ad. But I'm not going to be mealy-mouthed about this. I not going to criticize them for it or claim that it was inappropriate.

And in the marketing world in general, an advertisement that people think is obnoxious can be very effective in its purpose if it generates "buzz". And since virtually every Republican Member of Congress I heard this week at the hearings either mentioned the ad specifically or alluded to it, anyone who listened to that or read the news reports about it heard that some people thought there was real reason to question the Saviour-General's credibility.

My own guidelines in looking at things like this would be roughly as follows:

• Though the Republican Party has lately been re-defining words like "torture" to mean what they want them to mean at the moment, anyone not afflicted with RepSpeak can clearly distinguish the difference between the concept of "betraying trust" and "committing treason by giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the United States". This isn't comma-dancing, it's plain American English. The "aid and comfort" phrase is a well-known part of the US Constitution defining treason.

• Accusations of treason (aid and comfort to an enemy) should never be used lightly in politics. That's one reason the Constitution defines a very high bar on legal charges of treason, to discourage that very thing.

• Accusing the other party or the opposing candidate of "betraying" the public trust is common as dirt. See below for a dramatic instance.

• Despite the fact that accusations of "treason" are all-too-often used carelessly, there have been real cases of treason in American history, from Benedict Arnold to the officials responsible for blowing Valerie Plame's CIA cover for the cheapest of political purposes. Unionists and Jacksonians often referred to advocates of secession prior to the Civil War as "traitors", and in many cases the usage was entirely legitimate. When real acts of treason are occurring, there's nothing wrong with calling it by its real name.

• Democratic speakers and writers have not often called it "McCarthyism", and maybe that word has become as overused as "the example of Munich" to the point it doesn't actually mean much to most readers and listeners. But pretty much since September 12, 2001, Republicans from Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh to John Ashcroft and George Bush have frequently accused war critics and Democratic opponents of the aid-and-comfort type of treason. It's sleazy as all hell But they've been doing it and they're going to keep on doing it.

• As Robert Scheer says in the quote we highlighted this week at The Blue Voice, "So, ambassadors and generals lie. Get used to it." Pretending that generals are somehow holy men beyond question is not "supporting the troops" or "respecting the military": it sticking your head into a part of your body that doesn't admit light.

• To paraphrase Scheer, I would also say, Republicans and their media flacks are going to call Democrats traitors and weak on defense no matter what. Get used to it. But don't ignore it. It's how today's Republican Party acts.

• Given that reality, unilateral rhetorical disarmament by Democrats and war critics is not advisable. That doesn't mean we have to be stupid or sleazy about it. But war critics who think being nicey-nice is going to stop the Republicans from slinging sleaze should probably stop trying to criticize the war. But the Reps are going to try to stigmatize anything and everything you say that departs from the Cheney-Bush line or (for the moment) that sounds even mildly critical of our Saviour-General Petreaus.

Back in February of 2004, elected President Al Gore said the following of sitting President George W. Bush before a group of Tennessee Democrats:

He betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place.

I didn't criticize Gore for this at the time; on the contrary, I highlighted it on my blog. Despite my expectations at the time, Gore's statement didn't seem to create a whole lot of rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth by our Patriotically Correct Republicans. Presumably that's because it was very clear in the context that he was referring to a betrayal of trust.

But Gore also knows, I'm very sure, that tricking your own country into an unnecessary war acting with malicious motives can be and has been considered an act of treason in the other sense, as well. Again, in the context, it was clear he was referring to a betrayal of trust. But still, Gore's 2004 declaration that Bush "betrayed this country" was a stronger statement than MoveOn.org's "Petraeus/Betray Us" wordplay.

Getting back to the projection phenomenon, the Republicans' strong emphasis on how supposedly reprehensible it was for MoveOn.org to suggest that the Saviour-General would "betray us" even in the sense of betraying the public trust - and again, that's clearly what the ad means - is a very strong indication that the Republicans' treason-baiting against the Democrats and war critics is only going to intensify.

In Ted Olson and the pushovers 09/12/07, Neiwert explains how the Establishment media facilities this ugly strategy:

Why is it that foulmouthed left-wing bloggers seem to be the only people who have noticed that there's a peculiar set of political rules ruling the Beltway, particularly within media circles, these days?

