Petraeus's Report 1
at CNN.com.
I suppose I should have seen this coming, but I didn't. I thought it would be "the surge is working, so we can't reduce troop strength." I suspected that it wouldn't be "the surge isn't working"...even if it wasn't. But "the surge is working so we're bugging the f*ck out" is not only unexpected (by me, anyway) but also pretty clever. It lets us out without losing any face for W.
Is it true? Oh, be serious.
That's probably not a consideration. To clarify: it's not a consideration for this administration...though it may be at least some kind of consideration for Petraeus. But the political pressure is so great that even a a basically honest man might very well nip it and tuck it and massage it and spin it until it looks like the Powers That Be want it to look.
Lots of people will be happy about this one way or another. Some righties will be happy because it will help them prop up their "Bush is God" and "we are winning" beliefs. Some liberals will be happy because it's a step toward our getting out. I'm still depressed because there's not much reason to think that the surge really is working, and this report really does seem like a step toward bugging out and leaving the disaster we've made to turn into a mega-disaster.
Of course, I'd also be depressed if we were staying.
The thing is, once you've made a disaster that you can't unmake, depression may be the only reasonable emotional response...
But here's hoping beyond hope that Petraeus is telling the truth, and that the surge is making things a little less terrible over there. It ain't much, but it'd be something.
at CNN.com.
I suppose I should have seen this coming, but I didn't. I thought it would be "the surge is working, so we can't reduce troop strength." I suspected that it wouldn't be "the surge isn't working"...even if it wasn't. But "the surge is working so we're bugging the f*ck out" is not only unexpected (by me, anyway) but also pretty clever. It lets us out without losing any face for W.
Is it true? Oh, be serious.
That's probably not a consideration. To clarify: it's not a consideration for this administration...though it may be at least some kind of consideration for Petraeus. But the political pressure is so great that even a a basically honest man might very well nip it and tuck it and massage it and spin it until it looks like the Powers That Be want it to look.
Lots of people will be happy about this one way or another. Some righties will be happy because it will help them prop up their "Bush is God" and "we are winning" beliefs. Some liberals will be happy because it's a step toward our getting out. I'm still depressed because there's not much reason to think that the surge really is working, and this report really does seem like a step toward bugging out and leaving the disaster we've made to turn into a mega-disaster.
Of course, I'd also be depressed if we were staying.
The thing is, once you've made a disaster that you can't unmake, depression may be the only reasonable emotional response...
But here's hoping beyond hope that Petraeus is telling the truth, and that the surge is making things a little less terrible over there. It ain't much, but it'd be something.
posted by Winston Smith at
3:57 PM
24 Comments:
The treatment of David Petraeus from some quarters has been totally dishonorable. The tepid response from their ideological allies is nearly as dishonorable.
The thing is, once you've made a disaster that you can't unmake
"The Corbomite Manuever." Not chess, Mr. Spock. Poker.
Of course it's myth, but myths have no currency without an underlying human truth. You cannot ever win by folding, but the other fellow might. Poker more accurately embodies the human condition than chess.
Should we save our blood and treasure for the next hand? Perhaps. Perhaps we should be content with declaring war on the cargo containers and hope there is no next hand.
When Sen. Charles Shumer (D-Venus, not Mars) recently said that the Sunnis of Anbar Province turned against the barbarians of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia despite the surge, I do not think that was a supportable conclusion.
Bin Laden himself observed (the myth?) that people tend to go with the strong horse and not the weak one. In the case of Anbar, the people came to the conclusion that the US will not fold, if I may mix sporting metaphors. Perhaps they will come to regret that assessment and it would have been more prudent to bend to the monsters.
depression may be the only reasonable emotional response...
An arguable proposition about the course of human events, and perhaps accurate. It's said that while Winston Churchill stood alone against the rising tide of barbarism, he was quite emotionally under the weather. The question is if that should affect one's rhetoric or actions, how he plays the hand.
May I again send some props the way of the junior senator from New York: as the Democrat frontrunner and near-anointed, she has never given the Iraqis the impression that the US will fold. Perhaps she's aware of the Corbomite manuever. Regardless, she has never dishonored her office or her candidacy. Unlike many, she knows that when she speaks, the enemies of civilization are listening, and so far, she's shown no tells.
Fact-checking the Petraeus report:
http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/09/a-different-kin.html
And no, the surge was actually not even relevant to the insurgents turning against Al Qaeda in Iraq:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2413200.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=2015164
Uh-huh.
Even if the US outbid al-Qaeda (not an unthinkable strategy, in fact a good one), your trolling of the internet doesn't vindicate Sen. Shumer's assertion that Anbar turned against al-Qaeda despite the "surge."
