President Petraeus? Iraqi official re general's ambition

They will too.

Who wouldn't in their position.

When the money runs out you might as well.

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There has been talk in Iraq and in Washington for several years with regard to General Petraeus' political ambitions. His performance before the Congress appears to validate the impression.

It was reported that when General Petraeus responded truthfully to Senator Warner's question re is American safer now with "I don't know", he changed his answer to "I haven't studied it" following a scolding phone call from the White House. So much for "independence."

Will General Petraeus try to follow Eisenhower's example and be a candidate of the Republican Party for president in 2012?

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The Ambitious Delusions of George Bush and David Petraeus
The Ambitious Delusions of George Bush and David Petraeus
John Nichols, The Nation
9/14/07

We now learn that General David Petraeus fancies himself a Dwight Eisenhower for the 21st century.

According to a report in London's Independent newspaper by the reliable Middle East observer Patrick Cockburn, the U.S. military viceroy in Iraq would like very much to return from his mission and -- like the Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II and of North Atlantic Treaty Organization in its aftermath -- mount a bid for the White House.

Petraeus has apparently been so open in expressing his "long-term interest in running for the US presidency" that Sabah Khadim, a former senior adviser at Iraq's Interior Ministry who worked closely with the general in Baghdad, recalls, "I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, 'No, that would be too soon'."

Such are the political calculations of the man whose embrace of President Bush's war has become so complete that he and his aides have radically altered the manner in which statistics are gathered on violence in Iraq in order to foster the fantasy that the fight has taken a turn for the better.

"General Petraeus has a reputation in the US Army for being a man of great ambition. If he succeeds in reversing America's apparent failure in Iraq, he would be a natural candidate for the White House in the presidential election in 2012," explains Cockburn. "His able defense of the 'surge' in US troop numbers in Iraq as a success before Congress this week has made him the best-known soldier in America. An articulate, intelligent and energetic man, he has always shown skill in managing the media."

The problem, of course, is that Petraeus's "open interest in the presidency" might, Cockburn suggests, "lead critics to suggest that his own political ambitions have influenced him in putting an optimistic gloss on the US military position in Iraq "

It is Petraeus's willingness to apply the optimistic gloss that marks him as a worthy successor to George Bush, who in Thursday night speech to the nation pronounced himself well and truly pleased with his general's recitation of the administration's talking points. Based on general's testimony, Bush is claiming "success in meeting (our) objectives."

The president's "return on success" is an empty promise that a small number of troops already scheduled for withdrawal from Iraq may, in fact, be withdrawn. At the same time, however, Bush acknowledges that this "success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my Presidency."

Translation: For all the window-dressing talk about drawing down troop levels, Bush continues to peddle the " stay-the-course" message that has been his theme since the occupation of oil-rich Iraq went awry more than four years ago. And, once more, the president is asking Congress to provide him with more money for more war.

All that has changed is that the president now has a medal-bejeweled general who is willing to gloss over the failure the naked emperor so desperately seeks to define as "success."

Bush and Petraeus have joined their ambitions -- one for a presidency that is not summed up by the word "failed," one for a presidency of his own.

Ambition is, unfortunately, the wet nurse of delusion -- a delusion so severe that Bush has seldom hesitated to compare his meandering "war on terror" with the fight against fascism.

For their own reasons, the president and Petraeus feel they can afford to maintain the war until they figure out how to rearrange the letters of the word "quagmire" to spell "victory."

That will not happen. Bush's will be a failed presidency. And Petraeus's will be not be a presidency at all.

Unfortunately, on the way to their shared fate, the commander-in-chief and his general will preside over thousands of additional American deaths, tens of thousands of additional Iraqi deaths, the continued collapse of this country's global reputation and the emptying from our treasury of the resources that might have made America and the world more secure, more functional and more humane.

Petraeus may fancy himself a latter-day Eisenhower. But he has shown none of the wisdom of the man who, recognizing the folly of turning the Cold War into a hot fight, campaigned for the presidency in 1952 on a promise to end the bloodshed on the Korean Peninsula -- and, when elected, did so quickly and honorably.

To those who suggested in 1953 that it was necessary to wage an endless ground and air war against Chinese communists who were portrayed as being every bit as diabolical as the targets of the "war on terror," Eisenhower responded, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. [...] This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

Six years later, as he was finishing a presidency that had, for the most part, maintained the peace, Eisenhower counseled against paying too much heed to the pleading of generals and politicians for new fights.

"I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments," Ike told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. "Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."

And where do the people stand after weeks of propagandizing by the president and his Petraeus with regard to the war to which they have attached their ambitions?

A new poll of Iraqis, conducted by ABC News, Britain's BBC, and Japan's public broadcaster NHK, finds that 70 percent of those surveyed say they believe security has worsened in regions where the Bush/Petraeus surge has been focused. Another 11 percent of the people in whose name Bush claims the occupation must continue say the buildup has had no effect.

A new poll of Americans, conducted by the Gallup organization just prior to Petraeus's testimony, 58 percent rated the surge a failure. Perhaps more significantly, at least for the general's ambitions, 59 percent predicted that history would judge the whole of Bush's preemptive war with Iraq to have been a failure.

That is a seven percent increase from a year ago, when voters were preparing to reject the war and the war president's party at the polls. And while the testimony of a general and the preaching of a president may move some poll numbers temporarily, their empty words cannot change the reality that Eisenhower was right about such endeavors. "All of us have heard this term 'preventative war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it," the 34th president told a press conference in 1953. "In this day and time... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."

Those are the words of a general who had the wisdom required to assume the presidency, and of a president who had the wisdom to serve as commander-in-chief. It is a deficit of such wisdom that disqualifies both David Petraeus and George Bush, and that ill serves both Iraq and America.

