[NYTr] Rich: Who Was Really in Charge During Bush's Colonoscopy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Jul 29, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/opinion/29rich.html

Who Really Took Over During That Colonoscopy

By FRANK RICH

THERE was, of course, gallows humor galore when Dick Cheney briefly
grabbed the wheel of our listing ship of state during the presidential
colonoscopy last weekend. Enjoy it while it lasts. A once-durable
staple of 21st-century American humor is in its last throes. We have a
new surrogate president now. Sic transit Cheney. Long live David
Petraeus!

It was The Washington Post that first quantified General Petraeus’s
remarkable ascension. President Bush, who mentioned his new Iraq
commander’s name only six times as the surge rolled out in January, has
cited him more than 150 times in public utterances since, including 53
in May alone.

As always with this White House’s propaganda offensives, the message in
Mr. Bush’s relentless repetitions never varies. General Petraeus is the
“main man.” He is the man who gives “candid advice.” Come September, he
will be the man who will give the president and the country their
orders about the war.

And so another constitutional principle can be added to the long list
of those junked by this administration: the quaint notion that our
uniformed officers are supposed to report to civilian leadership. In a
de facto military coup, the commander in chief is now reporting to the
commander in Iraq. We must “wait to see what David has to say,” Mr.
Bush says.

Actually, we don’t have to wait. We already know what David will say.
He gave it away to The Times of London last month, when he said that
September “is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in
policy.” In other words: Damn the report (and that irrelevant Congress
that will read it) — full speed ahead. There will be no change in
policy. As Michael Gordon reported in The New York Times last week,
General Petraeus has collaborated on a classified strategy document
that will keep American troops in Iraq well into 2009 as we wait for
the miracles that will somehow bring that country security and a
functioning government.

Though General Petraeus wrote his 1987 Princeton doctoral dissertation
on “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam,” he has an
unshakable penchant for seeing light at the end of tunnels. It has been
three Julys since he posed for the cover of Newsweek under the headline
“Can This Man Save Iraq?” The magazine noted that the general’s
pacification of Mosul was “a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency
the right way.” Four months later, the police chief installed by
General Petraeus defected to the insurgents, along with most of the
Sunni members of the police force. Mosul, population 1.7 million, is
now an insurgent stronghold, according to the Pentagon’s own June
report.

By the time reality ambushed his textbook victory, the general had
moved on to the mission of making Iraqi troops stand up so American
troops could stand down. “Training is on track and increasing in
capacity,” he wrote in The Washington Post in late September 2004,
during the endgame of the American presidential election. He extolled
the increased prowess of the Iraqi fighting forces and the rebuilding
of their infrastructure.

The rest is tragic history. Were the Iraqi forces on the trajectory
that General Petraeus asserted in his election-year pep talk, no
“surge” would have been needed more than two years later. We would not
be learning at this late date, as we did only when Gen. Peter Pace was
pressed in a Pentagon briefing this month, that the number of Iraqi
battalions operating independently is in fact falling — now standing at
a mere six, down from 10 in March.

But even more revealing is what was happening at the time that General
Petraeus disseminated his sunny 2004 prognosis. The best account is to
be found in “The Occupation of Iraq,” the authoritative chronicle by
Ali Allawi published this year by Yale University Press. Mr. Allawi is
not some anti-American crank. He was the first civilian defense
minister of postwar Iraq and has been an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki; his book was praised by none other than the Iraq war
cheerleader Fouad Ajami as “magnificent.”

Mr. Allawi writes that the embezzlement of the Iraqi Army’s $1.2
billion arms procurement budget was happening “under the very noses” of
the Security Transition Command run by General Petraeus: “The saga of
the grand theft of the Ministry of Defense perfectly illustrated the
huge gap between the harsh realities on the ground and the Panglossian
spin that permeated official pronouncements.” Mr. Allawi contrasts the
“lyrical” Petraeus pronouncements in The Post with the harsh realities
of the Iraqi forces’ inoperable helicopters, flimsy bulletproof vests
and toy helmets. The huge sums that might have helped the Iraqis stand
up were instead “handed over to unscrupulous adventurers and former
pizza parlor operators.”