There are real human beings involved. Of course the failure to bail steeled the populace, else they'd have collapsed. Pragmaticists everyone, and who could blame them?
I guess if you swallow bullshit long enough it starts to taste like the truth.
A very incisive counterargument, by prevailing standards. My compliments.
BTW, Barack Obama was good today in giving pretty much what is WS' thesis. Principled disagreement isn't dead, just kinda buried under moveon.org, et al.
It's a shortcut. Assume everything coming out of the Administration is bilge; works 99% of the time.
Here's more *trolling* of the internets for ya:
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/09/anbar-surge/
http://www.americablog.com/2007/09/newsweek-internal-pentagon-report.html
It's called "evidence". Maybe you should try it sometime, instead of the talking points and propaganda you've been adopting as treasured beliefs.
An amazing visionary once said "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...you can't get fooled again!" Truly words to live by.
You guys are writing as if there is something you could say to Tom that would make him say "oh, yeah...I never thought of it that way. I guess Bush DID make a mistake!"
Reflect on the error of your ways, oh hoppers of grass...
C'mon, Tom. NOW you decide to worry about honor? And THIS is the point you choose to emphasize? The innumerable dishonorable actions that got us into this mess, they're all excusable. Petraeus doing what looks an awful lot like spinning the facts to protect his political masters--*that's* not dishonorable enough to raise your eyebrows, either... But a little rough-and-tumble from the other side, *that's* what gets your hackles up?
Ye gods, man! you're just downright unbelievable!
I guess you're right about that Winston, before he cries us a f-cking river over Chuck Schumer, he can read stuff like this:
"WARE: Absolutely. Look, I know General David Petraeus personally and he is a straight-shooter. In fact, what he is saying there is true, but what we are not hearing is how that was achieved. Anbar province, the violence is coming down, al Qaeda is under a lot of pressure. It's not because of U.S. forces. The Marines last year admitted they didn't have enough troops. The way they've done it is they've cut a deal with the Baathist insurgents and unleashed the insurgents from Iraq on the foreign al Qaeda fighters. They cut a deal."
source: http://dailyhowler.com/dh091107.shtml
In other words, evil Chuck Schumer is RIGHT.
I found this article particularly interesting.. and depressing.
http://makethemaccountable.com/index.php/2007/09/10/david-podvin-puppet-master/
Hummm -- the CNN piece is interesting, particularly when contrasted with Josh Marshall's summary of a related AP story.
Marshall posted:
BREAKING: Bush To Announce Possible Troop Cuts to Take Place in a Year
Does my headline pretty much get it right?
The AP is slugging this story: "Officials: Bush to announce troop cut"
You have to read the details to see that it's a troop cut next summer and whether it actually happens will depend on "continued progress."
Of course, the Bush White House has always been good at spinning the news.
The innumerable dishonorable actions that got us into this mess, they're all excusable.
They weren't dishonorable. Saddam was a butcher.
I guess Bush DID make a mistake!"
Was it a mistake? That's a prudential question, and certainly a valid one, but not one of honor. Am I saying Bush didn't make a mistake?
No.
"WARE: Absolutely. Look, I know General David Petraeus personally and he is a straight-shooter.
This was my core objection. One can disagree with any of the thises-and-thats honorably. What has occurred in the past few days has been dishonorable and speaks to the moral bankruptcy of Petraeus' slimers more than to the man himself.
I meant to praise Sen. Clinton, and also on this occasion, Sen. Obama. I don't think either have the political leeway to condemn moveon.org, but their silence at these people's disrespect and dishonor will have to do.
Honor, shmonor. Gen. Petraeus goes before Congress with a well-chosen and well-spun box of cherries, and MoveOn is dishonorable for calling him on it?
That White House spin is the betrayal of the truth, and Petraeus, like Colin Powell, Ollie North, and William Westmoreland before him, delivered it in a nice olive drab package with copious ribbons decorating his chest.
Those decorations are supposed, in our perverse media environment, to make him unassailable, but they shouldn't do that in any nation that cherishes civilian supremacy.
Sophistry again. Consequently, I'm out of this discussion.
The question isn't one of prudence, but of morality. All agree that Saddam was a butcher. That doesn't excuse the lies that led to the invasion. And you're ignoring the fact that we didn't invade for moral reasons. So, again: not prudence we're talking about.
I thought that the headline of the MoveOn ad was disgraceful. But then I'm not wild at all about MoveOn.
Right now, though, I'm just being amused by your selective sense of outrage.
I don't buy into the lies about the "lies." Sorry. But I don't want to discuss them anymore either. An epistemological impasse.
Which brings us to the present, and the conduct of the opposition. Some folks think anything is justified with sufficient provocation. I do not, and neither do I think the rhetoric of the past few days will be easily forgotten by the electorate.
