General Petraeus: collection

[MattC86]

I am very nervous about starting this thread and asking this, one because I know many of you are active military (and some have GEN Petraeus in their chain of command), and two because it's pretty politically sensitive, but all the political hoopla surrounding Congress, the White House, the American people, and GEN Petraeus/Ambassador Crocker the last few weeks has made me too curious not to ask. All that jazz about curiousity and the cat. . .

Anyway, is anyone else uneasy about GEN Petraeus and what he is doing in the United States? I personally feel that the administration has ceded it's Constitutional responsibilities as top policy-makers/policy strategists and has, in effect, "hid" behind GEN Petraeus and made the COIN/surge "strategy" (really a tactical reorientation in my mind) Petraeus' strategy rather than what it is, Bush's policy.

By ceding that responsibility, they have also passed GEN Petraeus the buck on "selling" the war. Now this is tricky, because I understand the importance of IO in any COIN situation (and the usual difficulties of fickle popular support for wars in the United States - or any liberal democracy), and I know some responsibility for IO falls to GEN Petraeus anyway. And most of what little I saw from his testimony was excellent - I particularly liked how he did not say whether MNF operations in Iraq are making America safer - but his appearances on Fox or on Katie Couric were cheerleader-esque appearances in some ways, and make me think that he's doing a lot of salesman work while he's here.

What especially bothers me is his op-ed from just before the 2004 election about the Iraqi Security Forces, which, as shown by events of the next years, was (to my admittedly non-expert perspective) debatable at best and patently false at worst. That editorial from a serving military officer smacked of political salesmanship, and I am worried that he is doing much of the same currently. I wonder what anyone else thinks of this blurring of political and military responsibilites.

I hope this was not too out of line, and if it was, I apologize.

Matt