Replies to post #35167 on Discover GOP Opprobrium

[teapeebubbles]

We’ve been hearing more and more lately about internal divisions among top U.S. military officials over Iraq policy. The Joint Chiefs of Staff want troop numbers cut in half over the next year, whereas Petraeus sees a massive force staying in Iraq indefinitely. Adm. William J. Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command and Petraeus’ superior, began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops just over a week ago. (The conflict between Petraeus and Fallon was compared by one senior civilian official to “Armageddon.”)

Indeed, McClatchy reported two weeks ago, “In a sign that top commanders are divided over what course to pursue in Iraq, the Pentagon said Wednesday that it won’t make a single, unified recommendation to President Bush during next month’s strategy assessment, but instead will allow top commanders to make individual presentations.”

Apparently, at least one major contingent at the Defense Department is planning to push back against Petraeus’ conclusions — and recommend a very different course.

NEWSWEEK has learned that a separate internal report being prepared by a Pentagon working group will “differ substantially” from Petraeus’s recommendations, according to an official who is privy to the ongoing discussions but would speak about them only on condition of anonymity. An early version of the report, which is currently being drafted and is expected to be completed by the beginning of next year, will “recommend a very rapid reduction in American forces: as much as two-thirds of the existing force very quickly, while keeping the remainder there.”

The strategy will involve unwinding the still large U.S. presence in big forward operation bases and putting smaller teams in outposts. “There is interest at senior levels [of the Pentagon] in getting alternative views” to Petraeus, the official said. Among others, Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon is known to want to draw down faster than Petraeus.

This is not only interesting on its face, but it also has political implications — congressional Democrats and Republicans who are tired of backing a policy that doesn’t work can embrace the recommendations of senior military leaders at the Pentagon who want to see a very rapid reduction to U.S. troop numbers.


Petraeus’s draw-down recommendations have outraged critics of the war who accuse him of merely doing Bush’s bidding and adjusting his recommendations to the politics of the Hill. (”General Betray Us,” the leftwing group MoveOn.org called him in a series of newspaper ads on Monday.) Even some supporters of the surge effort wonder whether Petraeus isn’t thinking as much about selling the war as winning it. “It depends on how this recommendation is framed,” said Dan Senor, a former top official with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq who is now working part-time as an adviser to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. “If it’s framed as a recommendation out of a position of strength, that things are going well and therefore we can afford to reduce our troop levels, that’s fine. If, however, it is interpreted as throwing a bone to Congress, in order to placate Congress at expense of our operational capacity, then that’s not good.”

John Arquilla, an intelligence and counterinsurgency expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, is even harsher in his assessment of Petraeus. “I think Colin Powell used dodgy information to get us into the war, and Petraeus is using dodgy information to keep us there,” he said. “His political talking points are all very clear: the continued references he made to the danger of Al Qaeda in Iraq, for example, even though it represents only somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the total insurgency. The continued references to Iran, when in fact the Iranians have had a lot to do with stability in the Shiite portion of the country. And it’s not at all clear why things are a little better now. Is it because there are more troops, or is it because we’re negotiating with the insurgents and have moved to small operating outposts? On any given day we don’t have more than 20,000 troops operating. The glacial pace of reductions beggars the imagination.”

Bush is going to officially embrace Petraeus’ recommendations this week, and I don’t doubt that Bush’s allies will call on Congress to do the same — or risk being labeled “anti-military.”

But therein lies the rub: military officials don’t agree, and many would side with congressional Dems in shaping the policy.

Stay tuned.

[teapeebubbles]

I’ve struggled a bit the last few Septembers to write about the anniversary of 9/11. On the one hand, it feels impossible to ignore the significance of the date and the events that transpired in 2001. On the other hand, there’s very little left to be said.

Matt Yglesias said, “The anniversary post is always the hardest one to write…. It’s hard for me to contemplate, and one wants to do writing worthy of the magnitude of the thing and I’m not sure I can.”

I agree wholeheartedly. Fortunately, Salon’s Gary Kamiya is up to the task and has an excellent piece on the sixth anniversary of the attacks, exploring the lessons of the 9/11.

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his “war on terror.” He has incessantly linked the words “al-Qaida” and “Iraq,” a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It’s no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus’ “anxiously awaited” evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11.

Petraeus’ evaluation can only be “anxiously awaited” by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we’ve been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush’s mighty-me, will insist that we’re making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that “we’re kicking ass” in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.

So let’s forget the absurd debate about “progress” and whether a bullet in the front of the head is better than one in the back, and how much we can trust our new friends from Saddam’s Fedayeen. On the anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask more basic questions — not just about why we can’t bring ourselves to pull out of Iraq, but why we invaded it in the first place. Those questions lead directly to 9/11, and the ideas and assumptions behind our response to it.

Good idea.

Kamiya’s piece is worth reading in its entirety, but he’s strongest when highlighting what the last six years say about us.

Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by “extremists,” demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation’s defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America’s moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.

All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin.

Indeed.