But "the surge is working so we're bugging the f*ck out" is not only unexpected (by me, anyway) but also pretty clever. It lets us out without losing any face for W.
WS, this at least would have the benefit of bringing peace.
However, nothing of the sort is on offer. Duhbya is not leaving. He has said so before right out in the open. He has also said we could bring a few troops home if, if, if and some contingent date. Those dates have come and gone with no real movement.
See
Unthinkable for more.
Last, I'm not sure I understand your objection anyway. Are you saying that we can't leave because things are too bad, but we also can't leave if they get better? Sure sounds that way.
Well, Tom, we know that you've elected to ignore all evidence and reason on this score. It's clear that we were lied to. The evidence is as irrefutable as it gets in politics. The deceptions have been well-documented.
Accept crazy enough premises, or choose to ignore inconvenient facts, and you can maintain whichever beliefs make you happy.
I hope you're nice and comfy.
I know of at least 4 threads that I've seen (and I'm sure there are countless others) that have descended into Tom rejecting the notion that the evidence available indicates that we were lied to.
Each one of these ends up with Tom squirming for around 30 posts until finally he says that he thinks Bush sucks.
And then we move on for three reasons:
1) He says he thinks Bush sucks (which we then can see in later posts that he doesn't really believe)
2) The post to which the string of comments is attached migrates off of the front page of philosoraptor
3) We give up on Tom in order to maintain sanity.
And then we come back to it! And then it happens again! It's so weird that someone could be so resistent to logic and yet still profess that he's the reasonable one and everyone else is wrong.
Conclusion:
Ignore Tom whenever he says something about us not being lied to by Bush and his administration. That means, if you say something that is derived in any way from the fact that Bush or his administration lied to us and Tom argues with you, explain that your argument in a nice formalized format.
If he contests the premise that Bush lied to us, ignore. If not, figure out if he's right or wrong and whether or not your argument works.
There. We all do that, we're all better off.
Mystic,
Tom actually earlier on clung to beliefs which upon any close inspection, such as that available at the cites I provided, turn to dust. At that point, he retreated merely to the essential requirement that we treat General Petraeus only as a man of honor, not as someone who would willingly carry water for the President. Sadly, even that characterization appears to give him too much of the benefit of the doubt.
For now it is clear that he either willingly peddles Westmoreland-worthy lies for the administration or inhabits that same planet that only the President and Rod Serling know of:
"On CNN, Anderson Cooper asked Iraq correspondent Michael Ware for his overall impressions of the speech.
Ware: "Well, Anderson, my first impression is, wow. I mean, it's one thing to return to the status quo, to the situation we had nine months ago, with 130,000 U.S. troops stuck here for the foreseeable future. It's another thing to perpetuate the myth. I mean, I won't go into detail, like the president's characterizations of the Iraqi government as an ally, or that the people of Anbar, who support the Sunni insurgency, asked America for help, or to address this picture of a Baghdad that exists only in the president's mind.
"Let me just refer to this, what the president said, that, if America were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened. They are now. Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries. They have that now. Iran would benefit from the chaos and be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region. It is now.
"Iraq would face a humanitarian -- humanitarian crisis. It does now. And that we would leave our children a far more dangerous world. That's happening now."
Cooper then played Ware Bush's quote about how "ordinary life is beginning to return."
Cooper: "What he didn't mention is, there are four million Iraqis not in their homes. Neighborhoods here in Baghdad have been ethnically cleansed."
WARE: "Absolutely. And if by the -- if the president means by ordinary life, families essentially living locked up in their homes, in almost perpetual darkness, without refrigeration, or perhaps constantly struggling -- struggling for ever more expensive gas to run generators, if he means waiting in their homes, wondering if government death squads will drag them off and torture and execute them, if he means living in sectarian, cleansed neighborhoods where people who were your friends have had to flee, if he's talking about living in communities that are protected by militias, then, yes, life has returned to ordinary."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/09/14/BL2007091401322_pf.html
I used to think Colin Powell was a man of honor too. Unfortunately, just because you wear the uniform, doesn't mean your integrity is guaranteed. The first clue should have been that while Bush was saying he would "listen to the advice of the commanders on the ground", he was busy replacing them when they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear. Well, he finally found one.
I must say, I am compelled to believe that Anonymous is speaking the truth.
However, it's starting to get to me that we keep determining Bush to be lying and now others such as Patreaus as following suit. Is it possible? Sure. But the more it happens, the liklihood that we're right seems to decrease, in my eyes at least.
