This week is (once again) going to be Petraeus and Crocker week on Capitol Hill, with the military and civilian heads of the US occupation in regime appearing before a slew of Senate and House committees, starting Tuesday.
When they were last there, last September, the best question of all came from our (very) senior senator here in Virginia, John Warner, who asked Petraeus flat out whether the Iraq war was making America any safer.
Petraeus answered, “Sir, I don’t know exactly.”
All the senators and members of congress should make a point of asking Petraeus– and Crocker– that question once again, and probing their thinking on this issue a bit more deeply than Warner did last Septamber.
Since then, an additional 243 US service-members and thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the war; and somewhere in excess of an additional $84 billion of taxpayers’ money has been poured into the sewer of the war (that is, in good part, into the pockets of the shareholders of Halliburton, etc.)
I was struck by Petraeus’s answer at the time, thinking it seemed to reveal that they guy had some core of professional integrity. Either that, or naivete, inasmuch as he seemed unable to think fast enough to provide a fudged, more “diplomatic”, answer.
Or maybe both.
But the answer was also important because it revealed the degree to which Petraeus was indicating that he judged that the question being asked was ways above his pay-grade.
No particular surprise there, especially given that he had only received a very hastily organized promotion to four-star general just shortly before his appointment as head of the “Multi-National (!) Force– Iraq”. Prior to that, he had co-authored a handbook at the level of operational art, that is, in the waging of a counter-insurgency. But he had not operated at the level of strategic thinking required to consider questions like which counter-insurgency should one seek to win, and on what terms? Or: which counter-insurgencies are worth investing a lot in? Or: on what basis should one make a judgment like this? Or: in a time of scarce resources (such as manpower), how should one prioritize one’s commitments to the fighting of various different battles/counter-insurgencies occurring in different theaters?
(This last one is the Dannatt question, of course.)
So I was reminded of Petraeus’s painfully honest answer of last September when I read this article by Michael Abramowitz in today’s WaPo. Abramowitz was examining the high degree of importance Pres. Bush gives to receiving military advice, on a regular basis, directly from Petraeus.
He writes,
- By all accounts, Petraeus’s view that a “pause” [in the drawdown of troops from Iraq] is needed this summer before troop cuts can continue has prevailed in the White House, trumping concerns by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others that the Army’s long-term health could be threatened by the enduring presence of many combat forces in Iraq.
Abramowitz also notes the degree to which modern technology has allowed Bush to keep in much closer direct contact with Petraeus than any previous war-time president could maintain with any of their field commanders:
- improved videoconferencing technology has allowed the president to communicate to an unprecedented degree with commanders on the battlefield… Bush has also held videoconferences with Casey and other previous Iraq commanders, but after Petraeus and Crocker were appointed last year, the process was institutionalized in a regular Monday morning war council between Washington and Baghdad. (A similar Afghanistan meeting takes place every two to three weeks, a White House spokesman said.)
That last detail is notable: Iraq once a week; Afghanistan, every two to three weeks. H’mmm…
Then this,
- those who have witnessed the Monday videoconferences describe Petraeus as a gifted briefer who moves beyond the dry recitation of the metrics of battle — enemy killed and captured — to describe how military developments interact with political ones…
Bush, sitting in the White House Situation Room, often takes the lead on political issues, such as dealings with Iran or Iraqi politics. [Ohmigod, I have to say this is a very scary thought…] But officials said he is deferential to Petraeus on military matters. The president “sets the goals,” Gates said. “He expects the military professional to handle the mission.”
While Bush and Petraeus are said to have bonded over their love of exercise [!], administration officials describe their relationship as more professional than friendly.
So here is my concern– and it is evidently one that has been shared by many other people, including Petraeus’s superiors in the chain of command, as well as, according to Abramowitz, the chair of the senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin: If Bush’s main and continuing way of getting military advice about the war in Iraq is from the commander in Iraq, at what point does he get the advice he needs about the overall strategic importance of that battlefield, relative to other calls that may be made on the US military, in Afghanistan or elsewhere?
Abramowitz reports that Carl Levin said, quite correctly, that,
- Bush should rely primarily on the advice of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Not only are they General Petraeus’s superiors,” Levin said, “but they have the broad view of our national security needs, including Afghanistan, and the risks posed by stretching the force too thin.”
He writes that Bush’s insistence on dealing directly with Petraeus, “created friction that helped spur the departure last month of Adm. William J. ‘Fox’ Fallon, who, while Petraeus’s boss as chief of U.S. Central Command, found his voice eclipsed on Iraq.”
He writes that Fallon and Petraeus, “differed over military planning and the scale and pace of the drawdown. Fallon and other top military officials have also voiced their concerns to Congress, in public testimony and behind closed doors.”
He also writes that– just as I would have expected under these circumstances– Fallon’s successor as head of Centcom, JCS Chairman Mullen, and Secdef Gates, all make a point of trying to sit in on Bush’s weekly videoconferences with Petraeus, whenever possible.
