Steve Coll, who writes for the New Yorker, explores -- in "General Accounting" --the rationale of General Petraeus, surge promoter and commander, and where it has gotten him and us.
Petraeus, perhaps the most scholarly American officer ever to wear four stars, has been preoccupied by a political imperative—justifying the “surge” of thirty thousand additional troops who accompanied him to Baghdad. The General, a fitness compulsive who excels at pushups, has given much time to hosting congressional delegations and providing journalists with interviews, which he often conducts amid the stirring atmospherics of his airborne command helicopter. This summer, Petraeus crafted a campaign to publicize signs of progress he claimed to see in Iraq, and it became clear that he regarded America’s restive democracy as a theatre in his counterinsurgency operations.
The general has become a dab hand at making promises and manipulating both people and evidence in order to keep his surge going. As Coll points out, the surge came from Petraeus' own Princeton dissertation on counterinsurgency. Coll notes: "Two decades later, Petraeus has his controlled experiment, and his research is remarkably well funded. It is far from clear, however, whether he is asking all the right questions."
Coll concludes:
Petraeus’s recent strategy of playing for time through the application of spin politics is straining the health and vitality of the Army to which he has devoted his life. It is also deepening mistrust between civilian politicians and the military. Surely, for example, the General is conscious of the partisan Republican campaign to promote him as “Bush’s Grant,” and is aware of the cause: the Party expects to lose the next Presidential election because of the war, but Petraeus offers hope, however faint, that a Republican nominee might find something in Iraq to embrace. Petraeus’s ambition is legendary; his pride and his professional devotion to counterinsurgency have now become entangled in an exploitive electoral machine.
Petraeus also apparently clings to the belief that Iraq’s sectarian leaders might reconcile if American forces stay the course. This opinion, shared by many in the Bush Administration, has encouraged yet another generation of unconvincing strategic plans that assume that a unified Iraq governed from Baghdad is attainable and that thousands of American troops might help patrol the capital’s streets for years. A more plausible strategy, devoted to managing as successfully as possible the informal sectarian partition of Iraq which is already well under way, has again been postponed, along with substantial troop reductions.
American majorities repudiated the Vietnam War and have repudiated the invasion of Iraq. They did not lack guts then or now; they saw past the false promises and manipulations of their leaders, and called time. George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden appear to share the belief that the United States is chronically afflicted with a cut-and-run syndrome, but they are both wrong: the most striking aspect of American democracy during the catastrophe in Iraq today is not the public’s inconstancy but, rather, its capacity to absorb thousands of casualties on behalf of a war that is widely understood as a mistake and has no foreseeable end.
What is oddest of all in the Petraeus performance in two days of hearings is that Congress (and most of the public and certainly the media) accepted the notion that the general, who designed and then managed the surge, should be the person on the Hill assessing the policy and his own performance of the job. If that ain't nuts, I don't know what is.