Here's what we've noticed: For some reason, Democrats must be the model of decorum and civility and moderation and bipartisanship when it comes to governing; any deviance from this script brings on fainting spells and finger-wagging. Meanwhile Republicans can be as vicious and nasty and ruthless and nakedly partisan as they please, and their "toughness" is merely celebrated.

Jane Hamsher in In Defense of MoveOn - No More Arrows in the Back Huffington Post 09/13/07 argues against head-ducking and timidity in the face of this kind of phony theatrical outrage by the Republican defenders of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove outing Valerie Plame. Specifically, she raps the titular head of the Democratic Party, John Kerry, on the knuckles for doing a duck-and-cover routine on this one:

I'm sorry, John Kerry, but you don't help the right wing out. Ever. Now they've got Diaper Dave Vitter out there leading the battle cry, trying to reclaim himself by introducing resolutions to denounce MoveOn. Does Kerry really not know how it works at this point?

Dave Neiwert in the Ted Olson post linked above characterized the Democratic response to the Republicans histrionics over the MoveOn.org ad as having been "to cower and run from their own best advocates." And he continues:

These, then, are the Bush Rules in action: Only Democrats have to be civil. "Bipartisanship" means acceding to the conservative agenda. And Republicans can be as vicious as they like, because then we'll just call it "toughness" or, if it's really ugly, "just a joke."

You'd think by now that Democrats would have figured out they're being played for patsies, that the calls for "civility" are just an obfuscatory demand for capitulation and a cover for the right to indulge in the lowest and meanest kind of discourse. But judging from the past week's events, it's clear they haven't.

Here are links to a couple of articles to which Wonky Muse's post referred where the Republican projection strategy is on display:

MoveOn's McCarthy moment by Peter Feaver Boston Globe 09/11/07

MoveOn and McCarthy New York Sun editorial 09/13/07

Tags: al gore, antiwar movement, iraq war, moveon.org, petraeus, treason-baiting

Criticizing Petraeus

I was planning to post about the Republicans now-deeply ingrained treason-baiting tendencies. Which is what I plan to call it until I come across a better word. "Redbaiting" is what it was called back when Joe McCarthy and Pat McCarran did it. But since the Red Evil Empire of the Soviet Union no longer exists, and since red stands for Republicans now anyway in the US, "redbaiting" just doesn't describe it any more.

But then I saw this report from Gareth Porter, so I'll come back to my original idea later: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge by Gareth Porter Inter Press Service 09/12/07.

At the Congressional hearing where our Saviour-General David Petraeus was testifying this week, Republicans made a big show of being shocked, shocked that MoveOn.org was running an ad criticizing Petraeus and questioning his credibility.

According to Porter's report, MoveOn.org wasn't alone in criticizing the Saviour-General:

In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

Now whether or not you think, as Joan Walsh put it, that the MoveOn.org ad "was marred ... by the right-baiting play on Petraeus as "Betray us", calling him "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" strikes me as even less reverential.

Porter continues:

The policy context of Fallon's extraordinarily abrasive treatment of his subordinate was Petraeus's agreement in February to serve as front man for the George W. Bush administration's effort to sell its policy of increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq to Congress. ...

Fallon was strongly opposed to Petraeus's role as pitch man for the surge policy in Iraq adopted by Bush in December as putting his own interests ahead of a sound military posture in the Middle East and Southwest Asia - the area for which Fallon's CENTCOM is responsible.

The CENTCOM commander believed the United States should be withdrawing troops from Iraq urgently, largely because he saw greater dangers elsewhere in the region. "He is very focused on Pakistan," said a source familiar with Fallon's thinking, "and trying to maintain a difficult status quo with Iran."

I also found this encouraging:

One of Fallon's first moves upon taking command of CENTCOM was to order his subordinates to avoid the term "long war" - a phrase Bush and Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates had used to describe the fight against terrorism.

Fallon was signaling his unhappiness with the policy of U.S. occupation of Iraq for an indeterminate period. Military sources explained that Fallon was concerned that the concept of a long war would alienate Middle East publics by suggesting that U.S. troops would remain in the region indefinitely.

I always thought that "the Long War" was a kind of Orwellian propaganda name.