Hence, among all the other dysfunctional consequences of this bizarre arrangement, you have the spectacle of all three of these very senior links in the nation’s chain of military command having to invest considerable time and energy simply in trying to keep tabs on whatever it is that Petraeus and the Prez are cooking up between the two of them.
Abramowitz also writes this:
- Some officials said Petraeus is pushing on an open door with Bush. The president has privately expressed impatience with military concerns over the health of the force, telling the Joint Chiefs that if they are worried about breaking the Army, the worst thing would be to lose in Iraq, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Ah, of course, this is why we do not need Gen. Petraeus to be a great strategist at the world level– because we have a president who is making these large-scale judgments on his own… a president who still thinks the US can “win” in Iraq, while also not suffering any catastrophic setbacks anywhere else.
Be scared. Be very scared indeed.
Sounds like the President still likes to play at being a soldier. Truly, as F Scott Fitzgerald said, there are no second acts in American lives
While Sen. Lugar was still Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said something to the effect that he had never found a way to provide his views to the administration. He lamented how closed they are to any participation from anyone except a “private” group inside the administration.
That style of behavior reminds me of the same style that the Soviet Union increasingly followed until they collapsed. It also reminds me of Virginia’s Byrd Machine that dominated politics in Virginia until the mid 1970’s.
One of my very favorite Professors, Professor Warner Moss at William and Mary taught that the best way to defeat a closed machine like the Byrd Machine is to recruit broad participation. The Byrd Machine really had a small base and did not know how to compete when faced with broad participation.
Sure enough, during the second half of the ‘70’s, local voters became fed-up with their closed society style city councils and county boards. The idea to throw them out erupted almost spontaneously and simultaneously across Virginia. Voters from Hampton to Lynchburg replaced their city councils 100%.
Now, our national politics seem to also behave like a private club that serves a few private interests. The military/industrial complex has become an important employer in almost every congressional district. Naturally, that interest group can influence congressional votes for war. Many of he neo-cons leaders have livelihoods that have largely depended upon contracts with right-wing factions in Israel. Oil companies can make record profits while the truckers must pay $4.00 for a gallon of diesel fuel.
With that combination of private closed interests in charge of our foreign policies, it is little wonder why we follow the policies that we have.
If recent history is of any use, does it mean that our policy makers are vulnerable to falling down in a big heap? Anything that we can do to increase participation probably will help the process. If that happens, it won’t matter for long what the General and the President decide in their closed private meetings.
Bob Spencer
Forty years ago the US military instituted the “project manager” concept for weapons development, and this procedure was also adopted in the civilian sector. Under this concept a commander deals directly with a project manager who has direct responsibility for a given enterprise, bypassing the normal line and staff organization. The PM draws on the instituted organization for support but he iss directly responsible for completing the project successfully.
This is the model for the Bush/Petraeus arrangement, and it makes sense. Why deal with intermediaries stuck in an archaic middle-management-heavy organization about Iraq, which is characterized not by large unit maneuvers but by a politically-based complicated military occupation?
Besides, Gates and Mullen (and Crocker) are non-army lightweights (read transcripts of their press conferences and yawn) but even if they weren’t the only things they know about Iraq is what Petraeus tells them. Same deal with CENTCOM.
By the way, the conflict in Iraq is not an insurgency, an armed revolt against an established government. It is an occupation resistance augmented by tribal warfare. There is no functioning government in Iraq. Counter-insurgency just sounds better than occupation resistance, like defense department and defense expenditures sound better than aggression department and aggression expenditures.
The Bush Bubble has a profound shortcoming:
The Bush administration has no learning curve.
Like WWI Generals the Bush White House keeps doing the same bloody thing over and over and failing every time.
An adversary’s power should be measured in political support rather than firepower; and the net effect of the offensive invariably leaves the enemy strengthened and the U.S. and its allies even weaker than before they launched the offensive.
Washington Punditry and Corporate Media totally ignore this crazy repetition of failure.
Re. Lugar: I don’t give a **** about his problems getting through to Bush: if he really cared about that, he would have rebelled against the GOP lockstep on the war long ago. He knows full well the war and occupation is wrong and illegal and has since day one. It’s hard for me to understand how someone could totally misplace their conscience, as he seems to have done for five years.
Re. Petraeus: I think that one line from his testimony is a very, very thin basis for attributing any integrity to him. As I understand it, the book on insurgency was not written by him. Others wrote it and he took credit. Also, he has lied or misrepresented repeatedly about what is going on in Iraq and particularly on Iran’s supposed involvement. He is exactly what Fallon called him out as, as far as I can tell: a total yes man.
Right now, he is Bush’s yes man. That makes him possibly the most dangerous man in the world right now.
Bush wants a reason to attack Iran. Petraeus will give him his reason this week. It doesn’t have to be true. It doesn’t have to be sufficient, even if true. Like Rove, like Gonzales, like everyone Bush likes to work with, Petraeus is a yes man. This week is the week of the big “YES”.
