The Charade of Letting The Generals Decide
You may not have noticed it from the coverage, indeed you may not have seen his name at all, but General Petraeus was in fact accompanied by Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to Iraq, in what was meant to be a joint presentation to Congress this week.
That Crocker paled into virtual invisibility beside the bemedalled figure of the four-star general beside him is a demonstration of Washington’s priorities now. With an election year coming up, what the American politicians and the public care about is how soon will their soldiers come home. It is what President Bush will be concentrating on in his response to the evidence tonight.
What doesn’t figure is what the Iraqis may feel (on the latest polling, they don’t believe the surge is working at all). The Iraqis are now only important in that their interests can be called up in aid of the surge and against Democrat demands for a much fuller troop withdrawal than Bush is intending to announce. Their actual conditions and needs, let alone prospects, are hardly worth a mention.
Certainly you won’t find much about it from Ambassador Crocker’s formal report to Congress, which blames all the Iraqi problems on Saddam Hussein’s rule, glosses over the political fractures, avoids the thorny issues of Kurdish separatism and electoral reform and ends with an almost desperate plea that America has to stay because chaos would ensue if it didn’t.
This is not just a failure on Crocker’s part, although it is that. It’s really a failure of the whole idea of sitting a general alongside a civilian ruler and pretending that somehow you can organise a society.
You can’t. At the heart of the failure in Iraq is an assumption about nation building through military might which was never going to work in Iraq and won’t work in other places such as Afghanistan. Humanitarian intervention can be effective in preventing civilian slaughter. It worked in protecting the Kurds after the first war with Iraq. It stopped the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. But it doesn’t build societies, particularly in countries that are fractured.
The idea, of course, is that the military provides the security behind which the civil society can develop, helped by doses of outside funds and expertise. But this is a chimera. However well-trained soldiers are, they are basically trained for battle. Security demands effective police forces, a working judiciary and accepted civil administration.
You can’t impose them. Indeed it’s doubtful whether you can ever grow them from the outside. And without them, the outside military force becomes just a foreign occupying presence. This is what has happened in Iraq and no amount of surge of soldiers is going to make it work. All it can do is what General Petraeus was trumpeting, which is to keep a lid on areas which you can patrol in sufficient numbers.
It is the mistake the British have made in southern Iraq. They went in boasting of their experience in Ireland, donning soft caps instead of helmets and assuming the best. But the best didn’t happen because electricity wasn’t restored, the sewers failed to work and the youth remained unemployed. Instead the British troops became targets for the militia vying to fill the vacuum of civil power, forcing the soldiers to don their flak jackets and helmets again, thus becoming ever more obvious targets of occupation - too alien to become friends and too few to mount an effective military government.
We are repeating the same mistakes in Afghanistan. For the military, the prospects may be different. Having failed in Iraq, they feel that they are now up against a more straightforward enemy in Afghanistan whom they can beat when they can bring them to battle. This is old fashioned warfare and the British generals feel that given time and more troops they can win it.
But it isn’t an old-fashioned war and no general, however highly regarded, should be depended on to decide the future of it. We are basically an occupying force attempting to sit on a civil scene every bit as fractious and resentful as southern Iraq. We can suppress opposition for the short term, but as the Americans have found elsewhere in Afghanistan, as soon as the troops go, the insurgents are back.
The harsh fact is that we are doing no more than holding ground, and becoming part of the problem as a result. The harder truth is that, as Iraq has proved once again, we are simply not suited to this kind of intervention. All we achieve is rousing up internal power struggles and becoming a magnet for every youth wanting to prove his virility.
The Petraeus-Crocker hearings were a piece of theatre played out for domestic US consumption, but they’re a charade we’d be ill-advised to imitate.
© 2007 The Independent
What else is new?
Top brass should avoid politics until they retire from active service.
So they ask a general if the war should end. Nice. While they’re at it, why not wander down to the Senate watering-hole and ask the drunks if the bar should close?
Betrayus and Crocker-shit are in Bush’s pocket, that’s why he hired them. They are loving it. It’s their chance for fame and a place in history. They don’t want to be shipped back and stuck in an office in DC. This is what they do.
Your last revolution was against us Brits. I think another one is long overdue. These guys are worse than King George. Grab the pitchforks!
You can read the micro-history of Petraeus on TV here.
Its going to be very embarrassing and catastrophic for the USA to lose 3 wars simultaneously…Afganistan, Iraq and Iran..
better to leave with a modicum of the illusion of a “superpower” still intact, than wait and be chased out later.
The usa only has air power, and a dedicated insurgency can bunker down and outwait any bombardment campaign.
In all fairness they should have a Halliburton executive, a Blackwater executive, an oil company executive and a banker testify - its their war, their administration, their government; they might as well cut the middle men and do us the courtesy of telling us about how much more killing they look forward to in order to buy their extra mansions, and yachts.
I posted this earlier on another comment - it fits here too.
For an opinion of Petraeus by his boss:
U.S.-IRAQ:
Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge
Gareth Porter*
WASHINGTON, Sep 12 (IPS) - In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus’s superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.
Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be “an ass-kissing little chickenshit” and added, “I hate people like that”, the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.
That extraordinarily contentious start of Fallon’s mission to Baghdad led to more meetings marked by acute tension between the two commanders. Fallon went on develop his own alternative to Petraeus’s recommendation for continued high levels of U.S. troops in Iraq during the summer.
For the rest:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39235
Contrary to what Hamilton asserts, war did not “stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.” Before the NATO attack, there was a Serbs-are-Nazis-and-Milosevic-is-Hitler meme clanging loudly in the US mass media echo chamber, along with the view that the violence in Kosovo constituted Serbian genocide or ethnic cleansing against Kosovo’s Albanian population. There was violence, yes, but it came from Serbs, Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, etc. In response to the NATO attack, hundreds of thousands of Kosovars fled to nearby Albania or Macedonia. After the attack, they returned and persecuted Kosovo’s Serbs and Roma, most of whom have fled.
I doubt that any war has ever been fought to prevent human rights abuses. I think this is a dangerous myth. The US and the EU wanted Yugoslavia destroyed and took advantage of internal dissension to accomplish their aims. For instance, in the early 1990s NATO threatened the Yugo central government with violence if it used its own legitimate military forces to prevent the separation of Slovenia– where separatist partisans were using force against Yugo regulars!
I want to know what those chestfuls of medals were awarded for. Long service? Administarative dilligence?
The generals decide if they want to continue their military career frustrated as discredited ass kissers or abandon their soldiers to officers who don’t mind continuing their military career as discredited ass kissers.
fresh 1,
Do you know any refugees from that war? Where is your information (or lack of it) coming from? I know several refugees from Bosnia who were there and have told me countless stories of the horror they went through. None of which sounds anything like your brief assessment of their war.
I think people are going to take a wait and see position for a while longer. They will examine this at the end of the year and the end of the first quarter next year when the 5th anniversary of the invasion comes around. People want to see a plan and progress. No more band aid patch jobs after all that has happened and all the lost time and loss of life that has taken place.
Paul M, I’m not sure what those chestful of medals and ribbons were for but I understand he is about the receive yet another for “Lying for his Commander in Chief”.
Urgent Memo to Congress: YOU are supposed to tell the GENERALS what to do, not the other way around. Sure, our Constitution lies in tatters and ashes, but it’s still readable. And it clearly states that the GENERALS work for YOU, as in WE THE PEOPLE.
Thank the kissass for his lies and bullshit, then declare the illegal occupation ended as of yesterday! Then we can juxtapose images of the Cheneybush cult kicking and screaming for more death with images of tens of thousands of happy troops hugging their children…