I was pleased to see that Leon Panetta won the support of all 100 senators to be our new Secretary of Defense. He will be the first Democrat to serve in the position in 14 years. I am very happy to bring that streak to an end. It’s important that he starts off with unanimous support because he’s going to be presiding over some very controversial debates, including a drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, the transition in Iraq, and further budget cuts at the Pentagon.
In some ways, I’m sad to see him leave the CIA. He was the first decent person to head that agency since Stansfield Turner. And he kept the agency out of the news, stopped the torture and the infighting, and still managed to not cause any Republican resistance whatsoever to him taking on this new position. With a little more time at Langley, he might have been considered the best director the agency ever had. I feel a little less confident that David Petraeus will be able to keep the drama at bay. He’s our best general, but he also likes to talk too much. And I don’t think he sees eye-to-eye with the president on some issues, and may try to win policy disputes through backchannels to Congress and the press.
I never joined in the Betray-Us Chorus both because it was appallingly short-sighted anti-war politics and because I early on realized that he was our most competent commander. He was a real general, surrounded by hacks and morons. Some people criticize him for his self-promotion, but I think he’s earned his promotions and belongs on the top of the food chain.
One of the very few things Bush got right was putting his trust in Petraeus. I just don’t think he’s a great fit to be the Director of Central Intelligence.
But, hey, he’s been successful in pretty much everything else he’s tried, and I can’t hang Afghanistan around his neck. The president is the one that put him in charge of a hopeless endeavor, and he hasn’t made things worse.
As for Robert Gates, back when he was nominated by Bush I stuck my neck out to say that he was a good appointment and we shouldn’t oppose his nomination. I said that with full knowledge that he lied to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair. But he was the best we were going to get from Bush, and he did a really excellent job both in cleaning up after Rumsfeld and in loyally serving the country for Obama. He’s earned some respect.
Our national security establishment is still screwed up completely, but we’ve been in worse hands. In fact, we’ve almost always been in worse hands.
My suspicion. Petraeus is going to CIA to deal with some persistent intelligence failures in AfPak that got us into trouble and reduced effectiveness. For example, it is clear that there have been huge failures in so-call human intelligence that resulted in terrorist attacks on our troops and drone attacks against civilians. CIA operations in Pakistan have been beset with fuckups.
The CIA was totally blindsided by he Arab Awakening, just as it was by the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is a failure in the analysis area.
Hopefully, the Petraeus can bring operational accountability to CIA the way Panetta seems to have brought financial accountability to the CIA.
And now Panetta has to find that $18 billion of oil-for-food money that Paul Bremer lost in Iraq. (That was not US money; it was held in trust for Iraqis). And bring the financial shenanigans at DoD to heel.
Very interesting re: the $18 billion! as is your take on Petraeus’ mandate – that would be a prerequisite for withdrawing/ reducing our presence in Afghanistan.
Interesting theory. I was wondering why Obama would put a military guy in at CIA.
From what I understand about Gates and Bush: without Gates, Israel would have attacked Iran, and we may have joined them.
Supposedly Condi also played a role in that, so she may deserve some cred too. But yes, Gates is said to have been a key player in cutting off Cheney and the worst of the other neo-cons, foreign and domestic, before they made their move on Iran. So, without Gates, perhaps there’s no Green Movement, and/or the Arab Spring would have played out very differently. Not to mention the collateral damage in lives and property that was avoided.
I think the man will be regarded well by history.
Are we talking about the Petraeus who lost tons of weapons & ammo in Iraq?
That Petraeus??
He didn’t personally lose any of that shit. It was lost to a VERY corrupt bunch of local thieves that they were forced to work with. I suspect it would have happened to anyone, really.
He was in charge of those weapons & was an epic fail at it.
Google “Petraeus & lost weapons” & see how many results you get.
http://careandwashingofthebrain.blogspot.com/2009/02/lost-weapons-in-iraq-afghanistan-and.html
I think you are thinking of Ricardo Sanchez, our awesome candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas.
.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I stand corrected.
Thank you Oui
The first I had really heard of this Patreus guy was in Thomas Ricks’ book “Fiasco” where he was introduced as the guy who really understood, from his studies of the failures of Vietnam, how to handle an invasion/occupation, whether we want to call it that or not. Then I was pleased to hear that he was being moved up the chain. And things got quite a bit better under his command.
I can’t predict how he will do as the head of CIA but I hope he has learned that ground invasions really aren’t the answer in the future. It should be human intelligence and covert stuff (you name it) that no one ever gets the full story on that we need to fight terrorism and other inconveniences in the world.