Well, anyone can make a mistake. And when General Petraeus cited soccer
games as an example of “the astonishing signs of normalcy” in Baghdad
last month, he could not have anticipated that car bombs would kill at
least 50 Iraqis after the Iraqi team’s poignant victory in the Asian
Cup semifinals last week. This general may well be, as many say, the
brightest and bravest we have. But that doesn’t account for why he has
been invested by the White House and its last-ditch apologists with
such singular power over the war.

On “Meet the Press,” Lindsey Graham, one of the Senate’s last gung-ho
war defenders in either party, mentioned General Petraeus 10 times in
one segment, saying he would “not vote for anything” unless “General
Petraeus passes on it.” Desperate hawks on the nation’s op-ed pages not
only idolize the commander daily but denounce any critics of his
strategy as deserters, defeatists and enemies of the troops.

That’s because the Petraeus phenomenon is not about protecting the
troops or American interests but about protecting the president. For
all Mr. Bush’s claims of seeking “candid” advice, he wants nothing of
the kind. He sent that message before the war, with the shunting aside
of Eric Shinseki, the general who dared tell Congress the simple truth
that hundreds of thousands of American troops would be needed to secure
Iraq. The message was sent again when John Abizaid and George Casey
were supplanted after they disagreed with the surge.

Two weeks ago, in his continuing quest for “candid” views, Mr. Bush
invited a claque consisting exclusively of conservative pundits to the
White House and inadvertently revealed the real motive for the Petraeus
surrogate presidency. “The most credible person in the fight at this
moment is Gen. David Petraeus,” he said, in National Review’s account.

To be the “most credible” person in this war team means about as much
as being the most sober tabloid starlet in the Paris-Lindsay cohort.
But never mind. What Mr. Bush meant is that General Petraeus is famous
for minding his press coverage, even to the point of congratulating the
ABC News anchor Charles Gibson for “kicking some butt” in the Nielsen
ratings when Mr. Gibson interviewed him last month. The president,
whose 65 percent disapproval rating is now just one point shy of
Richard Nixon’s pre-resignation nadir, is counting on General Petraeus
to be the un-Shinseki and bestow whatever credibility he has upon White
House policies and pronouncements.

He is delivering, heaven knows. Like Mr. Bush, he has taken to
comparing the utter stalemate in the Iraqi Parliament to “our own
debates at the birth of our nation,” as if the Hamilton-Jefferson
disputes were akin to the Shiite-Sunni bloodletting. He is also
starting to echo the administration line that Al Qaeda is the principal
villain in Iraq, a departure from the more nuanced and realistic
picture of the civil-war-torn battlefront he presented to Senate
questioners in his confirmation hearings in January.

Mr. Bush has become so reckless in his own denials of reality that he
seems to think he can get away with saying anything as long as he has
his “main man” to front for him. The president now hammers in the false
litany of a “merger” between Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and what he
calls “Al Qaeda in Iraq” as if he were following the Madison Avenue
script declaring that “Cingular is now the new AT&T.” He doesn’t seem
to know that nearly 40 other groups besides Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia
have adopted Al Qaeda’s name or pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden
worldwide since 2003, by the count of the former C.I.A.
counterterrorism official Michael Scheuer. They may follow us here well
before any insurgents in Iraq do.

On Tuesday — a week after the National Intelligence Estimate warned of
the resurgence of bin Laden’s Qaeda in Pakistan — Mr. Bush gave a
speech in which he continued to claim that “Al Qaeda in Iraq” makes
Iraq the central front in the war on terror. He mentioned Al Qaeda 95
times but Pakistan and Pervez Musharraf not once. Two days later, his
own top intelligence officials refused to endorse his premise when
appearing before Congress. They are all too familiar with the threats
that are building to a shrill pitch this summer.

Should those threats become a reality while America continues to be
bogged down in Iraq, this much is certain: It will all be the fault of
President Petraeus.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company