Imperial Autism: The Petraeus Moment Blots Out the World
Imperial Autism: The Petraeus Moment Blots Out the World
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com
Tuesday 11 September 2007

The former Cockney flower-girl turned elegant-English-speaker Eliza Doolittle caught something of our moment in these lyrics from My Fair Lady: "Oh, words, words, words, I'm so sick of words.... Is that all you blighters can do?" Of course, all she had to do was be Galatea to a self-involved language teacher/Pygmalion. We've had to bear with the bloviating of almost every member of Congress, the full-blast PR apparatus of the White House, and two endless days of congressional testimony from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, not to speak of the flood of newspaper, radio, and TV stories about all of the above and the bevy of experts who are hustled out to do the horse-race assessments of how the general and ambassador performed, whether they "bought" time for the President, and the like.

And - count on it - that's just the beginning. The same cast of characters will be talking, squabbling, spinning, and analyzing stats of every sort for weeks to come - with a sequel promised next spring. Everyone knows that's the case, just as everyone has known since mid-summer that we would get to this point and, when we did, that things similar to those said (and written) in the last two days would indeed be said (and written), and that nothing the blighters would say or write would matter a whit, or change the course of events, or the tide of history, even though whole forests might be pulped in the process and it would be springtime for hyperbole and breathless overstatement in the world of news.

There has been a drumbeat of growing excitement in the press, preparing us for "pivotal reports," a "pivotal hearing," "highly anticipated appearances," and "long-awaited testimony," or, as both the Washington Post on its front page and ABC World News in a lead report put it, "the most anticipated congressional testimony by a general since the Vietnam War."

Petraeus himself has been treated in the media as a celebrity, somewhere between a conquering Caesar and the Paris Hilton of generals. Nothing he does has been too unimportant to record, not just the size of his entourage as he arrived from Baghdad, or the suite he was assigned at the Pentagon, or even his "recon" walk through the room in the House of Representatives where he would testify Monday, but every detail. Somehow, when he refused to give interviews before his "long-awaited" appearance, lots of Petraeus-iana slipped out anyway:

"[H]e also has taken short breaks for walks with his wife.... for dinner with their daughter, who lives in the area, and for lunch with his wife's parents. On his daily jogging route he maintains a brisk, steady pace over a seven-mile route, snaking from Fort Myer, across the Potomac and through Georgetown?"

Sigh?

So who, exactly, was so eagerly awaiting the jogging general's testimony? If a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll is any indication, a majority of Americans weren't among that crowd. They had already discounted whatever he would say - I doubt the ambassador even registered - as "exaggerated" and "a rosier view" than reality dictated before his face and that chest full of ribbons hit the TV screens. ("Just 23 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of independents expected an honest depiction of conditions in Iraq.") This was simple good sense. What exactly could anyone outside of Washington have expected the general - who had a hand in creating the President's "surge" strategy, is now in charge of the "surge" campaign, and for months has been delegated the official administration front man for what was, from day one, labeled a "progress report" - to say? An instant online headline caught the mood of the Petraeus moment while his first round of testimony was still underway: "Gen. Petraeus Sees Iraq Progress." Ah, yes?

And what in the world could anyone have eagerly anticipated from our unbudgeable President? Just what occurred. And yet, in our media, and inside Washington, the drumbeat for "an anticipated moment of truth" continued, as if something were actually at stake. Take just one example. On Sunday, the Washington Post had a hard-breathing piece by no less than six of its best journalists, with the headline, "Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting."

It focused on a reported "clash" between Gen. Petraeus and his theoretical boss, Centcom Commander Adm. William J. Fallon. It seems that the two fell into a near end-of-the-world-style struggle because Fallon had begun "developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops." ("'Bad relations?' said a senior civilian official with a laugh. ?That's the understatement of the century.... If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it.'") Naturally, Petraeus, like the President, wanted to continue to surge full strength (as we now know - not that we didn't before - from his slow-as-molasses plan to drawdown American forces). But what did that radical Fallon have in mind that led to a "schism"? According to a source who spoke to a Post reporter, it "involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010." Imagine a Centcom commander as a force slasher!

But hold on a moment. Combat forces make up, at best, less than half of all U.S. forces in Iraq; so if, by 2010, the good admiral wants only three-quarters of those combat troops withdrawn, then we're still left with at least 80,000 or more troops in that country three years from now.

Well, I'm with Eliza D - and so, evidently, was the technology of the House hearing room in which the general and the ambassador appeared on Monday. After chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Ike Skelton (D-MO) and various other Congressional representatives introduced the hearings for what seemed like hours, the general was finally given the floor for his "long-awaited" testimony. His mouth began to move but in a resounding silence. The mike had failed and (except for Code Pink protesters rising from the audience to shout and be escorted out) the room fell into just about the only Iraqi silence of these past, "eagerly anticipated" months - and what a relief that was. While Skelton fumed, the announcer on MSNBC suggested, "The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq is apparently powerless over the sound system in the hearing room."

It was a moment that had Iraq written all over it. After all, has anything worked as planned or dreamed since March 2003?

Of course, fifteen minutes later the mike had been replaced (though the room lights then proceeded to flicker as if in distant communion with electricity-less Baghdad) - in Iraq, you suspect, people would have just started shouting - and the general did finally launch on his monotonal, mind-numbing, expectably boiler-plate testimony. He promised that, if all went well, American troops would be back to pre-surge levels by mid-July 2008, ten months from now, 18 months from that plan's beginning. "Progress" indeed.

The general's testimony would be dealt with in the tones of gravitas that journalists-cum-pundits and pundits-cum-pundits reserve for moments like this. Yet, given the original expectations of the Bush administration, some of the testimony Petraeus (and later Crocker) had to offer would have been little short of hilarious if the subject weren't so grim. (Good news! Four years after the invasion of Iraq, we finally have the former Baathists of al-Anbar Province, whom our President used to refer to as "dead-enders," on our side! Even better, we're arming them and all is going swimmingly!)

