The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004.
In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.
Some American officers in Baquba have placed blame for the Qaeda leaders’ flight on public remarks about the offensive in the days before it began by top American commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander in Iraq.
There has to be a feeling of dread among decent folk, given what our forces did to Fallujah when top insurgents got out before the assault.
But the fact that "top American commanders," including Petraeus himself, gave it all away, is pretty shocking (unless you're inured to shock by now). That betrayal alone bears out the analyses by people like MIT's Stephen Van Evera and BU's Andrew Bacevich about the quality of leadership in this war. It's going to be painful for America to accept that its most lauded command is no match for the Iraqi insurgency.
More on what Bacevich and Van Evera said later... (link will be added here when available).
