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2 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Selling the president's
general By Tom
Engelhardt
thesis on that war - he had,
before the president's invasion, taken part only
in "peacekeeping" operations in places like Haiti.
In March 2003, a two-star general, he crossed the
Kuwaiti border as commander of the 101st Airborne
Division. After Baghdad fell, his troops occupied
Mosul, a relative quiet city to the north, largely
untouched by invasion or war. There, he gained a
reputation (at least in the US) for having a
special affinity for Iraqis and for applying
top-notch, outreach-oriented counterinsurgency
tactics.
In those early months, he always
seemed to have a writer in tow. In 2004-2005, for
his next tour of duty - already with the ear of
the president and of deputy secretary of defense
Paul Wolfowitz - he
returned to Iraq as the
Newsweek Can-He-Save-It guy. His giant task was to
"stand up" Iraqi security forces. Again, he had
writers in tow. The Washington Post's columnist
David Ignatius, for instance, twice paid extended
visits to the general during that tour, returning
from helicoptering around the Iraqi countryside
all aglow and writing glowingly of the job
Petraeus was doing (as he would again over the
years, as so many other journalists and
commentators would, too).
The general
himself wasn't exactly shy on the subject of his
accomplishments. He wrote, for instance, a
strategically well-placed op-ed in the Washington
Post in September 2004, just as the administration
was rolling out another "product", the president's
run for a second term. In it, with just enough
caveats to cover himself professionally, he waxed
positive about the glories of Iraqi soldiers
standing up. It was a piece filled with words like
"progress" and "optimism", just the sort of thing
a president trying to outrun a bunch of Iraqi
insurgents to the November 4 finish line might
like to see in print in his hometown paper. The
general picked up his third star on this tour of
duty.
Next came a stint at home where he
oversaw the rewriting of the army's
counterinsurgency manual, while touting himself as
the expert of experts on that subject, too. And
then, in February 2007, a fourth star in hand, he
took charge of the US command in Iraq for its
"surge" moment.
Last week, Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates appointed him head of the
Pentagon's Central Command with responsibility for
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for the
proxy war in Somalia. His duties will soon stretch
from North Africa into Central Asia. The
appointment, however, came after the fact. By
then, as Bush's personal general, he had already
left the actual CENTCOM commander, Admiral William
"Fox" Fallon in the dust. The president dealt
with him directly, bypassing the CENTCOM
commander; and, even before Fallon's ignominious
resignation, Petraeus was already traveling the
Middle East as, essentially, the president's
personal representative, engaging in acts normally
reserved for the head of CENTCOM. His appointment
was seconded by presidential candidate Senator
John McCain ("I think he is by far the
best-qualified individual to take that job ..."),
signaling the degree to which the Bush
administration is now preparing optimistically for
McCain's war (or, alternatively, for Senator
Barack Obama's hell).
But here's the
strange thing when you look more carefully at
Petraeus's record (as others have indeed done over
these last years), the actual results - in Iraq,
not Washington - for each of his previous
assignments proved dismal. What the record shows
is a man who, after each tour of duty, seemed to
manage to make it out of town just ahead of the
posse, so that someone else always took the fall.
On his time in Mosul, former ambassador
Peter Galbraith offered this description:
As the American commander in Mosul
in 2003 and 2004, he earned adulatory press
coverage ... for taming the Sunni-majority city.
Petraeus ignored warnings from America's Kurdish
allies that he was appointing the wrong people
to key positions in Mosul's local government and
police. A few months after he left the city, the
Petraeus-appointed local police commander
defected to the insurgency while the Sunni Arab
police handed their weapons and uniforms over en
masse to the insurgents.
Mosul has
remained a hotspot of insurgency ever since. On
his next tour, when it came to all the "progress"
training the Iraqi army, let Rod Nordland, the
author of that "fawning" - his retrospective
adjective, not mine - Newsweek cover piece of
2004, suggest an obituary, as he did in 2007:
[Petraeus] rose to fame not by his
achievements but by his success in selling them
as achievements. He's first of all a great
communicator ... Training the Iraqi military and
shifting responsibility to them was the mantra
Petraeus sold to hundreds of credulous reporters
and hundreds of even more credulous visiting
CODELs (congressional delegations)... By the
time he left, the training program was clearly
on its way to spectacular failure. By the end of
last year that had become received wisdom; it
became convenient for the brass to blame the
fiasco on the politically less popular and
media-friendless General George Casey. Entire
brigades of police had to be pulled off the
street and retrained because they were evidently
riddled with death squads and in some cases even
with insurgents. The Iraqi army was all but
useless, a feeble patient kept on life support
by the American military.
Just
recently, in hearings before Congress, Petraeus
himself introduced two new words to describe the
post-"surge" security situation in Iraq: "fragile
and reversible". Take that as a tip for the
future. Fragile indeed. The "surge" landscape the
general helped create has, from the beginning,
been flammable and unstable in the extreme.
It has, in recent weeks, been threatening
to break down in Shi'ite civil strife, even as,
under an American aegis, the Sunnis have been
rearming and reorganizing for the day when they
can take back a Baghdad that was largely cleansed
of their ethnic compatriots during the "surge"
months. Americans are once again dying in
increasing numbers (though little attention has
yet been paid to this in the media), as are
Iraqis. It will be a miracle if post-"surge" Iraq
doesn't come apart before November 4, 2008, not to
say the end of Bush's term in January.
The
problem is: putting a face - that is, a mask - on
something has nothing to do with changing it in
any essential way, no matter how you brand it and
no matter who's listening to you elsewhere. This
August or September, when the general takes over
at CENTCOM, he will leave behind (as he has
before) the equivalent of a mined stretch of Iraqi
roadside ready to explode, possibly under the
coming US presidential election. It remains to be
seen whether he will once again have made it out
of town in the nick of time and relatively
unscathed.
The miracle was that, so late
in the game, the American media swallowed the
president's (and the general's) propaganda on the
"surge" campaign which, on the face of it, was
ludicrous. Stranger still, they did so for almost
a year before the situation started to fray
visibly enough for US TV networks and major papers
to take notice. For that year, most of them
thought they saw a brass band playing fabulously
when there was hardly a snare drum in sight.
That result may be a public relations
man's dream, but it was thanks to a con man's art.
The question is: Can the president make it back to
Texas before the bottom falls out in Iraq? And
will the general continue to fall ominously
upward?
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 been
updated in a newly issued edition that deals with
victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
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