The Prisoner of Gen. Petraeus
President Obama is being hailed for toughness in his firing of Gen. McChrystal and brilliance in his replacing him as Afghan field commander with Gen. David Petraeus, who managed the George W. Bush "surge" in Iraq that saved this nation from an ignominious defeat.
Herewith, a dissent.
By firing a fighting general, beloved of his troops, Obama just took upon himself full responsibility for the McChrystal Plan. The general is off the hook.
As of now, the plan is not succeeding. And given the inability of Kabul to deliver the "government in a box" to Marja, after Marines supposedly de-Talibanized the town, the McChrystal Plan is failing. The Battle of Kandahar has not yet begun, though the June D-Day has come and gone.
Should we be in this same bloody stalemate in December, Obama will be blamed for having fired his field commander who devised his battle plan, and was carrying it out, over some stupid insults from staff officers to some counterculture magazine.
More critically, Obama just made himself hostage to a savvy general who is said to dream of one day holding Obama's office.
Consider the box Obama just put himself in.
In 2009, he sacked Gen. David McKiernan and replaced him with his own man, Gen. McChrystal. Now, he has sacked McChrystal and replaced him with Petraeus.
The former community organizer and acolyte of Saul Alinsky cannot now possibly fire the most popular and successful general in the U.S. Army, who accepted a demotion to take command of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, without a firestorm that would consume his presidency.
If Obama has not noticed, the neocons, who want a "long war" in the Islamic world and a new war with Iran, are celebrating the Petraeus appointment with far greater unanimity than Obama's own staff.
Why is the War Party celebrating? Petraeus is one of them.
And the untouchable general's demands have begun to come in.
Clearly, Obama has been told he must back away from his declared deadline of July 31, 2011, for beginning withdrawals of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. And Obama is already moving to do so.
Vice President Joe Biden's statement in Jonathan Alter's "The Promise" that, "in July of 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out, bet on it," has already been challenged by Defense's Robert Gates.
No such decision has yet been made, said Gates.
Look to Obama, soon, to walk back that July 2011 date and declare that any withdrawal of U.S. troops will be "conditions-based"—another way of saying that if we are not winning the war in July 2011, we are not coming home.
Here is the likely scenario.
At the December review of the Afghan war, Petraeus will argue that, while progress is being made, we cannot meet our goals by July 2011. Years more of combat will be required to win the war.
Petraeus will ask the president for more time, perhaps years more, and perhaps ask for more troops, 20,000 or 30,000, to complete the mission and ensure Afghanistan is not again a sanctuary for al-Qaida.
Thus, in December 2010, Obama becomes LBJ in December 1967, when Gen. William Westmoreland, with 500,000 troops in Vietnam, came to the White House to ask for 200,000 more. LBJ said no.
And as the Republican right hammered him for not bombing Hanoi and blockading Haiphong, Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy entered the primaries against him from the left.
Richard Nixon, saying five years of unsuccessful prosecution of a war called out for new leadership, was marching to the nomination of a party he had helped reunite after the Barry Goldwater disaster.
The outlook bleak, his party splintering, LBJ declared on March 31, 1968, that he would not run again.
If Obama repudiates his July 2011 date for first withdrawals of U.S. troops, if he agrees to any new Petraeus troop request, his party will split and he will face a primary challenge from the antiwar left.
But if he stands with Biden and says the July 2011 date holds, and the troops start home in July, Petraeus would likely put out word that his hands are being tied and he will not fight a no-win war.
Should Petraeus resign his command under such circumstances, he would become a Douglas MacArthur-like hero to the GOP, and could wind up as No. 2 on the ticket. And that could send Barack Obama home to Chicago.
Obama should have left McChrystal to succeed or fail with the McChrystal Plan. Had he succeeded, Obama also would have succeeded. Had he failed, Obama would have been free to relieve him and tell the nation: "We gave it our best shot, with our best general, with all the resources he requested. Regrettably, we did not succeed. Now we are coming home."
That option was closed when he fired McChrystal and made himself the political prisoner of Gen. David Petraeus.
Brilliant.
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Rolling Stone no longer represents a "counter" culture.
"Why is the War Party celebrating? Petraeus is one of them.
And the untouchable general’s demands have begun to come in."
Now this makes more since to me than the General's Staff use of derogatory comments about "slimy civilians, effing this and that, Joe Biden, the goof ball, etc.. It makes since, but how in the world the little neo-cons running our country get the public to buy all of this b s is truly amazing. Of course we must remind ourselves that the counterculture magazine" is no longer counter cultural. Chronicles is the counter cultural magazine of our times.
It is asking too much of the American public to think that Obama will suffer for his foolishness. How did McChrystal save the U.S. from "an ignominious defeat" in Iraq? The whole thing was and is ignominious from the start, a defeat for America if not for politicians.
