A top general's dilemma (Petraeus column in the Toronto Star)

[applegrove]

A top general's dilemma


When he gives his highly anticipated Congressional testimony this week, Gen. David Petraeus (left), head of the multinational forces in Iraq, is expected to validate U.S. President George Bush’s divisive “surge” strategy. Email
He's tough and he's smart - his military views are informed by a Ph.D. - but has Gen. David Petraeus got what it takes to speak truth to power in Washington tomorrow?

Sep 09, 2007 04:30 AM
David Olive
Columnist

No matter how he shades it in his much-anticipated Congressional testimony on the Iraq war this week, Gen. David Howell Petraeus is the wrong man fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.

With becoming deference and self-deprecation, Petraeus in his testimony will acknowledge setbacks since U.S. President George W. Bush gave him command in Iraq in February. But the telegenic and articulate West Point graduate will provide a generally upbeat assessment of Iraqi conditions, intended to validate Bush's widely criticized decision in January to "surge" an additional 28,000 U.S. troops to the strife-torn country.

Yet it will be misleading testimony, at odds with the continued downward slope of trends in Iraq. Petraeus's hopeful busywork has merely postponed the inevitable, messy end to America's worst foreign-policy blunder of modern times.

Petraeus, 54, will emphasize progress in al Anbar province, a Sunni stronghold about 200 kilometres west of Baghdad. Beginning last year, Anbar tribal leaders began allying with U.S. forces they once opposed in driving from the region most elements of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown group whose ties with Osama bin Laden, if any, are uncertain.

......SNIP"

http://www.thestar.com/article/254531