And Porter reports:

Fallon acquired a reputation for a willingness to stand up to powerful figures during his tenure as commander in chief of the Pacific Command from February 2005 to March 2007. He pushed hard for a conciliatory line toward and China, which put him in conflict with senior military and civilian officials with a vested interest in pointing to China as a future rival and threat.

He demonstrated his independence from the White House when he refused in February to go along with a proposal to send a third naval carrier task force to the Persian Gulf, as reported by IPS in May. Fallon questioned the military necessity for the move, which would have signaled to Iran a readiness to go to war. Fallon also privately vowed that there would be no war against Iran on his watch, implying that he would quit rather than accept such a policy. (my emphasis)

Wow!

His article also references other news reports:

Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting By Peter Baker, et al Washington Post 09/09/07.

U.S. Command Shortens Life of ‘Long War’ as a Reference by Michael Gordon New York Times 04/24/07. (Note: Gordon shared a byline with Judith Miller's on some of her most notorious WMD-in-Iraq articles, so his reporting always has to be taken with caution.)

General Is Front Man For Bush's Iraq Plan by Peter Baker Washington Post 02/07/07. This article reports on an incident that Porter indicates was one action that Admiral Fallon particularly disliked:

"I've been selling Petraeus to anybody who would listen," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who terms the Bush troop increase the "Petraeus Doctrine" and fetched senators off the floor to meet the general in McConnell's office. "He's the General Grant of the surge. He's our last best chance as a military commander to bring about a change on the ground." ...

Graham said he grabbed Petraeus last week and had him wait in McConnell's office while he ushered in senators to see the general.

Porter describes this arrangement in particular as "a highly unusual political role for an officer who had not yet taken command of a war".

Huckleberry Graham's February comment also reminds me of why his "questions" were so blatantly cheerleading.

Tags: gareth porter, iraq war, petraeus

Petraeus: Good for the Republicans?

Duncan "Atrios" Black often jokes about the media's tendency, especially the TV pundits, to reflexively declare any political development as "good for the Republicans". This morning's San Francisco Chronicle print edition carried two news articles (on page A3) on the testimony Monday of Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus. The onger one, under the byline of the Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead, Troop surge report isn't turning point everyone hoped for, had this lede:

The upbeat assessment Monday on the state of the war in Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker appeared to provide President Bush with the breathing space he needs to forestall major congressional defections from his war policy.

It's good for the Republicans! The online headline is, "Upbeat assessment buys Bush some time on Iraq".

The other story was a wire version of this one from the New York Times, Objectives can be met, but not quickly or easily, Petraeus says by David Sanger and David Cloud. (I can't find the same story on the New York Times site.) It's lede was:

Gen. David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, warned in stark terms against the kind of rapid pullback favored by the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, in a day of testimony that drove home the continuing inability of the Democrats to force a change in strategy in Iraq.

It's good for the Republicans!

If most voters are desperate to hear that the Iraq War will go on indefinitely with American troops committed to fighting there for the indefinite future, then it will be good for the Republicans.

Because in the House hearings Monday, the Republican members who spoke got across the message that the Republican Party supports the Iraq War. The Republican Party thinks things are going fine in the Iraq War. The Republican Party is willing to almost unanimously support the continuation of the Cheney-Bush war policies in the Iraq War. The Republican Party sees no foreseeable end to the Iraq War and are willing to keep American troops fighting there indefinitely.

Maybe MoveOn.org should just give money to Republican ads declaring how much the Republican Party supports the Iraq War. The Republican Congressmembers made a few specific points clearly in the House Petraeus hearings:

• The Republicans regard Gen. Petraeus as our Saviour in Iraq.

• The Republicans think it is wrong, disgusting, horrible to question or criticism the claims of our military and particularly of our Saviour-General Petraeus on the Iraq War.

• The Iraq War is mainly against "Al Qa'ida".

• The Iraq War is going really, really well, as well as it possibly could be going, unless maybe we'd had Saviour-General Petraeus in charge from the start. But it's going to be a long time before we achieve Victory so we have to be patient and let the war continue to go brilliantly for years and years and years.