Buying a precious extra six-plus months for the White House, the general also suggested that it would be premature to think beyond next July, when it came to "drawdown" plans, and that we should, instead, all reconvene in mid-March 2008 for more of the same.

Sigh?

You can, of course, already begin writing the script for that "eagerly anticipated," "long awaited," "pivotal" moment when the situation in Iraq will be predictably worse, predictably more precarious, and predictably surprising to the general and the ambassador.

As aids for his testimony, Petraeus had brought along a profusion of enormous, multicolored charts to illustrate his points. Many of them - amazingly enough - seemed to have more or less the same blue, red, or yellow lines, each of which crested about chart middle and then essentially nosedived toward the present moment. The message was clear: Good news on the numbers! Everything's falling! You didn't need an expert - you essentially didn't need to know a thing - to find the confluence of those descending lines with the general's appearance in Washington a tad tidy.

As for me, I found it hard to believe that those charts hadn't been recycled from the Vietnam era, when Petraeus' equivalent, General William Westmoreland, used similar brightly colored, bar-coded, son-et-lumière aids to wow visiting congressional delegations with the metrics of "progress" in his war. Now, once again, we're knee deep in the Big Metric, flooded with so many different kinds of stats that you can hardly tell one from another (though most involve dead bodies). If you remember the Vietnam era, there's a simple rule here: When the top brass hauls out the pretty charts, duck?

In the meantime - mind you, this is Iraq where nothing has been orderly - everything was, we were assured, to proceed in an orderly fashion, summed up in the general's wonderfully tidy, if somewhat Orwellian-sounding formula, "from leading to partnering to overwatch."

Hmmm? "overwatch." I wonder who first woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night with that lovely term on the brain? I wonder what it even means? I wonder where we'll be "overwatching" from? Perhaps from that monstrous embassy that we've almost completed in Baghdad, the largest on this or any other planet, or from our vast permanent-seeming base towns like the one with the 17-mile security perimeter that the President visited in Iraq's western desert, but that no reporter accompanying him even thought to describe for us. (Oh, back in November 2006, that base, as a British reporter described it, already had the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool, a movie theater showing the latest flicks, and two bus routes.)

Like Eliza, I'm for skipping the words at this point. After all, what does all the talk mean if, in September 2007, the U.S. is building yet another base in Iraq, this time near the Iranian border, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The military describes it as a "life support area" - don't ask me what that means - with this added definition: "[It's] not really permanent, although it will be manned 24/7 and will be used for as long as necessary."

What does all the talk mean if, as the Washington Post's indefatigable Walter Pincus noted, also on Monday, the U.S. Commerce Department is looking for a new legal adviser for Iraq with a contract running through July 31, 2008, plus two possible 12-month extensions. (There we are in 2010 again!) This adviser is to help the poor, ignorant Iraqis as "they draft the laws and regulations that will govern Iraq's oil and gas sector." After all, as the proposal makes clear, the Commerce Department (U.S., not Iraqi) "will be providing technical assistance to Iraq to create a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraq's key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector." And "conducive" is just such a nice word! Even nicer than "sovereignty."

What do the words mean, if the far edge of Armageddon, as defined in Washington or in military-insider politics, leaves enough American troops in Iraq to fill a couple of baseball stadiums -? or several gigantic bases - in 2010?

At some level, the situation seems remarkably uncomplicated, if you skip the words (and the words about the words). As has always been true, the top figures of the Bush administration remain completely unmoved by, and unmovable by, words which, as is well known, are only meant to move other people; the Republicans in Congress - after all this time, despite all the dismal polling figures - are still on bended knee to the Bush administration, so powerless that they feel incapable of striking off on their own. (Senator John Warner, R-VA, who isn't even seeking reelection, recently begged the President to please, please, pretty please, send home a few thousand troops, any troops at all, and call it a day. And, in his testimony, General Petraeus threw the Senator a carefully gnawed bone, agreeing to do just that.)

The Congressional Democrats are too weak (and divided) to change policy - and let's be honest, even if they did, this administration would undoubtedly pay no attention whatsoever to anything they mandated. The Republican candidates for President (minus the maverick Ron Paul, who isn't really a Republican at all) have bowed down low before presidential Iraq policy, as if before a pagan idol in the desert, in search of the "base vote." Democratic candidates for President (Bill Richardson and Denis Kucinich excepted) are running "tough" (which means running scared and cautious) on Iraq. If, in 2008, the war actually proves good for business at the polls for Democrats, then, to their consternation, they'll find they've just inherited a disastrous war, that they're likely to be blamed for losing it, and that they're in charge of Hell, not the Oval Office or Congress. (And note that, out of kindness to all of you, I'm not even mentioning Iran.... though there was that nice, giant block of type over Iranian territory on a Petraeus-displayed map labeled "Major Threats to Iraq" that said: "Lethal Aid, Training, Funding.")

Given this line-up of forces, how could it have been anything but "words, words, words" in Washington, even while it was death, death, death in Iraq?

What those words do, however, is fill all available space, reinforcing a powerful sense that Washington's importance in the scheme of things is the one unquestionable reality on our planet. The rest of the world hardly registers, except in the mode of frustration.

Is there a single ounce of humility anywhere in Washington? Can we even imagine that, somewhere on Earth, someone doesn't think about us?

General Petraeus, always identified as having "earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton University as a young officer," is said to be a man with a high regard for his own reputation. Hasn't he noticed, then, that, for one extra star and his Warholian 15 minutes of fame, he's made himself this country's fourth commander of American forces in Iraq in less than five years? Each of those commanders had a plan. Each was confident. Each claimed "progress." And, once upon a time, each was embraced by the President as the man to give him "advice." Ambassador Crocker is similarly the fourth American civilian viceroy to head up our caliphate of Baghdad. He now has "carte blanche" there. But carte blanche to do what?

