George Finds Evil
I stubbed a toe on this quote from Dan Froomkin in his White House Watch post today:
"Look, people who kill innocent men, women and children to achieve political objectives are evil, that's what I think," Bush said.
Let's see now, what does that evoke? Certainly not the idea that we cannot countenance any planning for even a phased drawdown of US forces in Iraq. How about an indefinite "surge" of more young women and men into a lost deadly cause largely to preserve face for this sorry little monkey-prez and continue to fill the coffers of the cheneygargoyle. What if we even for once heard our elected officials acknowledge and talk about the euphemistic "collateral damage"? How about some dialogue about the use of depleted uranium in that few hours when the Rumsfeld approach actually had folks with an IQ over 80 briefly enthusiastic? How's that leukemia treatment going now, guys?
Oh please.
I have my suspicions as to our toy-cowboy's familiarity with Freud and Greek tragedy. But I'll be damned - could he be finally beginning to own up? Of course he can't say the words (he's still competing for the Most-Spoiled-Brat-of-the-Universe Title, and has that bullroarer codpiece ready), but Allah be praised, his inner self seems to be vibrating through the wires with that confessional!
It has been so long in coming.
But much as it a relief to encounter something resembling an addict's preliminary fumbling attempts to at least abstractly describe his own behavior, this unpleasant reality reported by AlterNet documents the criminally dishonest communications of people supposedly answerable to us for directing and managing the military as We the People would have it done:
It was The Washington Post that first quantified General Petraeus's remarkable ascension. President Bush, who mentioned his new Iraq commander's name only six times as the surge rolled out in January, has cited him more than 150 times in public utterances since, including 53 in May alone.
As always with this White House's propaganda offensives, the message in Mr. Bush's relentless repetitions never varies. General Petraeus is the "main man." He is the man who gives "candid advice." Come September, he will be the man who will give the president and the country their orders about the war.
And so another constitutional principle can be added to the long list of those junked by this administration: the quaint notion that our uniformed officers are supposed to report to civilian leadership. In a de facto military coup, the commander in chief is now reporting to the commander in Iraq. We must "wait to see what David has to say," Mr. Bush says.
Actually, we don't have to wait. We already know what David will say. He gave it away to The Times of London last month, when he said that September "is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy." In other words: Damn the report (and that irrelevant Congress that will read it) -- full speed ahead. There will be no change in policy. As Michael Gordon reported in The New York Times last week, General Petraeus has collaborated on a classified strategy document that will keep American troops in Iraq well into 2009 as we wait for the miracles that will somehow bring that country security and a functioning government.
Though General Petraeus wrote his 1987 Princeton doctoral dissertation on "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam," he has an unshakable penchant for seeing light at the end of tunnels. It has been three Julys since he posed for the cover of Newsweek under the headline "Can This Man Save Iraq?" The magazine noted that the general's pacification of Mosul was "a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way." Four months later, the police chief installed by General Petraeus defected to the insurgents, along with most of the Sunni members of the police force. Mosul, population 1.7 million, is now an insurgent stronghold, according to the Pentagon's own June report.
By the time reality ambushed his textbook victory, the general had moved on to the mission of making Iraqi troops stand up so American troops could stand down. "Training is on track and increasing in capacity," he wrote in The Washington Post in late September 2004, during the endgame of the American presidential election. He extolled the increased prowess of the Iraqi fighting forces and the rebuilding of their infrastructure.
The rest is tragic history. Were the Iraqi forces on the trajectory that General Petraeus asserted in his election-year pep talk, no "surge" would have been needed more than two years later. We would not be learning at this late date, as we did only when Gen. Peter Pace was pressed in a Pentagon briefing this month, that the number of Iraqi battalions operating independently is in fact falling -- now standing at a mere six, down from 10 in March.
But even more revealing is what was happening at the time that General Petraeus disseminated his sunny 2004 prognosis. The best account is to be found in The Occupation of Iraq, the authoritative chronicle by Ali Allawi published this year by Yale University Press. Mr. Allawi is not some anti-American crank. He was the first civilian defense minister of postwar Iraq and has been an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; his book was praised by none other than the Iraq war cheerleader Fouad Ajami as "magnificent."
Mr. Allawi writes that the embezzlement of the Iraqi Army's $1.2 billion arms procurement budget was happening "under the very noses" of the Security Transition Command run by General Petraeus: "The saga of the grand theft of the Ministry of Defense perfectly illustrated the huge gap between the harsh realities on the ground and the Panglossian spin that permeated official pronouncements." Mr. Allawi contrasts the "lyrical" Petraeus pronouncements in The Post with the harsh realities of the Iraqi forces' inoperable helicopters, flimsy bulletproof vests and toy helmets. The huge sums that might have helped the Iraqis stand up were instead "handed over to unscrupulous adventurers and former pizza parlor operators."
Well, anyone can make a mistake. And when General Petraeus cited soccer games as an example of "the astonishing signs of normalcy" in Baghdad last month, he could not have anticipated that car bombs would kill at least 50 Iraqis after the Iraqi team's poignant victory in the Asian Cup semifinals last week. This general may well be, as many say, the brightest and bravest we have. But that doesn't account for why he has been invested by the White House and its last-ditch apologists with such singular power over the war.