As Republican Congressman Mike Pence put it on the PBS Newshour last night, "[Crocker] said there's been some gradual improvements, but he said it's a very, very slow incline." Maverick McCain said in his opening statement Tuesday at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that "the road ahead is long and tough".

Very, very slow progress, a "long and tough" war still ahead: that good enough for the Republican Party in the Iraq War, and we can expect a US exit from the Iraq War to be "very, very slow" if the Republican Party gets its way.

That message is "good for the Republicans"?

The only Republican Congressmember at the hearing Monday that seemed to take a genuinely critical stance toward the war was Walter Jones of North Carolina.

The Democrats managed to get across some very different points:

• The Democratic Party is opposed to the Iraq War.

• The Democratic Party wants American troops withdrawn from Iraq.

• Political reconciliation in Iraq, the original purpose of The Surge, is farther away than ever.

• We've been hearing optimistic predictions from the Cheney-Bush administration for over four years, and they've all turned out to be as bogus as Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction".

• Saviour-General Petraeus himself has been making optimistic projections for years.

• Other military leaders favor a more rapid withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

• The relationship of the Iraq War to the "global war on terror" (GWOT) is very tenuous.

• The justifications for the Iraq War have changed a number of times, from combating nonexistent WMDs to restraining Iranian influence.

• The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are a long way from being adequately prepared to defend their country and keep order over four years into the war.

• The available polls show that the American presence in Iraq is tremendously unpopular among Iraqis.

• The Iraq War is putting significant strains on the US military.

• The administration is making little meaningful effort to engage Syria and Iran diplomatically.

• The arguments made by the administration for the war are often weak or just goofy: if this is part of the GWOT, how can we say that "sectarian reconciliation" is sufficient to allow the US to reduce troops levels? How can we say The Surge is succeeding if the political reconciliation that was its purpose isn't moving forward?

• The administration and war supporters cite statements by Al Qa'ida and Iranian President Ahmadinejad to support the importance of the Iraq War - but those might not be the best authorities on what the best US policy needs to be.

• Recent high-level evaluations of The Surge, including the Jones report and the GAO report, present a more pessimistic picture than Saviour-General Petraeus and other administration spokespeople have presented.

I was impressed that Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman asked Petraeus if he would obey an order from Bush to attack Iran without Congressional authority for it.

But I would criticize the Democrats on some points. Some questioners wasted their time and diluted their own message by asking a series of questions before getting a response.

It's too easy to criticize people for what they didn't say. But someone should have asked about the air war. This is a very significant part of the military effort, and the heavy reliance on air power also gives the lie to the Cheney-Petraeus claims about progress in Iraq.

And someone should
have followed up on Petraeus' curious statement that the US isn't providing weapons to Sunni tribes. David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo made a plausible guess that this comma-dancing may be based on the notion that the US isn't giving weapons to the tribes, but instead giving them money to buy weapons.

It's probably not a big deal in Monday's context. But Ray McGovern notes that the Committee didn't bother to swear in the Saviour-General and the Ambassador at the start of the hearing.

Tags: democratic party, democrats, iraq war, petraeus, republican party, ryan crocker

Live-blogging Petraeus and Crocker testifying to the House (Update thru 2:30 PDT)

I'm posting here on the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to a Joint House Armed Service/Foreign Affairs Committee chaired by Democrat Ike Skelton of Missouri. It began at 9:30 AM PDT. I'm going to being updating this periodically as I watch. I've also posted a few reality-check links which I'll keep at the bottom as I update this.

Skelton opened with a statement that did a good job putting the testimony in the context of previous administration and military lies about progress in the Iraq War. He focused on the purpose of The Surge having been political progress which isn't happening.

It's good to have Democrats in a leadership position so they can frame a hearing in this way.

Tom Lantos (who was my Congressman for 11 years and I voted for him in every election) did a good job in his opening statement. He called Bush's war policy a "discredited policy" and emphasized that a majority of Congress and a majority of the American people want to get American troops out of Iraq.

Lantos also cited past problems like inadequate troop levels in the initial months of the occupation. And he was even more emphatic than Skelton by saying that no Cheney-Bush administration assertions about the Iraq War can be taken at face value. He cited the recent Jones and GAO reports on the lack of progress.