Could these men really believe that, with them, the occupation of a crucial country in the embattled oil heartlands of the planet would finally head down the IED-pocked path of success? Is the vanity of American officials as great as that? Was it really worth turning so many Iraqis into red and blue lines, into military metrics?

To grasp the Petraeus moment, you really have to re-imagine official Washington as a set of drunks behind the wheels of so many SUVs tearing down a well-populated city avenue - and all of them are on their cell phones. They hardly notice the bodies bouncing off the fenders. For them, the world is Washington-centered; all interests that matter are American ones. Nothing else exists, not really. Think of this as a form of imperial autism and the Petraeus moment as the way in which the White House and official Washington have, for a brief time, blotted out the world.
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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

The General Came to Washington
September 15-16, 2007
CounterPunch Diary
The General Came to Washington
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Blend a war and a presidential campaign and you have a recipe for 200 per cent proof mendacity, as the Petraeus hearings at the start of the week triumphantly proved.

Take the war first. Into the witness chair in the Senate chamber marched General Petraeus, the blaze of ribbons on his chest suggesting actual combat experience somewhat longer than the modest four years his record discloses. He was once shot in he chest, it's true, but that was in a military exercise in the U.S. when a soldier's gun went off by accident.



Mechanically, the general read through testimony freshly vetted and re-written by Vice President Cheney, a man well aware that despite the utter absence of any supportive evidence and owing much to his own untiring falsehoods on the matter, 33 percent of all Americans, including 40 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats, believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks.

Hence Petraeus' testimony had a reference in almost every paragraph to al-Qaeda terror groups in Iraq, even though prudent estimates put total al-Qaeda membership in Iraq at 1,500 at most, thus furnishing some 5 per cent of the Sunni resistance.

The General spoke glowingly of his Surge. He marched the senators through graphs and flow charts, whose soaring curves and bars spelled out Order and Progress, just like the Brazilian national flag.

In fact it's hard to demonstrate there's ever really been a surge, (as the Pentagon military analyst cloaked under the pseudonym Herman Mindshaftgap concisely demonstrates on this website today). Right now the US is at a highpoint, with 162,000 troops in Iraq. But that's not far above the 160,000 deployment level at the end of 2005. Moreover, there's a steady decline in the Coalition of the Willing, which now stands at 11,500, falling at an average of 575 a month. Total Coalition troops in Iraq total 173,500, well below the peak of 183,000 at the end of 2005.

General Petraeus loosed off his volleys of bogus numbers and the senatorial candidates for presidential nomination returned fire in carefully prepared but equally meretricious salvoes. There were five such candidates on display - Clinton, Obama, Biden, Dodd,(all Democrats) and the Republican McCain.

This doesn't count General Petraeus himself who, according to Patrick Cockburn's story on Thursday's CounterPunch site, disclosed his own presidential ambitions to an Iraqi official two years ago, though he apparently confided to the Iraqi that a 2008 run would be premature. He probably hopes he'll be running against President Clinton in 2012. Candidate Clinton whacked presumptive candidate Petraeus with Coleridge's definition of "dramatic truth". To believe his report, she said, would require "the willing suspension of disbelief", a line which duly made its way onto the front pages and news headlines, as did Candidate Obama's theatrical question, "At what point do we say, Enough."

Mrs Clinton's problem is that she very willingly suspended disbelief in 2002. When it came time to deliver her Senate speech in support of the war, she reiterated some of the most outlandish claims made by Dick Cheney. In this speech she said Saddam Hussein had rebuilt his chemical and biological weapons program; that he had improved his long-range missile capability; that he was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program; and that he was giving aid and comfort to Al Qaeda. The only other Democratic senator to make all four of these claims in his floor speech was Joe Lieberman. But even he didn't go as far as Senator Clinton. In Lieberman's speech, there was conditionality about some of the claims. In Senator Clinton's, there was none, though even the grotesque war hawk, Ken Pollack, advising Senator Clinton prior to her vote, had told her that the allegation about the Al Qaeda connection was "bullshit."

Later, as the winds of opinion changed, Senator Clinton claimed - and continues to do so to this day - that hers was a vote not for war but for negotiation. In fact, the record shows that only hours after the war authorization vote Senator voted against the Democratic resolution that would have required Bush to seek a diplomatic solution before launching the war.

Barrack Obama, lagging in the polls behind Mrs Clinton rushed to Iowa on Wednesday to savage his prime rival for her war vote. "Despite -- or perhaps because of how much experience they had in Washington, too many politicians feared looking weak and failed to ask hard questions. I opposed this war from the beginning. I opposed the war in 2002, I opposed it in 2003, I opposed it in 2004, I opposed it in 2005," Obama declared, in Clinton, Iowa. All the Democrats flourish urgent schedules for withdrawal. General Petraeus says that 30,000 troops can go home next summer, owing to the Surge's splendid success.

Realists in military circles reckon the overall situation in Iraq is worsening, from the point of view of the United States; that by next spring, as one puts it, "the active-duty Army and Marine Corps will start to break under the current load". Forces will decline, unless Bush orders a real surge next year in involuntarily mobilized reservists. He won't do that. The war is lost, but like many a lost war, it will last a very long time. Acting President Bush made that clear in his address to the nation (small portions thereof. Candidate Petraeus may well have the chance in 2012 to tax President Clinton about the "stalemate in Iraq".

I doubt if anyone involved in the Iraq disaster will be well received by the voters, even years down the road.

Well,
You have done a good cut and paste job,but you havent said anything.

Are you attempting to say that a military man cannot run for President after they leave the service,or are you saying that this general cant run?

