As many of you already may have seen, General Petraeus has inserted himself into the narrative of the 2008 campaign, again. This time publicly stating his opposition to a timetable, as if he had the authority to set Military policy:
Gen. David Petraeus, the Iraq commander, said in an interview with McClatchy that the situation in Iraq is too volatile to "project out, and to then try to plant a flag on a particular date."
Petraeus said any timetable must have "a heck of a lot more granularity than the kind of very short-hand statements that have been put out."
"We occasionally have commanders who have so many good weeks, (they think) it's won. We've got this thing. Well we don't. We've had so many good weeks. Right now, for example we've had two-and-a-half months of levels of violence not since March 2004," he said from his office at Camp Victory.
"Well that's encouraging. It's heartening. It's very welcome. But let's keep our powder dry. . . .Let's not let our guard down."
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...
The republicans would love to exalt the status of General Petraeus for one very simple reason: they have no credibility left on this war, anything they say the opposite is immediately taken by the public as true. While in reality (or at least, according to our Constitution), the President of The United States outranks his Generals, Bush and McCain would want you to believe that Military strategy is to be determined exclusively by the Generals assessment of conditions on the ground.
This is totally bogus. The President is the commander of the Military, and it his job to make assessments of the information given to him by the Generals and it is the job of the Generals to carry out the policy and strategy of the President. That is why Obama says it is his job to see beyond Iraq. Obama's view of the Military is that it should serve the interest of the safety of the American people, if the American people are best served by having their Military cease to function as a police force of a foreign nation, than the President should remove those troops regardless of conditions of the ground. Because conditions on the ground in Iraq speak to the safely of the Iraqi people, not the American people, because this has never been a war against terrorist.
I do not need to tell you how dangerous and F**ked up it is that we have the top General in Iraq making statements that not only directly contradict the President of that so-call sovereign country, but also seem to play perfectly into a partisan political narrative that also undercuts the whole concept of Chain of Command.
Obama is taking the lead in, again, reframing the issue in a way that could debunk the whole bogus notion of Generals setting military policy. However, the R's in this country have their latest PR campaign going -- "Conditions on the Ground." They will keep repeating this idea that Conditions on the Ground drive Military strategy. They do not. Our President's judgement of what is in the best interest of our country and our people drive Military strategy.
If only we had a President capable of making such judgments...