Lantos said that the administration had sent Petraeus and Crocker to try to sell the administration position on the war. "I don't buy it," he said.

He criticized the Maliki Shi'a government for supporting militias, death squads and sectarian fighters.

He even talked about the "short-sighted" nature of US support for the mujahideed in Afghanistan during the 1980s, groups which gave rise to the Taliban. (And Al Qa'ida, though he didn't say that explicitly.)

He "dramatic change of course" to get out of Iraq "now", for the good of Iraq and the United States.

Ranking Republican Duncan Hunter criticized war critics for questioning Petraeus' credibility. He said "duty, honor and country" was the basis on which "our great officers" operated. Good. Duncan Hunter and his Republican Party are unwilling to question the false claims of our glorious generals.

This is a good exposure of what the Republican Party's "support the troops" hype is really about: defending the inflated claims of generals who support the Republican Party's position on war and national security. unter tried to do what he could to intimidate Democrats from questioning our noble, honorable, infallible general and savior Petraeus. Excellent. The people all need to know how the Republicans approch this.

Hunter defended dissolving the Iraqi Army. He made a few ritual chants about Reagan and how he made the Berlin Wall fall and how the Commies were about to overwhelm us all in the 1980s and Reagan saved us.

Skelton responded well by supporting the integrity of the witnesses and emphasizing that the Committee expects them to provide independent testimony.

Congresswoman Ilean Ros-Lichtiner (R-FL) recited the "support the troops" mantra and pretended that the war was connected to the 9/11 attacks. Vague slogans. Good. The voters need to know how much and how unquestionably the Republican Party supports the Iraq War. She also dismissed the notion that Gen. Petreus' claims could be questioned, pretending it is questioning "the military". Both she and Hunter mentioned MoveOn.org's criticism of our Savior Gen. Petraeus in almost identical terms. Oh, and she cited Neville Chamberlain and the Munich Conference. Good grief! She also cited Reagan. She went on about how we had to beat the Islamunofascodefeatocratists in Iraq and yadda, yadda.

Petraeus tried to start at about 10:15 PDT but his microphone was malfunctioning. This gave us the chance to hear Skelton arguing, uh, bluntly on the side with Hunter and another Republican who wanted to eject audience members whose looks they didn't like.

The summary above goes through 10:25 PDT.

Petraeus our Saviour in Iraq started by claiming that the military objectives of The Surge are being achieved. He expects to start a slow drawdown soon to bring the US troops level in Iraq back to pre-Surge levels. He emphasized alleged Iranian involvement with "Iranian-supported militia extremists". He even claimed that the Iranian Al Quds force is trying to turn Iraqi militias into Hizbullah-like tools to wage war against the Iraqi state. There is no real evidence for this based on what's publicly available of which I'm aware. And it also doesn't really make sense.

Petraeus' testimony reminded me of Colin Powell's notorious 2003 to the United Nations about Iraq's threatening "weapons of mass destruction" (that didn't exist). Petraeus referred often to a chart, reciting alleged facts even though some of his factual claims are highly questionable.

One thing to keep in mind in hearing reports of death trends in Iraq is that attacks normally have dropped in the very hot summer months. So without the year-over-year comparisons by month, the monthly trends can't be meaningfully evaluated.

He also emphasized the role of "Al Qa'ida" in the Iraq War, with its "barbaric Al Qa'ida bombings", etc. He made the claim that The Surge caused Sunnis in Anbar province to turn against AQI (but see the citations below on this issue). And if Al Qa'ida is this much of the problem in Iraq, it's worth keeping front-and-center the fact that Al Qa'ida is a Sunni Salafist extremist group that is bitterly anti-Shi'a. Is the Shi'a theocracy in Iran really supporting them?

He says that US still can't hand main counterinsurgency responsibilities to the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF).

A "premature drawdown" would have "devastating consequences", he said. That is probably true in the short run, although his explicit prediction that Al Qa'ida would flourish is highly questionable in light of the Anbar Miracle that he promotes as great progress. Of course, the fact is that US presence has had and continues to have "devastating consequences". But Petraeus our Saviour didn't describe it that way.

He used the phrase "America's new greatest generation" to describe the soldiers. How many "greatest generations" are we going to have before this dumb phrase becomes obsolete?