Mysteryman
I think the author of this thread had given his opinion and it is this.


"I doubt if anyone involved in the Iraq disaster will be well received by the voters, even years down the road."

Pentagon, State Department Debunk Bush Fabrications on Iran
Pentagon, State Department Debunk Bush Fabrications on Iran
By Gareth Porter
IPS News
Wednesday 19 September 2007

In his prepared statement to the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees last week, General David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds Force to turn Shi'ite militias into a "Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq."

But Petraeus then shattered that carefully constructed argument by volunteering in answering a question that the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, had in essence left Iraq. "The Quds Force itself, we believe, by and large those individuals have been pulled out of the country, as have the Lebanese Hezbollah trainers that were being used to augment that activity."

Petraeus's contradictory statements on the Quds Force are emblematic of a US administration propaganda line that has in essence fallen apart because it was so obviously out of line with reality. Nine months after the George W Bush administration declared that it was going to go after Iranian agents in Iraq who were threatening US troops, the US military still has not produced any evidence that Quds Force operatives in Iraq were engaged in assisting the militias fighting against US troops.

The US military command in Iraq has failed to capture a single Quds Force member it could link to the Shi'ite militias. And the evidence that has emerged over the past nine months about Shi'ite militias and their relationship to Iran suggests that Quds Force personnel in Iraq never had the mission of assisting Shi'ite militias, as claimed by the Bush administration.

It appears that an increasing number of military intelligence officers in Iraq have concluded that the Quds Force has been steering clear of working directly with Shi'ite militias attacking US troops, to avoid giving the Bush administration a pretext for aggression against Iranian territory.

In a military briefing presented in Baghdad on February 11, an unnamed US official stated flatly that weapons were being smuggled into the country by the Quds Force, but the briefers failed to present any specific evidence to back up the assertion.

Since that briefing, the US military command has captured the alleged deputy head and key logistical officer of the main Iraqi EFP (explosively formed penetrator, or armor-penetrating explosives) network and a Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the network, as well as a number of what it called "suspected members" or "suspected leaders" of a "secret cell terrorist network known for facilitating the transport of and EFPs from Iran to Iraq."

But the interrogations of these detainees have not led to the capture of a single Iranian official. Nor has the US military been able to identify a link between any Iraqi militia member and any Iranian official. On July 6, Major-General Rick Lynch, commander of US operations south of Baghdad, told reporters his troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie to Iran."

Even more devastating to the "proxy war" line, Lynch's spokeswoman, Alayne Conway, acknowledged on August 19 that they had not caught anyone supplying arms from Iran to the Iraqi Shi'ite militias.

There has long been some evidence, however, of a link between Shi'ite networks for procuring EFPs and other arms and the Lebanese Hezbollah. The leader of a Mahdi Army group that was carrying out attacks against British forces, Ahmad Jawwad al-Fartusi, who was arrested in September 2005, had lived in Lebanon for several years and was known to have personal contact with Hezbollah, according to a March 27 New York Times report.

Along with evidence of a growing relationship between Hezbollah and Muqtada al-Sadr's army, which has now culminated in a Sadr office in Beirut, such past links between the two Shi'ite groups suggest that Hezbollah's assistance to the Shi'ites need not have been ordered by Tehran.

US and British officials have acknowledged in the past that the EFP technology being used in Iraq might have entered Iraq from Hezbollah in Lebanon rather than from Iran.

The premise that the Quds Force agents in Iraq were involved in training Shi'ites to carry out operations against US troops was shattered when Lynch told reporters on August 19 that the Iranians were "facilitating the training of Shi'ite extremist" militiamen in Iraq. That clearly implied that the training was being done by Hezbollah.

The Washington Post and other news outlets quoted Lynch's statement but nevertheless reported that Lynch had charged that Iranians were doing the training. A spokesperson for Lynch confirmed to Inter Press Service that Lynch had not made any allegation about Iranians training Shi'ites in Iraq.

Petraeus dealt the final blow to the notion of a Quds Force training role when he noted that the Hezbollah trainers had also been withdrawn from the country.

The briefing by US military spokesman Brigadier-General Kevin Bergner on July 2 was aimed primarily at advancing the theme that Hezbollah acts in Iraq as a "proxy" for Iran. But the real significance of the briefing - unreported in the US news media - was the first suggestion by a US official that the Quds Force personnel in Iraq might have avoided direct contacts with Shi'ite militias altogether.

Asked by a journalist why the Quds Force would "subcontract" the training of Shi'ite militias to Hezbollah, Bergner answered that Hezbollah could "do things that perhaps they didn't want to have to do themselves in terms of interacting directly with special groups."

Without mentioning any pullout of Quds Force personnel, Conway said on August 19 that Lynch estimated there were 50 Quds Force agents in his entire area of responsibility in southern Iraq. Four days later, Lynch clarified that estimate, telling reporters that 30 of those estimated 50 agents were "surrogates" - presumably referring to Hezbollah operatives engaged in training Shi'ites in southern Iraq.

Although it was buried in the August 19 story inaccurately reporting Lynch's statement about training in Iraq, Megan Greenwell of the Washington Post reported the much more significant fact that "some military intelligence analysts have concluded there is no concrete evidence" linking the Quds Force in Iraq with the Shi'ite militias.

The charge that Iran is using the Quds Force to fight a proxy war is an effort to raise tensions with Iran by suggesting a potential reason for a US attack against that country. Similarly, the pressure for targeting the Quds Force in Iraq late last year came from senior officials in the Bush administration who wished to demonstrate US resolve to confront Iran, according to an in-depth account of the origins of the plan by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer published on February 26.

That policy was regarded with "skepticism" by the intelligence community, the State Department and the Defense Department when it was proposed, Linzer wrote, because of the fear it would contribute to an escalation of conflict with Iran.

