NYT: "Hiding Behind The General"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/opinion/09sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Editorial
Hiding Behind the General

Published: September 9, 2007

- snip -

President Bush, however, seems to be aiming for maximum political advantage — not maximum clarity on Iraq’s military and political crises, which cannot be separated from each other. Mr. Bush, we fear, isn’t looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public, scare Democrats into dropping their demands for a sound exit strategy, and prolong the war until he leaves office. At times, General Petraeus gives the disturbing impression that he, too, is more focused on the political game in Washington than the unfolding disaster in Iraq. That serves neither American nor Iraqi interests.

Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus’s strategy — as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell — another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier’s duty — play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war.

General Petraeus has his own credibility problems. He overstepped in 2004 when he published an op-ed article in The Washington Post six weeks before the election. The general — then in charge of training and equipping Iraq’s security forces — rhapsodized about “tangible progress” and how the Iraqi forces were “developing steadily,” an assessment that may have swayed some voters but has long since proved to be untrue.

And just last week, senior military commanders in Baghdad who work for General Petraeus entered the political fray by taking issue — anonymously — with the grim assessment of Iraq’s politics and security by non-partisan Congressional investigators.

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We hope that General Petraeus can resist the political pressure and provide an unvarnished assessment of the military situation in Iraq. He is an important source of information, of course, but he is only one source — and he is not the man who sets American policy. If Mr. Bush insists on listening only to those who agree with him, Congress and the public must weigh General Petraeus’s report against all data, including two new independent evaluations sharply at odds with the Pentagon’s claim that things in Iraq are substantially better.

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[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Expect another whitehouse whitewash next week, where more

reality will be invented.

[Beetwasher]

2. `Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people,`

That is one phrase I can never seen printed enough.