Breaking: WH Officials Say President Obama Has Asked Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to Step Down

[Algernon Moncrieff]

99. I agree with everything you say after "That is my opinion"

Petraeus executed the surge. He was a huge improvement militarily over Franks and Sanchez. One thing we now know in American politics -- one can rise from the ashes of a sex scandal. Republicans would likely welcome him to the role, and he brings the best real-world experience in the region.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/17/general-principles

Nowadays, most general officers, at least most American ones, do not see combat. They don’t fire their weapons, and they don’t get killed; for the most part, they don’t even smoke. In wars without front lines, American generals tend to stay inside fortified bases, where they plan missions and brief political leaders via secure video teleconferences. Their credentials are measured as much by their graduate degrees as by the medals on their dress uniforms. They are, for the most part, deeply conventional men, who rose to the top of the military hierarchy by following orders and suppressing subversive thoughts.

In recent years, the most esteemed officer in America—the very model of the modern general—was David Petraeus, whose public image combined the theorizing of the new school with a patina of old-fashioned toughness and rectitude. Before a sex scandal forced him to step down as the director of the C.I.A., a few weeks ago, he was widely regarded by politicians and journalists as a brilliant thinker and leader, the man who saved America in Iraq and might work a similar miracle in Afghanistan. Roger Ailes suggested, perhaps less than half in jest, that Petraeus run for President. Now many of the same people are calling into question not just his ethics but his basic ideas and achievements. History often forgives military leaders for small scandals, if they are successful enough. Eisenhower’s long-alleged affair with Kay Summersby has not much tarnished his reputation as an officer; even Hood, whose late campaigns were disastrous, is remembered as a paragon of bravery, if not of good planning. Will Petraeus be thought of, in time, as a hero guilty of no more than a distracting foible? Or as the general most responsible for two disastrous wars?

In Iraq and Afghanistan, most of the criticism has centered on the political leaders—Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld—who ordered the invasions and grossly mismanaged the occupations that followed. Less criticism has focussed on the soldiers and the generals who led them. This is understandable: the military didn’t start these wars, and the relatively small number of Americans who fought in them—after a decade, less than one per cent of the population—bore the burden for the rest of the country. In all those “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers and campaign applause lines, it has not been difficult to discern a sense of collective guilt.

But, by almost every measure, the American soldiers and marines who went into Iraq and Afghanistan were grossly unprepared for their missions, and the officers who led them were often negligent. In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, many American military units travelled to the National Training Center, a sprawling patch of California desert. There they took part in enormous mock tank battles against a phony enemy, called the Kraznovians, that was meant to stand in for the Iraqi Army but had in fact been modelled on the Soviet military in an imaginary invasion of Western Europe. When the real invasion got under way, in March, 2003, American soldiers came under attack from a hidden enemy that was wearing no uniform at all. There had been plenty of warnings that an anti-American insurgency might spring up, and none were heeded. The generals were unprepared.

How the Army got to such a point is the subject of Thomas Ricks’s “The Generals,’’ a series of vivid biographical sketches of American commanders from the Second World War to Afghanistan. In Ricks’s view, their quality, with a few exceptions, has steadily declined. His poster boy for the terrible early period of the Iraq war is Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, whom he accurately portrays as a decent man but an incompetent commander. Sanchez’s worst decision was signing off on harsh interrogations of Iraqi detainees—which, when the photographs leaked from Abu Ghraib, resulted in one of the war’s signal disasters. But his real sin was neglect. Stupefied as the insurgency spread around him, and paralyzed by Washington’s insistence that everything was under control (for months, Rumsfeld forbade American officers to use the word “insurgency”), Sanchez effectively delegated the strategy for the war to the lower-ranking generals beneath him.

I absolutely agree that war is a serious business and we fight to win. If it were up to me, we'd disengage militarily from the Middle East -- including Egypt and Israel. Our involvement there is more trouble than it's worth at every level. However, I'm a realist. Petraeus was the last highly successful General in the region, and he has intel experience. I think you could get him through the incoming congress with a minimal fight.