"This has little to do with Iraq," a senior intelligence officer told Linzer. "It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It's purely political."
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Gareth Porter is a historian and national-security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005.

similarities between Gen. Petraeus & former Secretary Po
Media Matters for America
Sidney Blumenthal
9/24/07

Did that voice inside you say, "I've heard it all before"?

In August, Sidney Blumenthal noted similarities between Gen. David Petraeus and former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

As Gen. David Petraeus prepares to deliver his report in September on the "surge" in Iraq, he is elevated into the ultimate reliable source, just as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's sterling reputation was exploited for his delivery of the case for invasion before the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, a date that will live in mendacity, for every statement he made was later revealed to be false; Powell regretted publicly that it was an everlasting "blot" on his good name. ... He was Petraeus before Petraeus, the good soldier before the good soldier, window-dressing before window-dressing.

As Blumenthal observed, Powell, like Petraeus, enjoyed a "sterling reputation" that was used to enhance the credibility of his case and to discourage scrutiny.

It is impossible to overstate just how thoroughly the vast majority of the media bought what Powell was selling. Without pausing to examine his claims or the credibility of his evidence, they declared his U.N. address a home run. The media's swift and fawning reaction to Powell's speech is one of the true low points in their coverage of the Bush administration and the Iraq war -- and that is no small feat.

Eric Alterman, now a Media Matters Senior Fellow, explained in a September 22, 2003, column for The Nation:

When Powell went before the UN Security Council in February 2003, reporters treated his accusations against Saddam Hussein as if akin to tablets passed down by Moses from the mountaintop. A study by Gilbert Cranberg, former editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register, discovered a nearly perfect storm of wide-eyed credulity in coverage of the speech. We heard and read of "a massive array of evidence," "a detailed and persuasive case," "a powerful case," "a sober, factual case," "an overwhelming case," "a compelling case," "the strong, credible and persuasive case," "a persuasive, detailed accumulation of information," "a smoking fusillade ... a persuasive case for anyone who is still persuadable," "an accumulation of painstakingly gathered and analyzed evidence," so that "only the most gullible and wishful thinking souls can now deny that Iraq is harboring and hiding weapons of mass destruction." "The skeptics asked for proof; they now have it." "Powell's evidence," we were told, was "overwhelming," "ironclad ... incontrovertible," "succinct and damning ... the case is closed." "Colin Powell delivered the goods on Saddam Hussein." "If there was any doubt that Hussein ... needs to be ... stripped of his chemical and biological capabilities, Powell put it to rest."

Another Media Matters Senior Fellow, Paul Waldman, detailed more of that coverage in his 2004 book Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You:

Since they regard him so highly, the press declined to investigate the charges Powell made before the UN too closely. Instead, they hailed his appearance as having settled once and for all the question of whether we should invade Iraq.

The editorials the following day were nearly unanimous. Speaking for many liberal commentators, the Washington Post's Mary McGrory wrote, "I don't know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell's 'J'accuse' speech against Saddam Hussein. I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince." "Secretary of State Colin Powell's strong, plain-spoken indictment of the Saddam Hussein regime before the UN Security Council Wednesday embodies something truly great about the United States," said the Chicago Sun-Times. "Those around the world who demanded proof must now be satisfied, or else admit that no satisfaction is possible for them." "In a brilliant presentation as riveting and as convincing as Adlai Stevenson's 1962 unmasking of Soviet missiles in Cuba, Powell proved beyond any doubt that Iraq still possesses and continues to develop illegal weapons of mass destruction," said the New York Daily News. "The case for war has been made. And it's irrefutable." The Hartford Courant said Powell's presentation was "masterful," while the Portland Oregonian found Powell's presentation "devastating" and "overwhelming ... We think he made his case." The headline in the Dallas Morning News read, "Only the Blind Could Ignore Powell's Evidence." The editors of the San Antonio Express-News, who also found his presentation "irrefutable," thought you didn't have to be blind to disagree, but you did have to be an Iraqi sympathizer. "Only those ready to believe Iraq and assume that the United States would manufacture false evidence against Saddam would not be persuaded by Powell's case," they said.

In Bill Moyers' Buying the War, former CBS anchor Dan Rather explained that he and his colleagues gave Powell's presentation to the United Nations extra weight not because of its content, but because of Powell himself:

RATHER: Colin Powell was trusted. Is trusted, I'd put it-in a sense. He, unlike many of the people who made the decisions to go to war, Colin Powell has seen war. He knows what a green jungle hell Vietnam was. He knows what the battlefield looks like. And when Colin Powell says to you, "I, Colin Powell, am putting my personal stamp on this information. It's my name, my face, and I'm putting it out there," that did make a difference.

MOYERS: And you were impressed.

RATHER: I was impressed. And who wouldn't be?

But journalists and pundits weren't just impressed with Powell. They uncritically treated what he said as gospel. They declared it "irrefutable." Not "un-refuted" -- irrefutable. Impossible to refute.

David Gergen, for example, declared on CNN that Powell had delivered "conclusive, compelling evidence" that "effectively destroyed" the arguments of "opponents of the president's policy." (If that sounds familiar, you may remember what Gergen said about his friend David Petraeus' testimony while serving as a CNN analyst last week: "[A]fter hearing him with that blizzard of facts and statistics and charts, it's going to be very hard for Democrats now to say, let's pull the plug.")

Worse, the media suggested that anyone who disagreed with Powell was a liar or a fool.

Powell's U.N. address occurred on February 5, 2003. A look at the editorials and columns that appeared in the next day's edition of The Washington Post makes clear how quickly the media ran to Powell's side.

The Post itself led things off with an editorial headlined -- what else? -- "Irrefutable" that declared, "AFTER SECRETARY OF STATE Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. ... Mr. Powell's evidence ... was overwhelming."