What I mean is, the more people we find to be outright liars, the more cautious I think we need to be about our evidence for that assertion, so as to avoid a momentum effect by which no one can stand in our path. Patreaus is going to be criticized even more heavily than he would've been had he not come at the end of a very long string of BS by Bush and his cronies. That's something to keep in mind, I think.
I also, however, think that the evidence you've advanced in your last post, and the evidence put forth by the community here in general, has been convincing. But, I want to know how someone might try to defend Patreaus here.
Any ideas? Really, can it be true that he's yet ANOTHER outright liar?
Mystic,
I would contend that in general a certain degree of nuance is required.
Military culture is steeped in a pragmatic, can-do type of attitude. So when a commander is given a certain task, I would expect that he or she takes it on with a genuine belief that the task can be accomplished, given adequate resources and expertise. So to that extent I believe that General Petraeus is justified in *supporting* the idea that the surge should be seen through and that it can accomplish its objectives. (Whether this is true IN FACT is another matter).
However, there is a certain point at which that support for a mission can cross the line into propagandizing. Given the General's 2004 Op-Ed (particularly its timing), and the recent reporting about him (especially what has leaked about Fallon's opinions), there is ample evidence for an inductive conclusion that Petraeus has crossed that line into the sphere of political propaganda. THAT is what I personally have a problem with. YMMV.
Well here's how I see it. Here are the major claims Patraeus made, as far as I can tell:
1) "Though the improvements have been uneven across Iraq, the overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in eight of the past 12 weeks, with the number of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006."
2) "Though al Qaeda and its affiliates remain dangerous, we have taken away a number of their sanctuaries and gained the initiative in many areas."
3) "Coalition and Iraqi operations have helped reduce ethno-sectarian violence as well, bringing down the number of ethno-sectarian deaths substantially in Baghdad and across Iraq since the height of the sectarian violence last December."
4) "The number of overall civilian deaths has also declined during this period, although the numbers in each area are still at troubling levels."
5) "Iraqi security forces have also continued to grow and to shoulder more of the load, albeit slowly"
6) "in what may be the most significant development of the past eight months, the tribal rejection of al Qaeda that started in Anbar province and helped produce such significant change there has now spread to a number of other locations as well."
7) "Based on all this, and on the further progress we believe we can achieve over the next few months, I believe that we will be able to reduce our forces to the pre-surge level of brigade combat teams by next summer without jeopardizing the security gains that we have fought so hard to achieve...while noting that the situation in Iraq remains complex, difficult and sometimes downright frustrating, I also believe that it is possible to achieve our objectives in Iraq over time, although doing so will be neither quick nor easy."
So, if all that's true, it paints the picture that, by 1, violence in Iraq is decreasing and by 2 and 6, Al Qaeda is being defeated. By 3 and 4, one notes that deaths in Iraq are dropping, and by 5, one sees that Iraqi Security forces are taking more burden upon themselves.
So, if all that's true, things DO sound like they're at least looking up, despite the trend of Patraeus qualifying his statements with "slowly" or "but it still sucks", etc., throughout his speech.
So, are we discounting his testimony (a) purely because, as Anonymous said, we feel like he is likely to lie to us due to his past and personal characteristics, or is it (b) because we have evidence to believe that his statements are false, or is it (c) because we don't think the evidence he provides is sufficient to believe that progress is being made in Iraq?
If the first (a), I think we may need to, despite the notion that may be of questionable character, give his testimony merit based solely on whether or not it is supported by evidence - not whether or not we suspect him of lying to us. We don't want that suspicion to consume our view of the political situation, even if Bush has made it near impossible to avoid.
I feel that, at least for my own conscience, I'm going to have to approach a challenge to what he said from (b) and (c) because of (a). I'm definitely suspicious because Bush and his administration have been historically such noted liars, but that is not reason enough to believe that Patraeus is lying in this instance. So, (a) prompts me to (b) and (c).
I don't know where to begin (b), but the way Patraeus qualifies what he says with modifiers that seem to reek of wiggling around in statistics, I feel that it would do us good if we knew where we could get a fact check on him. I have a feeling he's telling the truth insofar as, for instance, Iraq's security forces growing, but I'm wondering whether or not that's a statement that makes the reality seem much more cheery than it is. Perhaps Iraq's security forces have grown by only 5% and he is now saying that they "continue to grow" in a semi-desceptive manner.
It's stuff like that that I'm worried about, but I'm not sure where to begin, and I'm not sure if we're justified in anything more than suspicion without that sort of information. Only then can we make a judgment about whether or not he has been lying, and whether or not the information truly does constitute enough evidence to believe Iraq is improving.
Well, here's a start. Judge the reliability of the linked sources as you wish...
http://democrats.senate.gov/journal/entry.cfm?id=282187
Well if all that's true, I guess he's a liar.
Damn. It's really unbelievable.
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