ALL hail the conquering General Petraeus. After leading and orchestrating the muddled and seemingly intractable U.S. military offensives in Iraq and Afghanistan, a critically victorious Petraeus has been kicked upstairs to head our civilian Central Intelligence Agency whose pessimistic intelligence assessments of the conflicts he was managing abroad contrasted sharply with his rosy assessments of the 'progress' and 'success' the general was working to convince Congress and the nation was taking place in the deadly Mideast and Asian quagmires.
From the start, intelligence officials openly complained and questioned how Petraeus could separate his unwavering confidence in the efficacy and ability of the military forces from the convoluted reality on the ground. Now comes a
http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/cia-to-fuse-troops-1201394.html">report that Petraeus is already trying to impose his operationally-biased military perspective on the CIA assesments of the military deployments by allowing the 'commanders' in the field to weigh in at the beginning of the process of assessment to 'narrow the gulf between the intelligence community's sometimes negative view of the war versus the more positive views sometimes expressed by commanders in the fight'.
The value of those rosy, more optimistic has always been measured in the intelligence agency's assessments from the commanders and has always been an integral contribution to their decision-making analyses. The difference in this policy change will be the actual inclusion of those conflicting military viewpoints in the final civilian-oriented product. The intelligence officers will also have the option of revising their assessment after input from the military.
Although the CIA says the change was planned before Petraeus took charge, the general, nonetheless, approved the plan and ordered it implemented. Now the general won't have to endure an official rebuke or criticism of military policy or action from his intelligence officers. That's what Petraeus faced repeatedly as each and every report coming from the civilian agency clashed with his and his fellow commanders' optimism and enthusiasm for continuing their military offensive unabated of unaltered.
Spencer Ackerman, an American national security reporter and blogger who began his career at The New Republic and now writes for Wired, recalls how Petraeus basically re-interpreted the goals and aims of the Iraq occupation in the vacuum Bush left with his hands off approach. 'Trust the generals in the field' was his refrain and Petraeus obliged.
"The general spent a lot of time spinning the war without winning it," Ackerman
says, "and as a soldier who blurred the line between executing strategy and creating it, his legacy on civilian-military relations will be debated well into the future."
Generals will always find a 'way forward' on the battlefield, but the scope and course of our military offensives should be the determination of our civilian leadership - which carries their mandate directly from the American people - the folks who our forces will be tasked with laying down their lives to defend or fight against; not determined by the military.
Bush had a line about Iraq that he liked to pull out when he was challenged by Congress to account for the American lives he was sacrificing for the Iraqi government. "I think it is wrong for Congress to restrict our military commanders," Bush said way back then. "I can understand having a difference of opinion about Iraq, but our commanders need the flexibility necessary to meet the mission. We should not be substituting political judgment for the judgment of those in our military," he says.
That amazing abdication of responsibility for the direction and scope of our military involvement in Iraq was also an invitation for his handpicked generals to create their own rationale for remaining in Iraq and 'moving forward', instead of adhering to some clear direction from those charged with carrying out the will of the American people. It is not the right of 'generals in the field' to make the determination about whether our nation's defenders should continue to fight and die as mere mercenaries of some foreign government. That right to commit forces is still the job of Congress, despite the Executive's own responsibility for managing them in their deployment. Yet, Bush conjured his own convenient ploy to hide behind the military as they found a 'way forward' in Iraq, and Petraeus proceeded to dig our troops even deeper into the muck surrounding Iraq's civil war.
At one point in the conflict, top U.S. commander in Iraq, Petraeus, told FOX news that he wasn't ready to pull the American prop out from under the beleaguered Iraqi regime, despite the utter lack of progress Iraqi had made in achieving the political stability which had become the administration's main justification for escalating our presence and increasing their assaults on the communities actively resisting the Iraqi regime's presumptive rule.
Offering his opinion that the occupation could still produce a 'stable, democratic government' in Iraq, Petraeus told FOX that, "We are ahead of where we thought, I thought, we would be at this point in time, and then we are behind where we might have been in some other areas."
But he also offered his view that, " . . . it's up to the policymakers and to the legislators to determine the course ahead." Petraeus's assessment, offered months ahead of the September intelligence review of the 'progress' of the occupation he's promised, was typical of a military commander tasked with finding a way to endure on the battlefield. Generals will always find a way forward, but it's just not their job to decide whether or not to continue on.
The job of deciding where and when our forces are deployed is clearly the responsibility of our legislators, and our civilian branches of government is charged with carrying out that legislative will. Aside from Gen. Petraeus' contention that the occupation could still produce a 'stable, democratic government,' there was still the open question of whether or not the U.S. should be engaged in battling for the present one against Iraqis resisting the U.S. enabled regime.
It was the (leaked) conclusion, at the time, of Bush's own civilian intelligence agencies that our occupation not only created and encouraged those elements of armed resistance who had allied themselves with Bush's nemesis, al-Qaeda, but the occupation was actually 'fueling jihad' as more and more Iraqis and others are drawn to fight our forces 'there' as Bush challenged when he called for them to 'bring it on.'
The resistance had increased, as predicted by the intelligence officials, in response to our own increase of force. Still, Gen. Petraeus insisted that our very forces which are aggravating Iraqis to violent expressions of liberty and self-determination could be, nonetheless, effective in eliminating that provoked 'threat' if we just doubled-down our force presence and dug in for the long haul.
Generals will always find a 'way forward' on the battlefield, but it should be the determination of our civilian leadership - which carries their mandate directly from the American people - just who our forces will be tasked with laying down their lives to defend or fight against; not the military.
The military commanders should not be allowed to substitute those judgments of our legislators and our civilian leadership, mostly representative of the opinion of the American people that the occupations are counterproductive to many of the stated aims, with their own biased determination to continue anyway.
The policy of consultation with the commanders in the field, that our new CIA director is enthusiastically planning to enhance by putting their compromised views at the head of the civilian agency's intelligence analysis, is antithetical to the tenets of our democracy. The conquering general wants to carve out a corner for his military cohorts in the heart of our civilian center of leadership and consultation. He'd like to generate something other than the reasoned assessment from his civilian peers at the CIA when evaluating his pet military offensives. Experience has taught the general that few outside his cabal of military officers sees the value in his brand of self-perpetuating, unending conflict. He's hedging against the almost certain evaluation from those who are now his subordinates that the political reconciliation and reform promised to spring from his "pollyandish misadventure" in Afghanistan is doomed to failure. He's hoping that the optimism of his buddies in the military leadership will trump the reasoned assessment of the civilian intelligence agency he intends to lead.
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