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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI Was Punked By Petraeus
How I Was Drawn Into the Cult of David Petraeusby Spencer Ackerman
November 11, 2012
{snip}
____ The first time I met Petraeus, he was in what I thought of as a backwater: the Combined Armed Center at Fort Leavenworth. Its one of the Armys in-house academic institutions, and its in Kansas, far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2005, Petraeus ran the place, and accepted an interview request about his tenure training the Iraqi military, which didnt go well. Petraeus didnt speak for the record in that interview, but over the course of an hour, he impressed me greatly with his intelligence and his willingness to entertain a lot of questions that boiled down to isnt Iraq an irredeemable shitshow. Back then, most generals would dismiss that line of inquiry out of hand, and that would be the end of the interview.
. . . Petraeus recognized that the spirited back-and-forth journalists like could be a powerful weapon in his arsenal. His ability to talk to a reporter for 45 minutes, to flow on the record, to background or off-the-record and back, and to say meaningful things and not get outside the lane too much it was the best Ive ever seen, Mansoor reflects. It paid dividends. On the strength of a single tour running the 101st Airborne in Mosul, Newsweek put the relatively unknown general on its cover in 2004 under the headline CAN THIS MAN SAVE IRAQ? (Its the first of three cover stories the magazine wrote about him.) Petraeus embrace of counterinsurgency, with its self-congratulatory stylings as an enlightened form of warfare that deemphasized killing, earned him plaudits as an intellectual, unlike those old-fashioned, gung-ho, blood-and-guts sort of commanders, as Times Joe Klein wrote in 2007. This media narrative took hold despite the bloody, close-encounter street fights that characterized Baghdad during the surge . . .
Politicians and the press treated Petraeus as a conquering hero. Tom Ricks, then the Washington Posts senior military correspondent, wrote that Petraeus determination was the cornerstone of his personality, and portrayed the success of surge as that determination beating back the insurgents and the nay-sayers. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus, wrote Brookings Institutions analysts Michael OHanlon and Kenneth Pollack after a return from Iraq. They are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference. John McCain hugged Petraeus so closely during his 2008 campaign that Post columnist Jackson Diehl dubbed the general McCains Running Mate.
But by the time President Obama tapped Petraeus to run the Afghanistan war in 2010, something had changed. Petraeus mouth was saying counterinsurgency, with its focus on protecting civilians from violence, but in practice, he was far more reliant on air strikes and commando raids. He was even touting enemy body counts as measurements of success, which was completely antithetical to counterinsurgency doctrine, and his staffs insistance that nothing had changed sounded hollow.
But then there was Broadwell to spin the shift away. On Ricks blog, she described the complete flattening of a southern Afghan village called Tarok Kolache, confidently asserting that not only was no one killed under 25 tons of U.S. air and artillery strikes, but that the locals appreciated it. Danger Rooms follow-up reporting found that the strikes were even more intense: two other villages that the Taliban had riddled with bombs, were destroyed as well. But Broadwell, who was traveling around Afghanistan and working on a biography of Petraeus, didnt grapple with the implications of Petraeus shifting away from counterinsurgency, let alone the fortunes of the Afghanistan war . . .
read more: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/petraeus-cult-2/
(I'm a confessed admirer of Spencer Ackerman's writings and reports on Iraq and Afghanistan. They are both candid and informative, and Spencer's views are right up front for all to measure, for what that's worth. This article reflects the integrity of Spencer in his willingness to confess his own past blindness to the sins of the general; while providing yet another detailed and informative insight into Petraeus' recent past.)
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I Was Punked By Petraeus (Original Post)
bigtree
Nov 2012
OP
bigtree
(85,996 posts)2. we'll come around to this I guess
after we exhaust all of the salacious bits