The Cult Of Petraeus

Over at Balloon Juice Bernard Finel explains The Real Sin in the Petraeus Case.  Read the entire thing but here is a snippet:

Petraeus deliberately sought to woo a range of folks, compromising them with access, and using them in ways that blurred lines of professional integrity. Just as it isn’t clear what Broadwell was in this—a grad student? Reporter? Publicist? Officer? Public intellectual?—it isn’t clear what, say, Tom Ricks is. Well, that’s not true… we know that Ricks is an ignorant blowhard, but I mean aside from that. But this blurring of lines, this use of “reporters” and “independent analysts” to promote Petraeus personally and his policy preferences, was a key factor in both the Iraqi and Afghan “surges.”

Bernard points out that Spencer Akerman has the integrity to admit he was taken.
No matter his position or mission Petraeus always surrounded himself with a PR machine to create the cult of Petraeus.

Perceptions

The few remaining supporters of the invasion and occupation of Iraq are not only talking about mythological improvements in Iraq but of mythological changes in perception. Last week we had Lieberman camp "Democrats" Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack told us how things are improving in Iraq and that we can still "win". Willaim Kristol tells us public opinion has turned based on the column by uber hawks O'Hanlon and Pollack. All three have been consistently wrong about all things Iraq from the beginning but still think we should listen to their "wisdom". Of course they fail to mention that Iraq is no closer to a political solution than it was three years ago and in fact the country is falling apart. Former war supporter Michael Ignatieff acknowledges that in the lead up to the invasion those who “truly showed good judgment on Iraq” might have had no more information than those who got it wrong, but did not make the mistake of confusing “wishes for reality.” All these years later it's still going on. Wishes don't make reality.

Over at RealClearPolitics Michael Barone continues the fantasy today.
Perceptions of Iraq War Are Starting to Shift

It's not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when The New York Times printed an opinion article by Brookings Institution analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq.

Yes, progress. O'Hanlon and Pollack supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- Pollack even wrote a book urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein -- but they have sharply criticized military operations there in the ensuing years.

"As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq," they wrote, "we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory,' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."

Their bottom line: "There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008."

Of course the justification given for the surge was to give the political process and the government time. As we have seen the political situation is even less viable. If there are indeed some military advances they are meaningless if the political climate continues to deteriorate. By the time General Petraeus reports in a month the Iraqis may have no government at all. A few more months is not going to make any difference.

Wishes don't make reality

Bush and his military commanders acted as if that reality hadn't changed, until the voters weighed in last November. Then, Bush made changes, installing new commanders and ordering a surge -- an increase in troops, and a more forward strategy of confronting and cleaning out al-Qaida terrorists. And the reality apparently has once again changed.

It can be argued that the surge will prove insufficient to produce the "sustainable stability" that O'Hanlon and Pollack see as a possible result. Serious military experts have argued that we still don't have enough troops or that we won't be able to keep enough troops in place long enough -- current force rotations indicate a net drawdown of troops next spring. And certainly there is room to make the argument that Bush should have acted sooner, as the results of the Samarra bombing became apparent months before the voters' wakeup call.

But it is also reasonably clear that Boyda's "reality of this issue" -- that our effort in Iraq has definitively and finally failed so clearly that there should be no further discussion -- may no longer be operative. That, instead of accepting defeat and inviting chaos, we may be able to achieve a significant measure of success.

No Mr Barone, your wishes may not have changed but neither has the reality. King George has created a failed state and the king is running out of horses and men and can't put it back together again.

Battling for Iraq - three years later

Many of us have been questioning the credibility of General Patraeus and have doubts that anything he says this September will be believable. I did so myself over at The Gun Toting Liberal the other day and incurred some rightwing wrath here and here. My response was this.

I find it amusing that folks at QandO and the others on the right accuse us of questioning the credibility of Gen. Petraeus. I’m sorry but the general has done that all by himself by saying little that wasn’t administration spin and being proved wrong over and over again. His appearance on the Hewitt spin machine was just icing on the cake.

Paul Krugman discussed General Patraeus in his column All the President’s Enablers and said this:

Thanks to that vote, nothing will happen until Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, delivers his report in September. But don’t expect too much even then. I hope he proves me wrong, but the general’s history suggests that he’s another smart, sensible enabler.

I don’t know why the op-ed article that General Petraeus published in The Washington Post on Sept. 26, 2004, hasn’t gotten more attention. After all, it puts to rest any notion that the general stands above politics: I don’t think it’s standard practice for serving military officers to publish opinion pieces that are strikingly helpful to an incumbent, six weeks before a national election.

In the article, General Petraeus told us that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously.” And those security forces were doing just fine: their leaders “are displaying courage and resilience” and “momentum has gathered in recent months.”

In other words, General Petraeus, without saying anything falsifiable, conveyed the totally misleading impression, highly convenient for his political masters, that victory was just around the corner. And the best guess has to be that he’ll do the same thing three years later.

Here is the op-ed article Krugman refers to:

Battling for Iraq
By David H. Petraeus
Sunday, September 26, 2004; Page B07

I'm not going to reprint any of it here, Krugman gives a good summary above, but go read it and encourage everyone you know to do the same. It will be much easier to put whatever Petraeus says this September in context. Although the timing of the September, 2004 Op-Ed is suspicious I don't want to assign motive but it does question his credibility. Three years later we have not turned the corner and in fact things are much worse than they were then and the US is even deeper in the desert quagmire. You have two choices when you listen to the Generals report in September, it's political spin or he simply doesn't know what he is talking about.

Cross posted at The Gun Toting Liberal