The Post's columnists took it from there. Four Washington Post columnists wrote on February 6 about Powell's presentation the day before. All four were positively glowing:

Richard Cohen, in a column headlined "A Winning Hand For Powell," declared that Powell's presentation "had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." Cohen was careful to make clear that he based his own conclusion not upon an examination of Powell's arguments and evidence, but on Powell himself: "The clincher ... was the totality of the material and the fact that Powell himself had presented it. In this case, the messenger may have been more important than the message."
George Will, under the headline "Disregarding the Deniers," wrote that "Powell's presentation, its power enhanced by his avoidance of histrionics, will change all minds open to evidence. Thus it will justify disregarding the presumptively close-minded people who persist in denying ... what? What are people denying who still deny the need for force? That Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? Or that Iraq is resisting the inspections? No, they are denying only that force is needed." Will directly equated those who were not convinced by Powell's performance to "[p]eople determined to believe that a vast conspiracy assassinated President Kennedy." "People committed to a particular conclusion will get to it and will stay there," Will wrote -- and, hard as it is to believe now, he was referring to those who disagreed with the Bush administration.

Mary McGrory, in a column headlined "I'm Persuaded," insisted that she had been "as tough as France to convince" of the case against Saddam, but that Powell had done it. How had the great man won over this stalwart opponent of the war? "His voice was strong and unwavering. He made his case without histrionics of any kind, with no verbal embellishments." McGrory offered no critical assessment of the evidence Powell presented; she indicated instead that she was swayed by the performance.

Jim Hoagland, in a column headlined "An Old Trooper's Smoking Gun," lauded Powell's presentation as a "convincing and detailed X-ray of Iraq's secret weapons and terrorism programs" that "exposed the enduring bad faith of several key members of the U.N. Security Council." Hoagland wrote: "Speaking as 'an old trooper,' the ex-general showed, through technical detail, the illogic of Iraq's protestations that it has been importing aluminum tubing for short-range rockets and not for nuclear weapons. Nobody uses this kind of tubing for rockets, Powell said convincingly. ... To continue to say that the Bush administration has not made its case, you must now believe that Colin Powell lied in the most serious statement he will ever make, or was taken in by manufactured evidence. I don't believe that. Today, neither should you."

Not only did all four buy what Powell was selling, they did so without an examination of the goods. The salesman's smile, his voice -- and his impeccable credentials as an "old trooper" -- were enough.

Worse, three of the four directly attacked anyone who would dare disagree with Powell. You'd have to be a "fool" or a "Frenchman" to disagree with Powell's assertions, according to Cohen. Will added that such foolishness would require the closed mind of a conspiracy theorist. Hoagland concluded that skeptics were guilty of "enduring bad faith" and seemed to speak for the entire punditocracy when he observed that to remain skeptical of the Bush administration's case required the belief "that Colin Powell lied." And that, of course, was unthinkable.

Even after it became clear that Powell's address was not only quite refutable, it relied on forgeries and supposed British intelligence dossiers that were in fact plagiarized from the Internet, many journalists steadfastly refused to criticize Powell. In his book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, Eric Boehlert noted that ABC's Ted Koppel hosted Powell for three "in-depth interviews" on Nightline. In the first appearance, according to Boehlert, Powell "was not asked one question about his U.N. performance despite the fact that observers had already detailed the obvious errors in Powell's presentation. In fact it took the international press just one week to detail the holes in Powell's speech. But eight months later on Nightline, Koppel paid no attention to that fact." In what must surely be a coincidence, Koppel and Powell are, according to Boehlert, "good friends."

Less than five years ago, America's news media enthusiastically embraced Powell's U.N. address -- an address that we now know was riddled with untruths and bogus "evidence." But the nation's leading journalists and commentators bought it and shouted down skeptics. They bought it not after examining and assessing the quality of Powell's evidence, but because "Powell himself had presented it." They shouted down skeptics not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of the quality of the man. To be a skeptic required believing "that Colin Powell lied"; thus, being a skeptic was unacceptable.

Why dwell on that now? Because the media's coverage of David Petraeus in 2007 is depressingly similar to their treatment of Colin Powell in 2003.

Compare Tucker Carlson's questioning of a Powell skeptic in 2003 to Wolf Blitzer's questioning of a Petraeus skeptic in 2007.

In 2003, Carlson was a co-host of CNN's Crossfire. When Vermont Congressman (now Senator) Bernie Sanders expressed skepticism about Powell's presentation, Carlson expressed shock and demanded to know why Sanders did not believe Powell: "Wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. I think we're making news here. Possibly. Colin Powell, the secretary of state, got up before the U.N. yesterday and said in no uncertain terms that this happened. Are you saying he's lying? ... Do you not take his word?"

Earlier this week, Blitzer interviewed television host and comedian Bill Maher. When Maher indicated that he did not believe Petraeus' claims that his testimony was prepared completely independently of the White House and Pentagon, Blitzer pounced: "Let me point out. General Petraeus, who has been a military officer for more than 30 years, the first thing he basically said out of his mouth last week is, 'I didn't show this testimony to anyone. I wrote it myself. I didn't have it vetted by the chain of command. Not by the White House. Not by anyone at the Pentagon. Not by anyone in Congress.' Don't you believe him when he says that?"

Later in the interview, Blitzer described Maher as having "attack[ed]" Petraeus "personally" for saying he didn't believe that Petraeus' testimony was independent of the White House and Pentagon.

There is an obvious commonality between Powell and Petraeus that no doubt drives some of the media sycophancy toward them, particularly the incredulity at any suggestion that they might not be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Both are longtime military men, and highly decorated ones at that. As I noted last week, Blitzer actually walked CNN viewers through an examination of the medals on Petraeus' chest that was more detailed than many news reports about the testimony he delivered.