The summary above goes through 11:00 PDT.

Ambassador Crocker's prepared statement was pretty forgettable. He sounded like a dull speaker at a civic club dutifully reciting the Republican Party line. He droned on about federalism and how these things take time. He compared today's situation in Iraq to the civil rights movement in the US. Riii-iight.

For what it's worth, he said that when Iraqis got a taste of Al Qa'ida rule in some local areas, they overwhelmingly rejected Al Qa'ida. That's great news! That means they won't need American troops to deal with Al Qa'ida so Iraq is unlikely to become a haven for Al Qa'ida. Mission accomplished. Let's bring the American troops home.

Also said Iran had provided "lethal capabilities to enemies of the Iraqi state".

Crocker also said that in 2006, Iraq almost became "unraveled". Say what? And all this time the administration and our unquestionably honest generals were telling us that things were going great, we were winning every battle, there was progress everywhere and so on? You might think from that they might have been, you know, bald-faced lying, wouldn't you? But we know that can't be. Just ask Duncan Hunter.

Otherwise, Crocker's prepared testimony was dull as dirt.

The summary above goes through 11:35 PDT.

Skelton expressed extreme skepticism about Crocker's and Petraeus' claims. In response, Crocker admitted that we're unlikely to see rapid progress on their own "benchmarks".

Lantos jammed Petraeus for making a fake comparison between his own "token" proposal and a hypothetical "rapid", irresponsible withdrawal. Petraeus claimed he had proposed "substantial" reductions in force levels there. Lantas made the point that other military experts and officers had proposed more rapdi withdrawals. Petraeus playing down that factor, saying that the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) all agreed with him.

Hunter tossed Petraeus a softball question to let him brag about how well things are going with developing the ISF and to make dubious claims about Iranian involvement.

Ros-Lichtiner asked another softball to ask Petraeus and Crocker to recite the Party line on Iran, Syria and the dire risk of pulling American troops out of Iraq. Which they cheerfully proceeded to do.

The summary above goes through 12:15 PDT.

The Democrats have done an uneven job in questioning Petraeus and Crocker up to this point.

Among the Democrats, Gary Ackerman of New York made a strong point of pointing up that after over three hours testimony, no one had mentioned the alleged "international war on terrorism". He said that if they really believed that, Crocker and Petraeus would not be recommending troop drawdowns. He talked about the futility of trying to settle the Iraqi civil war. He asked, "how much more blood should we invest?" He asked them to say how many casualties they thought it would be worth in the next four years. This was a good way to put the real issue of costs and benefits in perspective.

He even interrupted Petraeus a couple of time when he was talking smack about Al Qa'ida to make the link. Petraeus side-stepped on whether AQI actually threatened the United States. Ackerman did a decent job of pressing him on his testimony that indicated ending the sectarian violence was now the mission, but still trying to use AQI as a selling point for continuing the war indefinitely.

Gene Taylor of Mississippi said the US-ISF partnership looked like a "partnership in words" to him and asked when it might become real. Petraeus recited an organization chart of reporting and consulting arrangement to duck the question. Taylor asked if there was an actual target date for the ISF to be fully ready to defend themselves. Petraeus didn't give a date.

Eni Faleomavaega of American Samoa asked about military overstretch. Petraeus ducked. He also brought up Gen. Shinseki's famous prewar recommendation for more troops, and Gen. Taguba's problems after he did his Abu Ghuraib report. He then asked if the thought Petraeus had enough troops. He ducked the question.

John Spratt of South Carolina asked Crocker whether political progress in Iraq could be reasonably expected to result from the surge, raising an important point.

Solomon Ortiz rasied the issue of more active diplomacy with surrounding countries. Petraeus recited the need to stop foreign fighters from coming to Iraq through Syria. Ortiz did follow up to highlight that Petraeus was ducking the question. But he didn't pick up on a comment by Petraeus about the need for more active measures in cyberspace, including the use of the Internet for "inspiration" of jihadists.

Howard Berman of California didn't do well. He asked a whole series of questions and asked Petraeus to respond to all of them in a group. This is a classic mistake and lets the respondent duck most everything in the questions, which Petraeus did. Interestingly, Petraeus denied that the US was arming Sunni tribes. (I'm assuming there's some comma-dancing involved there, because we know the US is arming some of them.)

