As Petraeus addresses Congress,
alexander cockburn reports on
a soldier playing for high stakes |
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Scheduled to report to the US Congress on September 10 on progress in Iraq, General David Petraeus is playing for very high stakes. Bush picked him to restore White House credibility. Already America's best-known soldier, he could rise to become chairman of the joint chiefs, with a cabinet post to follow in some future Republican administration.
But this bright 54-year-old, his shining resume adorned with a PhD and fistfuls of top-of-his-class awards, knows that nothing hangs as heavily round a general's neck as a punctured prophecy.
In November 1967, America's top commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, declared: "I have never been more encouraged in my four years in Vietnam." Only two months later came the devastating Tet offensive by the Vietnamese. The war dragged on for eight years. |
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General Petraeus will paint a rosy picture, but history is littered with the bones of optimistic military predictions
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History is littered with the bleached bones of optimistic military predictions and many of these bones lie amid the sands of Iraq.
In January 2004, when he was commanding the 101st Airborne in Mosul, Petraeus was cultivating admiring press coverage for his skill in recruiting former Iraqi army officers to the coalition's cause. What Petraeus was doing in Mosul, journalists proclaimed, could be the model for success throughout Iraq.
Later that year, on November 11, Mosul, a city of 1.7m people, collapsed into the hands of the insurgency, as thousands of police simply changed sides. Gen Petraeus was no longer on hand to witness history's rebuttal to his optimistic assessments of January. He and the 101st Airborne had moved on.
By then Petraeus was in charge of retraining the Iraq army, from which vantage point he transmitted his next upbeat assessment to the Washington Post, to be read by the White House and Congress. "I see tangible progress," he wrote. "Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. The institutions that oversee  |
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