Unless of course Congress grills him the way they did Gonzales. The chances of that are, what, nil? Less than nil?
Re. Lugar: I don’t give a **** about his problems getting through to Bush: if he really cared about that, he would have rebelled against the GOP lockstep on the war long ago. He knows full well the war and occupation is wrong and illegal and has since day one. It’s hard for me to understand how someone could totally misplace their conscience, as he seems to have done for five years.
Re. Petraeus: I think that one line from his testimony is a very, very thin basis for attributing any integrity to him. As I understand it, the book on insurgency was not written by him. Others wrote it and he took credit. Also, he has lied or misrepresented repeatedly about what is going on in Iraq and particularly on Iran’s supposed involvement. He is exactly what Fallon called him out as, as far as I can tell: a total yes man.
Right now, he is Bush’s yes man. That makes him possibly the most dangerous man in the world right now.
Bush wants a reason to attack Iran. Petraeus will give him his reason this week. It doesn’t have to be true. It doesn’t have to be sufficient, even if true. Like Rove, like Gonzales, like everyone Bush likes to work with, Petraeus is a yes man. This week is the week of the big “YES”.
Unless of course Congress grills him the way they did Gonzales. The chances of that are, what, nil? Less than nil?
This page was automatically translated from Arabic.
“Far from the occupation …
Without people of Iraq and the people of Iraq without .. Are saying such deception, or a new rhetorical Thoemat hypothetical?
When thinking man thresholds American sacred thresholds here I mean the White House, the Pentagon, CIA people and be replaced by erasing the latest symbolic presence be equal to the absence of actual people.. True that (the victor) is a history written with “Vico” but write the story of the last, until yesterday near the American story and this is part of the lying media played by the Kingdom of Habib Sadr engulfment of the facts or coloration of cultural propaganda carried out by the Republic and its long (Mam Fakhri Karim), which resembles the picture that also lied to delete them one of the most important elements of an Iraqi, this false information hypocrite cultural inheritance returned once again strongly repressive old and by the frantic race to new strains of the killers, he returned to swim at the pools of blood, it is Fallujah, which has no more than a witness to its destruction ruin himself, to the city of hit-and-run and scourge (routers blood) via Baghdad, which had been converted into a large cemetery graves and competition driving Najaf and the rest is not the end of Iraq’s cities and Krabh.
”
أبعد من عملية احتلال …
عراق بلا شعب وشعب بلا عراق .. هل تعتبر مقولة كهذه خديعة جديدة أم تهويمات بلاغية افتراضية؟ فحين يفكر رجل العتبات الأمريكية المقدسة ـ أعني بالعتبات هنا البيت الأبيض، البنتاغون، وكالة المخابرات المركزية ـ بمحو شعب واستبداله بآخر فإن حضوره الرمزي يكون مساوياً لغيابه الفعلي كشعب . صحيح أن (المنتصر) هو من يكتب التاريخ بتعبير “غرامشي” ولكن من يكتب الحكاية الأخيرة، حتى الأمس القريب كانت الحكاية أمريكية وهذا جزء من الكذب الإعلامي الذي تقوم به مملكة حبيب الصدر بابتلاعها للحقائق أو التلون الثقافي الدعائي الذي تقوم به جمهورية المدى ورئيسها (مام فخري كريم) والذي يشبه أيضاً كذب الصورة التي حُذف منها أحد أهم عناصرها وهو العراقي، فهذا الإعلامي الكاذب ـ الثقافي المنافق عاد مجدداً بقوة الإرث القمعي القديم وبفعل السباق المحموم لسلالات القتلة الجدد، عاد ليسبح على برك الدم فمن الفلوجة التي لم يبق شاهداً على خرابها سوى الخراب نفسه، إلى مدينة الكر والفر والبلاء (وفقه الدم) مروراً ببغداد التي تم تحويلها إلى مقبرة كبيرة تنافس مقابر وسراديب النجف وليس انتهاء بباقي مدن العراق وخرائبه .
http://www.kitabat.com/i37473.htm
Salah,
You, personally, are a much better translator into English than the machine is.
IRAQ……IRAQ….
Was US promise a Free and Democratic Iraq, now on the ground seeing Iraqi-stan.
The battle now between US and Iraqistan!
HERE, BULLET
BRIAN TURNER
ASHBAH
General Barry R McCaffrey testimony for the Senate Foreign Relations Hearing on 2 April 2008 (pdf).
We now have brilliant new national security leadership in place:
The Maliki Government is dysfunctional. He must:
The Iranians are playing a very dangerous role. They are supporting Iraqi Shia factions with: money, advisors, training in Iran, EFP’s, mortars, rockets, automatic weapons, and belligerence.
6.We have never had in our country’s history a more battle
-hardened US military force; courage (34,000 killed and wounded), leadership, initiative, intelligence, fires discipline, civic action. Our battalion and company commanders are defacto the low level government of Iraq.