No, Pat, no. Who is going to be Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy? Right now, there is nobody who can challenge Obama from Democratic ranks on the war. The best they can muster would be Dennis Kucinich. And when is the last time a major party put up a general who did not win a war? 1864? Petreaus can thirst for the White House all he wants. He will thirst in vein.
If we are just talking shop, Alan Grayson is being groomed by the powers that be, and old stand-by Russ Feingold is a perennial option.
Anti-war left.... They still exist?
Robert, sir, the neo-cons are not in power (thank God). Yet, are we better off with the likes of Obama and company? I see no difference.
We are not a nation of warriors, though many of us would like to imagine we are. Many Americans are familiar with fighting, and war; but the vast majority have not experienced martial combat since grade school. How is a nation such as this supposed to make credible decisions concerning the manufacture and artifice of War? Why should not the leaders of such a nation imagine that they understand how to tame such a beast?
Why should not a general get drunk and carry on? Who cares so long as he annihilates the enemy? Why the insistence on protocol? I think perhaps the Tea Party is in the White House. We simply must observe our manners.
I apologize for the previous post. I believe that in some cases higher manners are indicative of a higher level of cultural attainment, and personal and social discipline. In this case, I believe the attempt to enforce finer social graces should start with an apology to the people of Afghanistan.
It also baffles me that even after Afghanistan and Iraq ARE failures, no matter how one sees it, they keep saying, "You can't have a deadline for withdrawal".
What is that supposed to mean? You don't turn a failure into a success. In the stock market, we sell on a downtrend and limit our losses, and we don't sit and pray that a 20% fall will be reversed by a 25% rise.
Not only can you have a deadline for withdrawal, you can just forget the deadline and start bringing back troops home. You lost. Get out of Afghanistan and the Taliban will take over, as it already has. Get out of Iraq and Shi'ite/Iranian sympathisers will take over, as they already have.
Sanjay is right: It is time to bail on Afganistan now and let Afganistan go back to being the tribal backwater it wants to be. Two super powers have had their heads handed to them in Afganistan. Can't we finally see we should never have gone there in the first place. The only reason to go there was to find Bin Laden. All the rest is hubris.
#6 I see no difference."
Yes, this is precisely my point. When Pat writes:" the neocons, who want a “long war” in the Islamic world and a new war with Iran, are celebrating the Petraeus appointment with far greater unanimity than Obama’s own staff," what Mr. Buchanan is saying is the neo-con agenda is still winning "the war on terror."
When General Tommy Franks called one of the neo-cons working in the Pentagon"the stupidest fuc...man in America," he was not fired or dismisssed because there is an unspoken rule among Republicans and movement conservatives in the beltway that truth is always an absolute defense for what high ranking General Officers might say about incompetent civilians and politicians. McChrystal was a special ops -- deep background type who made his mark killing and planning assasinations of real and perceived enemies of America. His recent dismissal smells like a set up to me or else a set up for Obama. When I say that it makes sense that the neo-cons are cheering and smirking, in the same tone as when they were blathering on about invading Iraq and all the goodness that would descend upon America when Saddam was hanging from a tight rope, it means they are simply pleased that their will can be done by democrats as it is by republicans -- or in their view of things "on earth as it is in heaven." You are right to say, "I see no difference" because the honest truth is, there isn't a helluva alot of difference. Regardless of what the labels say, it is still snake oil being sold to us whether the delivery truck is sporting a donkey or an elephant for advertisement. Or what is probably more accurate, A donkey on one side and an elephant on the other. Soon they will need to add a Tea Party phone number on the back for citizens to to call if the driver is not driving safely. One thing is for certain, it will be the same damn truck delivering the "goods" regardless of what the signs say.
Although I do think the US Democratic Party is as pro-war as its Republican Party, Patrick Buchanan once said that anti-war legislators in the Democratic Party are curiously tongue-tied for some other reason.
There is supposedly a reputation of Democrats as being "soft on war". Thus, a Democrat lets military operations continue with quiet consent.
Although I'd dispute Mr. Buchanan - there is more than quiet consent when Obama orders more assassinations than any American President.
Evil continues on for a long time and becomes commonplace and we get used to it and no longer feel the evil. Something similar must have happened to the ordinary Germans under Hitler. So we discuss the merits of various generals and strategies and squalid political infighting in these expeditions. Remember, the Iraq war, illegal under both American and international law, was and is a fiasco perpetrated by smirking liars who thought they could use American blood and treasure to reconstruct the world according to their mad vision. Even "victory" in these circumstances is a crime against the American people and others, and a victorious general is still a criminal. How did the U.S. government avoid defeat in Iraq. By PAYING the same people we went to war against to keep order.
