Letters to the Editor
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St. David?
A friend whose brother is a highly placed general in the US Army tells me that Petraeus may be the darling of the press and the Washington establishment, but he is not much liked by his fellow high-ranking officers. He is quite skilled at buffing his image as genius leader and tactician, but is seen as a self-promoter who claims credit and cuts out those have made his success possible.
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TOTALLY OFF TOPIC
Glenn -
every once in a while, when I open your column here at Salon, I get a series of thick black lines across the screen. I am using FIrefox on a Windows XP Machine. It seems like the kind of mistake caused by some malfunction in CSS code maybe?
If you could just pass that along to someone at Salon, it would be much appreciated.
Thx,
nick
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Shorter CarolynC
CarolynC:
Amazing. Fast forward to September 2007. We have Serious Beltway Establishment type Brent Scowcroft, arguing that we must stay in Iraq in order to avoid a wider war, versus Michael Ledeen, representing the Cheney wing, who argues that we must stay in Iraq, as part of the drive to create exactly that situation, a regional war throughout the entire Middle East.
Shorter CarolynC: "It's a breath mint!" / "It's a candy mint!" / "Stop! You're both wrong! It's arsenic, you douchebags!"
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Pravda on the Beltway
I'm heartened to see that Americans, like the Russians do, have at last learned to not believe what they're told. That our once-proud media had to turn into Pravdas is yet another sad price we've had to pay.
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OK - Its time for another round
of everybody's favorite fun game -
STUPID OR LYING?
You have said several times that you don't beleive people wake up in the morning and decide, "I'm going to tell a pack of lies today" and I've frequently said in defense of that notion "Never underestimate the power of delusion"
But there comes a point in time where the question of whether the deception is deliberate or not comes into play. Now shooter can come here and utterly fail to notice that if a randomly selected group of Americans ends up falling 50/40 Democrat, then that reflects the makeup of the population in question and is definitely NOT a reason to dismiss the poll results. But the Press Corps isn't shooter. They're supposed to be professionals. When they say "this is what Americans believe" they are indeed, flat-out lying. They know how polls work. They aren't idiots. In short the answer to the question "Stupid or Lying" is unquestionably - Lying.
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Deja Vu, All Over Again
GG:
But anyone who becomes a part of our political class, such as Gen. Petraeus, is inherently distrusted.
The LA Times this morning has what I thought was going to only be a puff piece on Petraeus [the front page teaser: Petraeus brings savvy to Iraq report], but turned out to be more nuanced [actual headline: Petraeus nears a precipice of history] and instead raises the question, "Will he be Ulysses S. Grant or General Westmoreland?
Nearly a year ago, staff officers told Gen. David H. Petraeus that they couldn't help but notice the striking similarities between his situation and one of the most famous moments in U.S. military history.
They told Petraeus -- then in charge of Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas, and soon to take over as U.S. commander in Iraq -- that he had the opportunity to turn the war around and thereby repeat the achievement of Ulysses S. Grant, who rescued the flagging fortunes of the Union army in the Civil War.[...]
Petraeus may yet turn out to be the Ulysses Grant of the Iraq war. But his upcoming appearance in Washington has other historical echoes, involving a military leader to whom history has been far less kind.
Forty years ago, Army Gen. William C. Westmoreland was brought to Washington in an effort to shore up public support for the Vietnam War. In November 1967, at the behest of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Westmoreland left Saigon to appear before Congress, deliver speeches and take questions from the press. His command later ended amid the turmoil of public debate about the wisdom of the war.
" '67 was the year you really saw erosion of public support starting, and that is why Johnson brings Westmoreland back, because he senses the public is getting tired," said Mark Moyar, a military historian and author of a book about the Vietnam War, "Triumph Forsaken."
"Westmoreland comes back and says progress is being made and there is light at the end of the tunnel," Moyar said. Westmoreland's comments in Washington led some to accuse him of being a political pawn of the White House, a charge that has begun to be leveled at Petraeus.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-petraeus9sep09,0,1344448.story?coll=la-home-center
Given the disconnect between what is true public perception and what our leaders think is public perception, I'll make a prrediction it's going to be Westmoreland, no matter how Smart and Serious Petraeus is.
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Cute
Paul Rosenberg says:
Shorter CarolynC: "It's a breath mint!" / "It's a candy mint!" / "Stop! You're both wrong! It's arsenic, you douchebags!"
Very funny. You got the point.
I think many Democrats in Congress are following the Scowcroft line of reasoning (if we can make the stretch and assume they are reasoning at all). We must make war in the Middle East to prevent war in the Middle East. In the end, it's the same result. More and longer U.S. involvement in Iraq, the people be damned.
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CarolynC
Good post, and I'd add that Osama bin Laden comes down squarely on the Neocon side in this debate. Cauldronize the entire region.
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Win--Lose
Glenn wrote a book whose subtitle is: "How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency." How true. But the good vs. evil mentality also created the Bush presidency. And the concept of "win-lose" in Iraq is another perfect example of how Rovian politics creates polar opposites, one with a desirable name and the other with an undesirable name -- and presents them as the only two choices available. "People! You wanna win or you wanna lose??!" Put that way, who's going to say, "We wanna lose!!" No one. But it's a completely false set of choices. There is no winning in Iraq, nor is there losing. Whatever the outcome, it will be complex, unpredictable and impossible to label with a single word. Historians will be arguing about it for decades. Anyway, you get my point. Anyone conducting a poll that says people believe the war "can be won" is conducting a dishonest poll.