The Republicans, not surprisingly, have so far stuck to the Party script pretty well. In general, they praised Petraeus profusely. Then they mentioned or alluded to a MoveOn.org ad criticizing Petraeus. Then they tossed out a softball question to allow Petraeus to recite the administration's line.

Jim Saxton of New Jersey said Evil would take over in Iraq if we left. Christopher Smith of New Jersey said that massive killing would happen if we leave. John McHugh of New York gave Petraeus a softball to link the Iraq War to the "global war on terror" (GWOT), after he had faltered on the question when Ackerman pressed him. Donald Manzullo of Illinois also gave hime a softball to link the Iraq War and the GWOT.

Donald Manzullo of Illinois let Petraeus go back and make more vague allegations about Iranian assistance to anti-government forces in Iraq based on (of course!) secret information.

Roscoe Bartle of Maryland griped about reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post about the way casualties are counted. Petraeus answered it carefully to reinforce Bartle's point. Geoff Davis of Kentucky recited Petraeus' virtues and gave him a softball to recite how necessary the war is.

Rep. Royce of California, who had an unfortunate resemblance to Joe McCarthy on screen, gave him the chance to talk about the supposedly central role of Al Qa'ida and the bad role of Syria.

The summary above goes through 1:38 PDT.

In the last segment I', reporting live here (which omits what should be the last hour and a half of the hearing), Democrat Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii made the point that basically there is no military policy in Iraq other than indefinite occupaton. And he mentioned the Hunt Oil deal recently reported. And he even said "Iraq is not a sovereign country".

Kathy Castor of Florida cited various reports about the sad shape of the ISF and brought up the shifting justifications for the war. Both good points, but it was structed as a direct question to force Petraeus to address either point.

Donald Payne of New Jersey asked a sadly rambling question about the degree of hostility to Al Qa'ida of the Anbar Sunni tribes and the poor performance of the ISF.

Silvestre Reyes of Texas asked a much better, more direct question about the state of the ISF and the pessimistic evaluation of it in the Jones report. Petraeus dancing around it.

Republican Buck McKeon's softball question was to let Petraeus talk about how great the Army is doing in Iraq despite the extended deployments and multiple deployments. "Morale is solid", Petraeus said.

Steve Chabot of Ohio followed by talking about what a bad guy Saddam Hussein's son Uday was and asked Petraeus to essentially repeat what he just said about morale. If you listened carefully, Petraeus said in a vague way that morale was mainly driven by unit leadership and cohesion. Chabot also asked him to talk about how bad Muqtada al-Sadr is. Both Chabot and Petraeus mentioned his being in Iran.

Overall, Petraeus' performance was impressive in a technical sense that he was very articulate and didn't slip into any embarassing statements of difference with the Cheney-Bush policy. Crocker was so bland and dull that no one would have noticed if he had. If there was a "gotcha" moment, it would be Petraeus' dancing around Gary Ackerman's question about the Iraq War's relationship to the GWOT.

But I doubt most voters seeing Petraeus would have found much to change their minds and get them to be more enthusiastic about the Iraq War.

Unfortunately, the Republicans did better in their questioning than the Dems did. The Reps had a simpler task: their script must have been something like (1) praise Petraeus; (2) attack MoveOn.org; (3) toss Petraeus a softball question to let him recite administration talking points. It was noticeable how closely they stuck to that script.

The Dems needed to state the problems that Petraeus was trying to avoid or smooth over, and to try to get him to address those concerns or admit that he couldn't. The biggest problem I saw was that several Dems (Berman, Castor, Payne) wasted their chance by tossing out several questions in sucession and then asking for a response to all of them. It let Petraeus go easily back to his talking points and also diffused the emphasis that they might have put on one or two of their points.

But the Dems did a decent job, on the whole. And Tom Lantos, Gary Ackerman and Gene Taylor were particularly good.

The summary above goes through 2:30 PDT.