We have gone from dealing with and deterring threats to fighting threats to now fighting “inconveniences”? What a slippery slope we’ve descended since the end of the Cold War!
The failure of the military is to understand that what went wrong in Vietnam was that a nation of 19 million people in the midst of a nationalist military struggle do not like the fact that someone is trying to prevent their victory. And that setting up a Roman Catholic puppet with a corrupt family does not provide a real alternative. What went wrong was Eisenhower deciding to pick up the role of colonialist that France was kicked out of at Dien Bien Phu. An army of 500,000 was not going to defeat a determined army of 19 million without obliterating the country, which the US made a good go at.
And the publicly stated premise of the war, that we were saving Vietnam from the PRC was false. And if there were a loud Juan Cole type in 1954 we might have seen the error. But 1954 was the climax year of the McCarthy hysteria.
The military still thinks that staying the course would have provided victory. Until they can shake that doctrine, we are going to repeat misadventures like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Petraeus muddled through in Iraq, benefiting from a policy of bribery and the fact that Ayatollah Sistani was a competent advocate for restraint on the part of the Shi’ites. What cooled things off was the fact that Petraeus’s tour coincided with the establishment of a date certain for US withdrawal. The same is occurring in Afghanistan. If he has grasped that America’s voluntarily leaving and foregoing any future demands (such as permanent bases) is what allows the return of stability, he might deserve the props he’s been getting. But there’s been a lot of post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy going on in the assessment of Petraeus, a fallacy that he has not discouraged.
My hopes for him at CIA is based on the fact that he apparently does not like failure among those under his command. And he knows firsthand where there have been intelligence failures in the AfPak theater.
Human intelligence is not a silver bullet; there is too much room in those operations for hidden incompetence, corruption, and double dealing. And covert action rarely does more than muddle through at best. For example consider the hostage rescue mission in Iran that Carter undertook. And even the killing of bin Laden was a muddling through and lost a helicopter, which exposed secret US technology.
Belligerents appear for very specific reasons. Deterring threats has more to do with understanding the logic in the threat than in the knowledge that you pretend to have overwhelming overt of covert capabilities. The Arab Awakening is going to do more to destroy al Quaeda than anything the US did in the past 18 years. See the changes that have already taken place at al Akhar Seminary in Cairo, the most influential Sunni religious institution.
Peace comes when ordinary politics is more effective than war for large numbers of people obtaining their objectives. That comes either through raising the economic and social costs of insurgency or war. Or it can come from lowering the social and economic costs of peace and prosperity. Authentic democracy within a regime of respect for law and human rights, a system which we are sadly lacking in the US, tends to lower the social costs of people reaching their objectives. Secret activities are eventually corrosive of democracy.
My opinion of Petraeus took form long before he was put in charge of Iraq and, in fact, before he was given the job of training Iraqi police and armed forces, which was his only real failure in his career. It was his command of the 101st during the invasion and early occupation that stood out for me. Anywhere he went, things worked. Anywhere he wasn’t, things turned to crap immediately. And when he left somewhere, things fell apart.
Ditto. I remember reading about his management in northern Iraq when he was commanding the 101st. Getting to know the locals, as opposed to cracking down on them like some other divisional commanders were doing in their sectors.
What cooled things off was the fact that Petraeus’s tour coincided with the establishment of a date certain for US withdrawal. The same is occurring in Afghanistan.
Yes!
Although I think Patraeus has nonetheless shown himself to be quite a competent commander. The notion of backing the “Awakening Councils” as they took on the jihadist regimes of their former allies seems to have come through, if not directly from, Patraeus. Notably, this development happened after the US backed off from trying to occupy the towns in that part of Iraq. I think there’s reason to hope that Patraeus and others in this administration understand the withdrawal lesson from Iraq.
What went wrong was Eisenhower deciding to pick up the role of colonialist that France was kicked out of at Dien Bien Phu.
I go back further, to FDR and Truman siding with France’s colonial reoccupation ambitions in order to keep France firmly in the western military alliance.
We totally missed the boat on anti-colonial and anti-plantation politics during the Cold War. I’m glad Obama’s not making the same mistake with the uprisings in, for instance, North Africa.
“We’ve almost always been in worse hands.”
Good point. Obama-Clinton-Biden-Gates-Mullen-Panetta-Patraeus. I think you have to go back to FDR-Marshall et al. to find a better national security establishment.
” And he kept the agency out of the news, stopped the torture and the infighting, and still managed to not cause any Republican resistance whatsoever to him taking on this new position. “
All of which makes me wonder, did he REALLY stop it, or did he just do it too competently for us to find out about it. Is that why the Republicans didn’t oppose him?