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"Look, people who kill innocent men, women and children to achieve political objectives are evil, that's what I think," Bush said.
Let's see now, what does that evoke? Certainly not the idea that we cannot countenance any planning for even a phased drawdown of US forces in Iraq. How about an indefinite "surge" of more young women and men into a lost deadly cause largely to preserve face for this sorry little monkey-prez and continue to fill the coffers of the cheneygargoyle. What if we even for once heard our elected officials acknowledge and talk about the euphemistic "collateral damage"? How about some dialogue about the use of depleted uranium in that few hours when the Rumsfeld approach actually had folks with an IQ over 80 briefly enthusiastic? How's that leukemia treatment going now, guys?
Oh please.
I have my suspicions as to our toy-cowboy's familiarity with Freud and Greek tragedy. But I'll be damned - could he be finally beginning to own up? Of course he can't say the words (he's still competing for the Most-Spoiled-Brat-of-the-Universe Title, and has that bullroarer codpiece ready), but Allah be praised, his inner self seems to be vibrating through the wires with that confessional!
It has been so long in coming.
But much as it a relief to encounter something resembling an addict's preliminary fumbling attempts to at least abstractly describe his own behavior, this unpleasant reality reported by AlterNet documents the criminally dishonest communications of people supposedly answerable to us for directing and managing the military as We the People would have it done:
It was The Washington Post that first quantified General Petraeus's remarkable ascension. President Bush, who mentioned his new Iraq commander's name only six times as the surge rolled out in January, has cited him more than 150 times in public utterances since, including 53 in May alone.
As always with this White House's propaganda offensives, the message in Mr. Bush's relentless repetitions never varies. General Petraeus is the "main man." He is the man who gives "candid advice." Come September, he will be the man who will give the president and the country their orders about the war.
And so another constitutional principle can be added to the long list of those junked by this administration: the quaint notion that our uniformed officers are supposed to report to civilian leadership. In a de facto military coup, the commander in chief is now reporting to the commander in Iraq. We must "wait to see what David has to say," Mr. Bush says.
Actually, we don't have to wait. We already know what David will say. He gave it away to The Times of London last month, when he said that September "is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy." In other words: Damn the report (and that irrelevant Congress that will read it) -- full speed ahead. There will be no change in policy. As Michael Gordon reported in The New York Times last week, General Petraeus has collaborated on a classified strategy document that will keep American troops in Iraq well into 2009 as we wait for the miracles that will somehow bring that country security and a functioning government.
Though General Petraeus wrote his 1987 Princeton doctoral dissertation on "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam," he has an unshakable penchant for seeing light at the end of tunnels. It has been three Julys since he posed for the cover of Newsweek under the headline "Can This Man Save Iraq?" The magazine noted that the general's pacification of Mosul was "a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way." Four months later, the police chief installed by General Petraeus defected to the insurgents, along with most of the Sunni members of the police force. Mosul, population 1.7 million, is now an insurgent stronghold, according to the Pentagon's own June report.
By the time reality ambushed his textbook victory, the general had moved on to the mission of making Iraqi troops stand up so American troops could stand down. "Training is on track and increasing in capacity," he wrote in The Washington Post in late September 2004, during the endgame of the American presidential election. He extolled the increased prowess of the Iraqi fighting forces and the rebuilding of their infrastructure.
The rest is tragic history. Were the Iraqi forces on the trajectory that General Petraeus asserted in his election-year pep talk, no "surge" would have been needed more than two years later. We would not be learning at this late date, as we did only when Gen. Peter Pace was pressed in a Pentagon briefing this month, that the number of Iraqi battalions operating independently is in fact falling -- now standing at a mere six, down from 10 in March.
But even more revealing is what was happening at the time that General Petraeus disseminated his sunny 2004 prognosis. The best account is to be found in The Occupation of Iraq, the authoritative chronicle by Ali Allawi published this year by Yale University Press. Mr. Allawi is not some anti-American crank. He was the first civilian defense minister of postwar Iraq and has been an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; his book was praised by none other than the Iraq war cheerleader Fouad Ajami as "magnificent."
Mr. Allawi writes that the embezzlement of the Iraqi Army's $1.2 billion arms procurement budget was happening "under the very noses" of the Security Transition Command run by General Petraeus: "The saga of the grand theft of the Ministry of Defense perfectly illustrated the huge gap between the harsh realities on the ground and the Panglossian spin that permeated official pronouncements." Mr. Allawi contrasts the "lyrical" Petraeus pronouncements in The Post with the harsh realities of the Iraqi forces' inoperable helicopters, flimsy bulletproof vests and toy helmets. The huge sums that might have helped the Iraqis stand up were instead "handed over to unscrupulous adventurers and former pizza parlor operators."
Well, anyone can make a mistake. And when General Petraeus cited soccer games as an example of "the astonishing signs of normalcy" in Baghdad last month, he could not have anticipated that car bombs would kill at least 50 Iraqis after the Iraqi team's poignant victory in the Asian Cup semifinals last week. This general may well be, as many say, the brightest and bravest we have. But that doesn't account for why he has been invested by the White House and its last-ditch apologists with such singular power over the war.
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posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:55 PM
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