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Bush report which Petraeus will report

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basionok	Bush report which Petraeus will report	Lead	[-]
Posts: 345 (09/08/07 05:28:35) Banned User Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Tags : None Bush report which Petraeus will report WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 With Gen. David H. Petraeus set to testify before Congress on Monday about the status of the Iraq war, leading Democrats in the House and the Senate maneuvered Friday to portray his report as being controlled by the White House. Said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, Its President Bushs report. President Bush took final ownership of this when he landed in Anbar Province just a few days ago. On the House floor, Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said, Instead of a new strategy for Iraq, the Bush administration is cherry-picking the data to support their political objectives, and preparing a report that will offer another defense of the presidents strategy. On Thursday White House officials disclosed that General Petraeus had told Mr. Bush that he would be willing to withdraw about 4,000 troops in January as a symbolic gesture. Some lawmakers seemed unhappy to be learning of the generals recommendations before his appearance. We have heard some things today, that they may have a small recommendation to bring home a couple thousand troops, Senator Reid said, noting that Congress had received several other assessments of the war, including one by the Government Accountability Office and another by a commission led by a retired Marine general, James L. Jones. The G.A.O. report, the Jones report, the Bush report which Petraeus will report on sometime next week its very clear that every one of those reports, every one of them without exception, does not accomplish what the president promised the surge would do, and that is bring about political stability in Iraq, Senator Reid said. But if you look on the ground in Iraq, he continued, were still losing troops; today, seven. I have to go make three calls back to people in Nevada, this afternoon, of families who have lost loved ones in Iraq. So if you look on the ground, you find the war is still an intractable civil war. You find that the war is now costing us $3 billion a week. The wounded and maimed are going up every day. President Bush is preparing to tell the nation, once again, that his strategy in Iraq is succeeding, Senator Durbin said in prepared remarks. We know what the Bush-Petraeus report will say: The surge is working; be patient. He continued: By carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing and thus the surge is working. Even if the figures were right, the conclusion is wrong. www.nytimes.com/2007/09/0...p2u/yuZstw
basionok	Re: Bush report which Petraeus will report	#1	[-]
Posts: 345 (09/09/07 08:52:27) Banned User Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Mr. Bush isnt looking for the truth Military progress without political progress is meaningless Bush plans to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco The military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is to deliver a report to Congress on Monday that could be the most consequential testimony by a wartime commander in more than a generation. What the country desperately needs is an honest assessment of the war and a clear strategy for extricating American forces from the hopeless spiral of violence in Iraq. President Bush, however, seems to be aiming for maximum political advantage not maximum clarity on Iraqs military and political crises, which cannot be separated from each other. Mr. Bush, we fear, isnt 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 Petraeuss 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 soldiers 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 Iraqs 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 Iraqs politics and security by non-partisan Congressional investigators. As Congress waited anxiously for General Petraeuss testimony, a flurry of well-timed news reports said that he told the White House he could go along with the withdrawal of about 4,000 American troops beginning in January but wanted to maintain increased force levels well into next year just like Mr. Bush. Democrats who once demanded a firm date for the start of a troop pullout immediately started backpedaling. Withdrawing 4,000 troops and dangling the prospect of additional withdrawals is a token political gesture, not a new strategy. If it proves enough to cow Congress into halting its push for a more robust and concrete exit strategy, that would be political cowardice at its worst. 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 Petraeuss report against all data, including two new independent evaluations sharply at odds with the Pentagons claim that things in Iraq are substantially better. The Government Accountability Office found that the Iraqi government has not met 11 of 18 benchmarks set by Congress and that violence remains high, despite the White Houses disingenuous claims of success. And a commission of retired senior military officers determined that Iraqs army will be unable to take over responsibility for internal security in the next 12 to 18 months. That is four years beyond what the Pentagon predicted in 2004. It is too long. Nothing has changed about Mr. Bushs intentions. Waving off the independent reports, he plans to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco. Military progress without political progress is meaningless, and Mr. Bush no more has a plan for unifying Iraq now than when he started the war. The United States needs a prudent exit strategy that will withdraw American forces and try to stop Iraqs chaos from spreading. www.nytimes.com/2007/09/0...ref=slogin
basionok	Re: Bush report which Petraeus will report	#2	[-]
Posts: 345 (09/09/07 09:23:14) Banned User Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Crocker and Petraeus planned to meet on Sunday to go over their remarks and responses to expected tough questioning from lawmakers including skeptical Republicans. Crocker, a career diplomat with extensive experience in the Middle East who opposed the war when it began in 2003, is pushing for political change where progress has been elusive and the administration's options are limited under the fragile Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Crocker also will discuss the challenges of corruption, reconciliation, de-Baathification and the difficulties of enacting wide-ranging legislation such as an oil law, according to officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal deliberations. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Crocker were in the Washington area on Saturday working separately on final drafts of opening testimony on Capitol Hill. Later in the week, Bush plans a national address. Officials said Crocker is focused on trying to do the best he can with the tools available to him now before completing his tour in Baghdad and retiring. More is at stake for Petraeus because he is believed to have higher ambitions, including possibly elected office. news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070...pe/us_iraq
