Today In Military Hagiography

By Cernig

Today in the Washington Post noted hagiographer to generals (if they have neocon patronage) Thomas Ricks explains why Saint General Petraeus is so wonderful for slipping a decades-long occupation of Iraq past an unsuspecting American public disguised as a short-lived "surge". No, really:

Throughout his time in Iraq, Petraeus bypassed the chain of command and answered directly to Bush, with whom he held weekly videoconferences from Baghdad. He waged -- and won -- the political fights at home by discreetly but unmistakably downgrading U.S. goals for Iraq, by facing down congressional Democrats, and by winning more time for the new strategy to take hold.

In effect, Petraeus helped lay the groundwork for a much more prolonged engagement in Iraq. The surge itself would last 18 months, with the last of the five additional brigades leaving last summer. But what neither he nor Bush had articulated -- and what lawmakers, the public and even some high up the military chain of command did not recognize -- was that the new strategy was in fact a road map for what military planners called "the long war."

The strategy envisioned a series of stages: First would come increased security. Then, political progress, and with it the creation of a reliable Iraqi army and police force. And all that, even if everything went as planned, could take many, many years.

Nice of Bush, General Saint Pet and their neocon patrons to understand that Americans couldn't handle a real, open debate on their plans...wasn't it?

Oh, and along the way Ricks manages a serious hatchet job on Adm. William J. "Fox" Fallon, a pincipled officer who stood up against the neocon cabal's plans for attacking Iran and got shitcanned for it. Reading it, you have to wonder how much lube Ricks used as he dropped impartial, investigative journalism on the floor and grabbed his ankles instead.

Update: Go read Jeff Huber, author of "Bathtub Admirals", you'll be glad you did. A snippet:

As Ricks writes, Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” That the surge has, as Ricks acknowledges, “failed politically,” is of little consequence.

The generals’ gambit, as Ricks told David Gregory on Meet the Press, is “they feel they have made huge sacrifices, that they have had friends die and sons bleed, and that they don't want to throw that all away on the—you know, because some guy said on the campaign trail, ‘We're going to get all these guys out.’”

Thus did Ricks, wearing the beard of an impartial journalist, deliver the ultimatum for Petraeus, Odierno, Keane, Kristol, and the rest of the war oligarchs. Obama can either accede to the their goal, which is and always has been a permanent military occupation of Iraq, or stand up to them and be vilified as the wimp who betrayed his soldiers because of the campaign promise he made to get the peace pansy vote.