As I'm listening to our Generals from the Independent Commission on Security Forces in Iraq testify before Congress on the condition of the "surge", I thought I'd find out more about General Patraeus' history in Iraq, having heard that he'd been in charge of training earlier there and had actually performed poorly in his previous Iraq tours.
My search located an article just written at Alternet which validated what I'd heard, but not yet taken time to read, about Patraeus' less-than-perfect performance there. Weren't we told by Bush and the Republicans that Patraeus was the best of our best Generals? Weren't we told that if anyone can make this work, General Patraeus will make it work. But that doesn't seem possible based on his failures in the past in Iraq? If he's gotten it so wrong in the past, why should we put our soldiers' safety in the hands of General Patraeus'and his plan now?
Brent Budowsky, who writes for The Hill, wrote the Alternet article. He serves on the International Advisory Council of the Intelligence Summit,served with U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen and has advised both Democrats and Republicans. His article, General Petraeus on Iraq: Always Partisan, Always Wrong, is a strong and disturbing discussion on how Patraeus has been consistently wrong in his performance in Iraq, especially in training the Iraqi forces.
Here's some of what Mr. Budowsky writes:
Fact: After the initial phase of fighting, in the areas under his command, sectarian warfare ultimately escalated and his efforts for political agreements, while worthy, failed.Fact: There have been major disappearances, losses and/or misplacement of large amounts of Iraqi weapons that were grossly mismanaged (at best) under his command. Almost certainly those weapons were ultimately sold on the Iraqi black market with some landing in the hands of criminals, insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists who used them to kill Americans and Iraqis.
Fact: The Army has recently expanded a major criminal investigation of the mismanagement, misuse and probable corruption that happened during the Petraeus watch, under the Petraeus command. Petraeus is undoubtedly 100 percent personally honest, but there are people close to him under investigation for weapons and resources under his command, which were stolen or lost, and he bears a substantial command responsibility for bad management and bad judgment.
Fact: Shortly before the 2004 presidential election Petraeus did something that active-duty commanders should not do. In late September he wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post obviously as a favor to the Bush campaign, in which he applauded what he called major progress by the Iraqi military, Iraqi police and Iraqi leadership.
We learned recently that the Patraeus Report will be written by the White House and will represent their recommendations for Iraq. But Budowsky tells us this:
Even worse, we now learn that there will be no written report from Petraeus or the White House that was to have received his original paper. The whole exercise was a political sham, designed to buy time, and now that the time has been bought, the truth comes out: The Petraeus Report will not exist, anywhere, in written form.
Budowsky calls Patraeus' performance a "compendium of misjudgment and analysis and forecasts that a reasonable person might call delusional, and even the most charitable person would call disastrously wrong, with disastrous consequences for those who served during the three years after this op-ed was written." That's a pretty strong indictment of this General's actions.
To prove his point of incompetency, Budowsky has posted an article written by General Patraeus, and published on Sunday, September 26, 2004 in the Washington Post. I was unable to find the find the article at the WaPo website but Budowsky has provided it in his Alternet article. I won't iterate here Patraues' claims in his article, disturbingly written right before the 2004 election when Bush and company were touting Iraq success out of one side of their mouths and fear-mongering out of the other side. Please read it for yourself and then compare it to the miserable situation that now exists in Iraq and don't tell me that we're not being scammed one more time by this Administration.
The Independent Commission on Security Forces in Iraq is headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top commander in Europe. Their report said Iraq's armed forces won't be ready to perform independently during the next 18 months. You can read more on their assessment at CNN http://www.cnn.com/2....
And it was on Patraeus' watch that the 190,000 AK-47s and pistols went missing...
Intelligent, though not obviously creative or innovative. Extremely ambitious. Extremely political. Remember that within two months of Petraeus' graduation from West Point, he married the daughter of the Superintendent. Might he have been looking for a suitable match that would enhance his career, sort of what John McCain did in pursuing a second wife who had the advantage of great wealth to boost the aspiring politician's career prospects?
Petraeus has been given the opportunity to write his own personnel evaluation and to fill out his own report card on his performance in executing the "surge" in Iraq.
So here is the question: should we trust anyone who is this political and this personally ambitious to provide us with a detached, accurate appraisal of the results of his own performance? Or should we expect him to make up numbers, cook the books and casualty figures, and try to convince us that his leadership of the "surge" has been a "breathtaking" (an adjective he has used for developments in Anbar Province) interim success and just needs another FU, (or two, or three, or four, or whatever) to be a complete success?
Let us hope that the Senators and Congressmen do not let Petraeus off lightly when he tries to back up his bogus numbers and self-serving judgments, all of which likely will be crafted and coordinated to support the Bush/Cheney policy of maintaining a long-term military occupation of Iraq.
You are absolutely right: a general who is a coward and charlatan (especially a general who's overseeing a war) wouldn't dare damn himself and Bush's plan in front of Congress and the American public. But a true patriot general (one who defends his or her country without chauvinism) would be honest with Congress, our soldiers, and Americans and tell us the truth about Iraq.
Any Democratic congressperson who doesn't grill Patraeus ruthlessly deserves the wrath of the public.
Just stop and think how long and repeatedly we have been told these same lies, year after year and, considering that things keep getting worse, I'm stunned by the amount of money we keep dropping in this black hole of incompetence and corruption.
But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four