basionok	Re: Bush report which Petraeus will report	#3	[-]
Posts: 345 (09/09/07 09:42:50) Banned User Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Remarkable conflict within Bush administration Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, sent a rear admiral to Baghdad this summer to gather information. Soon afterward, officials said, Fallon began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops. One of those plans, according to a Centcom officer, involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010. His efforts offended Petraeus's team, which saw them as unwelcome intrusion on their own long-term planning. The profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq only exacerbated the schism between the two men. "Bad relations?" said a senior civilian official with a laugh. "That's the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it." For Bush, the eight months since announcing his "new way forward" in Iraq have been about not just organizing a major force deployment but also managing a remarkable conflict within his administration, mounting a rear-guard action against Congress and navigating a dysfunctional relationship with an Iraqi leadership that has proved incapable of delivering what he needs. As Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker deliver progress reports to Congress tomorrow, the questions they are likely to face are the same ones asked internally: How long should the troop buildup last? When should U.S. forces start to come home? Should the United States stand by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or seek another leader? What are the hidden risks of the emerging alliance with Sunni tribal leaders? What is the best outcome Washington can hope for at this point? www.washingtonpost.com/wp...id=topnews
basionok	Re: Bush report which Petraeus will report	#4	[-]
Posts: 345 (09/09/07 14:02:57) Banned User Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	sweetness-light.com/archi...n-petraeus
Luck of the Draw	Surging	#5	[-]
Posts: 2213 (09/10/07 09:10:55) Proto-imperialist Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	It's all a bit of a charade. The president has had little or no intention of changing course since he adopted the surge strategy in January. Certainly not this soon. The surge's architects had always imagined the U.S. offensive would take 18 months to work and maybe more. Bush officials bought themselves a lot of time (and margin) last winter by saying the surge might only last a few months and involve only 20,000 troops. But that was a snow job; it took five months just to get the troops into position, and a force of some 30,000 troops is involved now. www.time.com/time/nation/...33,00.html
basionok	Noise you heard yesterday on Capitol Hill	#6	[-]
Posts: 345 (09/11/07 07:24:16) Banned User Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	The next six months in Iraq are crucial -- and always will be. That noise you heard yesterday on Capitol Hill was the can being kicked further down the road leading to January 2009, when George W. Bush gets to hand off his Iraq fiasco to somebody else. It's clear by now that playing for time is the real White House strategy for Iraq. Everything else is tactical maneuver and rhetorical legerdemain -- nothing up my sleeve -- with which the administration is buying time, roughly in six-month increments. Appearing before a joint hearing called by the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, Gen. David H. Petraeus probably won the respite Bush wanted when he said that U.S. military objectives "are in large measure being met." Never mind whether those objectives make sense. Oh, and if anyone mentions that Congress is supposed to decide what wars this nation fights, not generals or diplomats? Attack them for impugning our nation's finest - and give that can another kick. Remember when the Decider asked for his troop escalation -- calling it a "surge" -- and explained what he was trying to achieve? The idea, back in March when the "surge" troops began to arrive, was that 21,500 additional pairs of boots on the ground would so dramatically improve the security situation, especially in Baghdad, that the "unity" government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could take dramatic steps toward political reconciliation. That was the key -- a political settlement that would mark the beginning of the end of a de facto sectarian civil war. Just give us until September and you'll see, Bush promised. Six months. Well, for the record, the number of extra troops ended up being more like 30,000. And it turned out that the Shiite-dominated government had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination to fashion an equitable deal with the Sunni minority on issues such as how to share oil revenue. Various Sunni and Shiite factions made clear that they had no faith in Maliki as a leader or an honest broker. Far from improving, the political situation in Iraq deteriorated markedly. U.S. officials say that sectarian killings in Baghdad have declined, but journalists point out that many neighborhoods have already been subjected to ethnic cleansing. Petraeus showed Congress a chart yesterday demonstrating that civilian deaths nationwide had fallen -- but he didn't mention that most of the decline came before the "surge" troops arrived. Meanwhile, according to the United Nations, an estimated 60,000 refugees are fleeing the country each month. But Petraeus, Bush's handpicked commander, intelligently recognized that something interesting was happening in Anbar province, once a deadly haven for Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists. Sunni tribal sheiks were getting fed up with the al-Qaeda foreigners and seemed ready to kick them out. Petraeus did everything he could to encourage this trend, pouring largess into Anbar to forge new relationships with warlords who used to be bitter enemies. Once the local Sunni leaders decided -- for now -- that they would rather work with the Americans than shoot at them, attacks on