Links on the Iraq War:

Security in Iraq still elusive by Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers 09/09/07:

Baghdad has become more segregated. Sunni Muslims in the capital now live in ghettos encircled by concrete blast walls to stop militia attacks and car bombs. Shiite militias continue to push to control the city’s last mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods in the southwest, by murdering and intimidating Sunni residents and, sometimes, their Shiite neighbors. Services haven't improved across most of the capital — the international aid group Oxfam reported in July that only 30 percent of Iraqis have access to clean water, compared with 50 percent in 2003 — and tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing their homes each month in search of safety.

Iraqi security forces remain heavily infiltrated by militias, and political leaders continue to intervene in their activities.

Civilian deaths haven't decreased in any significant way across the country, according to statistics from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and numbers gathered by McClatchy Newspapers show no consistent downward trend even in Baghdad, despite military assertions to the contrary. The military has provided no hard numbers to back the claim.

The only sign of progress is in the homogenous Sunni Arab province of Anbar, where tribes have turned on al Qaida in Iraq and established relative security in a once violent area. But that success has little to do with the 4,000 U.S. troops who were sent to Anbar as part of the surge of 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. Instead, it began more than four months earlier, with the formation last September of the Anbar Salvation Council to fight the escalating terror of Sunni extremists. Officials agree that the anti-Islamist coalition in Anbar has yet to ally itself with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and a recent National Intelligence Estimate warned that it might even threaten it. (my emphasis)

And the Anbar Miracle? The administration is touting this as a great success but Sunni insurgent groups have fought "Al Qa'ida in Iraq" (AQI) and have proved to be effective at it. Which one might think would be an argument that American aren't necessary to fight AQI. But for Cheney and Bush, it's somehow an argument for the Americans to stay indefinitely.

"Officials agree that the anti-Islamist coalition in Anbar has yet to ally itself with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and a recent National Intelligence Estimate warned that it might even threaten it", Fadel writes. That would be the American-backed government, whose Sunni opponents the US is arming and empowering as part of the "Anbar" approach.

Oh, and there's this:

The tribal rebellion against al Qaida in Iraq began in September 2006, well before the surge was even contemplated. That's when tribal leaders, fed up with al Qaida in Iraq’s attacks on moderate Sunnis and its efforts to impose strict Islamic fundamentalism, formed the Anbar Salvation Council to battle the group.

Tribal sheik Fassal Gaoud, a former Anbar governor, told McClatchy Newspapers in June that the tribes previously had asked for U.S. help in attacking the group, but had been rebuffed. By the time U.S. troops began working with the tribes, the battle against al Qaida was well under way. Gaoud, however, was killed in a bombing at the Mansour Melia hotel in central Baghdad in July in the midst of the U.S. surge.

“We did in three months what they couldn't do in four years," Ali Hatam Ali al Suleiman, another tribal leader, told McClatchy in June. (my emphasis)

In Baghdad, she writes, a series of elaborate concrete barriers seems to have given some communities a greater sense of security in their neighborhoods. But it hasn't made it a peaceful city, not by a long shot. As grim as the fact is, the ethnic cleansing which has gone on in Baghdad could reduce some violence because the targets for sectarian militias are so widely dispersed as they once were before Cheney and Bush liberated the Iraqis.

This administration has created a massive nightmare in Iraq. And they can't realistically face the consequences of the disaster they've created.

Investigative reporter Laura Rozen passes on an analysis from "a knowledgeable Iraq observer" on the Anbar Miracle, Fantasy Island War and Piece blog 09/10/07. That analysis also references Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt SmaWarsJournal.com Dave Kilcullen 08/29/07. Kilcullen is a leading expert on counterinsurgency warfare, though caution is in order in looking at his reference to alleged Iranian support of Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida group.

Tom Engelhardt provides some of the numbers with links to two similar previous analyses in Tomgram: Launching Brand Petraeus TomDispatch.com 09/09/07.

The AP's Richard Lardner discusses the figures, as well, in Iraq debate is sea of statistics 09/09/07.

Steve Clemons comments on an article by Bruce Ackerman on the role of Petraeus under Cheney and Bush right now in Corrupting the Military: Petraeus as Bush's Political Spear-Carrier Washington Note blog 09/05/07.

Mark Tushnet, however, thinks that concern is exaggerated: The "Petraeus" [read Bush] Report and Civilian Control of the Military Balkinization blog 09/10/07.

Tags: iraq war, petraeus, ryan crocker