Journalist Chris Hayes argues that the national discourse has come to be dominated by a "cultural and political ethos" he describes as "the Cult of the Soldier":

It's not surprising that during a time of war, civilians and politicians hold an elevated opinion of the nobility and valor of warriors. After all, it is ostensibly for our collective benefit that a tiny fraction of American citizens voluntarily endure (over and over) some of the worst horrors of human existence as both the target of violence and its implacable agent. But the Cult of the Soldier is something more than mere gratitude or appreciation. It's the insidious belief that since warriors transcend the petty and corrupt world of politics, they are uniquely equipped to make the nation's decisions about war and peace.

In sending General Petraeus to Capitol Hill, the White House was trying to have it both ways: to smuggle in a radical and unpopular agenda under the sainted mantle of an outstanding soldier. When MoveOn called this move bullshit by taking out a full-page ad in the Times accurately pointing out that Petraeus was "cooking the books" to paint a rosy picture, not only Republicans but the majority of mainstream pundits acted as if the group had violated an unspoken taboo. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen sniffed that the ad "recalls the ugly McCarthy era," adding that "MoveOn.org and the late senator from Wisconsin share a certain fondness for the low blow."

Cohen's comparison of the MoveOn ad to "the ugly McCarthy era" is an interesting one. That era draws its name from Joseph McCarthy, a United States senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy's actions can be boiled down to using the power of the United States Senate to condemn people for their political views.

The MoveOn ad in question doesn't seem to fit that bill. The ad, whatever you think of its merits or propriety, was simply a case of private citizens criticizing a government official and government policies. That isn't McCarthyism; that's private citizens exercising one of the most sacred rights a democratic nation has to offer: the right to disagree with, and criticize, the government.

But Cohen, like much of the Beltway media, ran frothing after MoveOn for more than a week, barely needing the prodding the Republicans so eagerly gave them. As Eric Boehlert explained earlier this week, MoveOn's ad got far more cable news attention than did the deaths of nine American service members in Iraq the day the ad ran -- 250 times as much. Not only that, the coverage of the ad rarely explained its actual contents or assessed its accuracy. Instead, reporters and pundits simply screeched about the outrage of the language used to describe Petraeus. Little attempt was made to assess whether the ad was right that Petraeus was misleading the Congress and the nation about Iraq. All that mattered was that his honor had been challenged. It was Petraeus that mattered, according to the media, not his testimony -- just as it was Colin Powell, not the actual merits of his presentation, that mattered to Richard Cohen in 2003.

Paul Krugman noted earlier this week:

To a remarkable extent, punditry has taken a pass on whether Gen. Petraeus's picture of the situation in Iraq is accurate. Instead, it was all about the theatrics -- about how impressive he looked, how well or poorly his Congressional inquisitors performed. And the judgment you got if you were watching most of the talking heads was that it was a big win for the administration -- especially because the famous MoveOn ad was supposed to have created a scandal, and a problem for the Democrats.

But here's the thing: new polls by CBS and Gallup show that the Petraeus testimony had basically no effect on public opinion: Americans continue to hate the war, and want out. The whole story about how the hearing had changed everything was a pure figment of the inside-the-Beltway imagination.

What I found striking about the whole thing was the contempt the pundit consensus showed for the public -- it was, more or less, "Oh, people just can't resist a man in uniform." But it turns out that they can; it's the punditocracy that can't.

And so, for more than a week, the media played along with the Republicans' absurd little game. They pretended the MoveOn ad criticized every member of the military, which it clearly did not. They acted as though there was no substance to the ad, only insult. They seemed to stipulate that Gen. Petraeus, by virtue of his title, was exempt from such criticism.

All of this came to a head yesterday, when the United States Senate voted, by a 72-25 margin, to officially condemn private citizens for criticizing their government.

Whether one agreed with the substance of the MoveOn ad or found the wording offensive, there should be something disconcerting about a government body formally condemning private citizens for criticizing the government.

Surely journalists, of all people, should recognize how chilling it is for the Senate to take such action. But I can find not a single journalist who has made that point, or even raised the question of the appropriateness of such a government action in a free society. Nor did most of the news reports about the vote include necessary context. I have not seen a single news report, for example, that told readers how frequently the United States Senate condemns citizens for speech acts critical of the government. I suspect (and hope) it is quite rare. But that context was absent from media coverage of the vote.

To be sure, there have been some journalists who have criticized the vote. Keith Olbermann and Dan Abrams and Joan Walsh, among others, noted the absurdity of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body taking the time to condemn a newspaper ad when there are more serious things going on -- like, say, a war. Others noted the hypocrisy of Republicans voting to condemn the MoveOn ad, but voting against condemnation of their ideological allies who mocked the military service of John Kerry and Max Cleland.

But I find no journalist who has yet spoken out against our elected representatives formally condemning private citizens for criticizing their government.

Isn't that, ultimately, at least as important as speaking out against private citizens for the words they use in criticizing their government?

One of the key differences between a democracy and a dictatorship is that, in the former, no one is exempt from criticism because of his or her title. America elects presidents; we do not serve kings.

In 2003, the news media believed everything Colin Powell said simply because of who he was and shouted down any who dared disagree. They based their faith in Powell's presentation on their faith in Powell -- on their stipulation that he was honorable and honest. The results were disastrous.

In 2007, another highly decorated military veteran was sent out by the Bush administration to make its case for war. Again, much of the media uncritically accepted his claims and shouted down those who disagreed. As with Powell, David Petraeus' personal honor, stipulated to by the media, seemed reason enough to believe him. No need to examine the evidence.

And this time, much of the media cheered on the United States Senate as it formally condemned American citizens for daring to be impolite in their criticism of the government.

Those journalists are not only repeating the mistakes of 2003, they're adding new ones.