The illegality of the war was one thing, but the deaths of a million Iraqi women and children from the bombing of Baghdad is the worst war crime of the Anglo-American world since Dresden.
Compared to the outright murder of so many innocent civilians in Iraq, the deaths in Srebnica seem nothing. It's more than three times the number killed in Dresden. Not only is it one of the worst war crimes imaginable, it's one of the most ignored.
The worst thing is that when I criticized it in another place, a French special forces officer started calling me names for it. It's like the Western world has largely gone mad under so much war propaganda.
Should Petraeus resign his command under such circumstances, he would become a Douglas MacArthur-like hero to the GOP, and could wind up as No. 2 on the ticket. And that could send Barack Obama home to Chicago.
Oh please! Why are Americans,especially neocons enamored with former Generals as Presidential material?
At least former generals like Jackson, Grant, and Eisenhower actually did something, unlike the present batch of bureaucrats.
Grant did nothing good.
"Evil continues on for a long time and becomes commonplace and we get used to it and no longer feel the evil." Clyde Wilson
"To want peace without God is an absurdity, seeing that where God is absent thence too justice flies, and when justice is taken away it is vain to cherish the hope of peace. 'Peace is the work of justice' (Is. 32:17). ... For there is but one party of order capable of restoring peace in the midst of all this turmoil, and that is the party of God." St Pius X, E Supremi Apostolatus
I posted this to satisfy Professor Gottfried's recent critique that "Catholics always suggest we pray or read St Thomas to solve problems in the Middle East." (and not only there, professor)There are of course other suggestions that we have made and continue to make but they are rarely mentioned or found desirable in America --such as the Hank Williams song,"Why don't you mind your own business, so you won't be minding ...."
Why would Americans vote for Petraeous? The guy is just another "limousine" armchair, career type general that is going to be in charge of a war that every American knows deep down is bogus at best. Americans only support a winner anyway, so if Petraeous loses the war, he will just be kicked to the side of the road. Last of all, American are going to be getting war weary soon. Do you think they qare going to vote for some guyt h at is just going to give them more of it, ev en another possible world war? I think not.
On another level, I personally don't think that Obama really gives a damn if he is reelected. He is just another banker/ international financier stooge anyway who will be set for life once he is out of office. H.W. Bush didn't really seem to want to be reelected in '92 and virtually gave the election to Clinton, I can see Obama doing the same in 2012 easily, since all the probable opponents are also internationalist stooges(Gingrich, Palin, Romney).
We can always bring back that great soldier and statesman Colin Powell.
"Should Petraeus resign his command under such circumstances, he would become a Douglas MacArthur-like hero to the GOP, and could wind up as No. 2 on the ticket. And that could send Barack Obama home to Chicago."
If anything can be more damning of the Republican Party than Clyde Wilson's frequent indictments, it must be this line.
To think that a party would consider anyone a hero for having asked for the sacrifice of more Americans in a war in which the chances of American victory are worse than they were in Viet Nam in 1967, his hypothetical resignation notwithstanding, is one of the more depressing political possibilities, though not much more depressing than the thought of B.O. back "home" in my city. But this shows not just the decay among Americans identifying themselves as Republicans; a Petraeus candidacy might also play well among independents, neocons currently crossdressing as Democrats, and those with a stake in the defense industry; in short, with enough voters possibly to swing the election.
How much has the quality of our electorate degraded? Would Westmoreland have become a "MacArthur-like hero" to the voters of '68 had he resigned over Johnson's refusal of 200,000 more troops? Not bloody likely: those voters had known the real Mac, and remembered the sweet taste of victory in '45. Voters in those days still had the discernment to realize that Westmoreland was either incompetent or had made an unacceptable moral compromise in playing along for the previous 2 years with a doomed strategy. In the event, they deemed Nixon's "peace with honor" slow drawdown the lesser evil to the Democrats' immediate unconditional surrender.
Or, most depressing thought of all, perhaps many Americans know exactly what they want to vote for; perhaps it is becoming widely held that, as Steve Berg wrote after Mr. Buchanan's previous article, the Afghan war is about nothing more than securing the oil pipelines, so that there are enough Americans who are willing to vote their gas tanks above their principles and any other national interest to make someone president.
I don't think Petraeus could ever dream of getting on the ticket, unless he miraculously wins the war in the next year and five months. Coming home a loser isn't going to inspire the American people. Do you think Westmoreland would have been a great VP candidate for Nixon? Lastly, how many people in Boobus America know who Petraeus even is? The only generals since Ike that could have capitalized on their generalship to propel them to the White House were Powell and Schwartzkopf and their time to capitalize on that has already past.