David Petraeus
In January 2007, as part of his overhauled Iraq strategy, President George W. Bush announced that Petraeus would succeed Gen. George Casey as commanding general of MNF-I to lead all U.S. troops in Iraq. On January 23, the Senate Armed Services Committee held Petraeus' nomination hearing, during which he testified on his ideas for Iraq, particularly the strategy underpinning the "surge" of forces
My take on this man, who Bush put there, is that he is immoral, has been immoral and will be immoral. This has
nothing to do with his private life where morality is so often put forth as so important. This has to do with the widespread failure to condemn Bush and the other immoral people for what they did to Iraq and what they did to our country in the process. Read on below for I have more to say.
I'll just use one source for convenience but there are so many more:The Sins Of General David Petraeus. This should be so obvious to people here but I will say it again for emphasis:
But the warning signs about Petreaus’s core dishonesty have been around for years. A brief summary: we can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or, that in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. The policy wasn’t working, but Bush repaid the general’s political advocacy by giving him the top job in the war three years later.
There’s his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He’s more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as “Iraqi death squads.” On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called Surge, he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war.
He did it by papering over what The Surge actually was: we took the Shiites' side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we’d help them out, too. It was a brutal enterprise—over 800 Americans died during The Surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus’s policies fueled. Then, he popped smoke, and left the members of the Sunni Awakening to fend for themselves. A journalist friend told me a story of an Awakening member, exiled in Amman, whom Petraeus personally assured he would never abandon. The former insurgent had a picture of the Petraeus on his wall, but was a little hurt that the general no longer returned his calls.
MoveOn may have been ill-advised to attack the general as “Betray Us” in Washington, but there was little doubt but that many in the Awakening felt betrayed.
Out of respect for President Obama I will not get into what a fool he has been in so many of his appointments. This is just another. We just won a hard fight but our champion has some
very weak spots. I will write more on that later.