U.S. forces in the province fell sharply. However, this works directly against the "strategy" of counting on the central government in Baghdad to work everything out. Maliki initially reacted with alarm at seeing the Americans strengthen the hand of the Sunnis in Anbar. Unable to do anything about it, he changed tactics and tried to take credit for the drop in violence. One funny thing about the improved security situation that Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker described: Iraqis don't seem to have noticed. In a poll of Iraqis commissioned by ABC News, the BBC and the Japanese network NHK -- released yesterday before Petraeus's testimony -- 31 percent of Iraqis said security in their local areas had worsened over the past six months, as opposed to just 24 percent who said it had improved. A full 61 percent said security had worsened in the country overall, against only 11 percent who said it had gotten better. Only 22 percent said things in general were going well in Iraq (down from 44 percent in November 2005), and just 23 percent thought things would get better over the coming year (as opposed to 69 percent in 2005). Some 63 percent of Iraqis polled said the U.S. invasion was wrong, 47 percent said that coalition forces "should leave now" and 57 percent said attacks on U.S. forces were "acceptable." Never mind what the Iraqis think. On with the new new strategy, which is to bypass the national government and work from the bottom up, making deals with local power brokers. That should be good for, what, another six months? www.washingtonpost.com/wp...02066.html
basionok	Broken promises and false claims of success	#7	[-]
Posts: 345 (09/11/07 08:46:52) Banned User Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	For months, President Bush has been promising an honest accounting of the situation in Iraq, a fresh look at the war strategy and a new plan for how to extricate the United States from the death spiral of the Iraqi civil war. The nation got none of that yesterday from the Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. It got more excuses for delaying serious decisions for many more months, keeping the war going into 2008 and probably well beyond. It was just another of the broken promises and false claims of success that weve heard from Mr. Bush for years, from shock and awe, to bouquets of roses, to mission accomplished and, most recently, to a major escalation that was supposed to buy Iraqi leaders time to unify their nation. We hope Congress is not fooled by the silver stars, charts and rhetoric of yesterdays hearing. Even if the so-called surge had created breathing room, Iraqs sectarian leaders show neither the ability nor the intent to take advantage of it. The headline out of General Petraeuss testimony was a prediction that the United States should be able to reduce its forces from 160,000 to 130,000 by next summer. That sounds like a big number, but it would only bring American troops to the level that were in Iraq when Mr. Bush announced his surge last January. And its the rough equivalent of dropping an object and taking credit for gravity. The military does not have the troops to sustain these high levels without further weakening the overstretched Army and denying soldiers their 15 months of home leave before going back to war. The general claimed a significant and steady decline in killings and deaths in the past three months, but even he admitted that the number of attacks is still too high. Recent independent studies are much more skeptical about the decrease in violence. The main success General Petraeus cited was in the previously all-but-lost Anbar Province where local sheiks, having decided that they hate Al Qaeda more than they hate the United States, have joined forces with American troops to combat insurgents. That development which may be ephemeral was not a goal of the surge and surprised American officials. To claim it as a success of the troop buildup is, to be generous, disingenuous. The chief objective of the surge was to reduce violence enough that political leaders in Iraq could learn to work together, build a viable government and take decisions to improve Iraqi society, including sharing oil resources. Congress set benchmarks that Mr. Bush accepted. But after independent investigators last week said that Baghdad had failed to meet most of those markers, Mr. Crocker dismissed them. The biggest achievement he had to trumpet was a communiqu in which Iraqi leaders promised to talk more. General Petraeus admitted success in Iraq would be neither quick nor easy. Mr. Crocker claimed that success is attainable, but made no guarantee. With that much wiggle room in the prognosis, one would think American leaders would start looking at serious alternative strategies like the early, prudent withdrawal of troops that we favor. The American people deserve more than what the general and the diplomat offered them yesterday. For that matter, they deserve more than what was offered by Representative Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. When protesters interrupted the hearing, Mr. Skelton ordered them removed from the room, which is understandable. But then he said that they would be prosecuted. That seemed like an unnecessarily authoritarian response to people who just wanted to be heard. www.nytimes.com/2007/09/1...1tue1.html
basionok	his honor with a series of duels	#8	[-]
Posts: 345 (09/12/07 08:05:14) Banned User Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Sen. Dick Durbin accuses Gen. David Petraeus of "carefully manipulating the statistics." Sen. Harry Reid contends, "He's made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual." "People are getting tired of hearing things are getting better. I don't know anybody who believes that," Senator Dodd of Connecticut said. A newspaper ad by MoveOn.org includes the taunt: "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" Gen. Andrew Jackson probably would have responded to these reflections on his honor with a series of duels. Using blunter language than any other Democrat in the last two days, Senator Clinton told General Petraeus that his progress report on Iraq required "a willing suspension of disbelief." Referring to the charts General Petraeus brought to the House and Senate this week, Mrs. Clinton said, "Although the charts tell part of the story, I don't think they tell the whole story." She said the "bottom-up" political reconciliation was "anecdotal" and that the success in Anbar province, where sheiks turned on Al Qaeda, started before the surge. At the end of her speech, Mrs. Clinton pointed to what she saw as a discrepancy in the general's responses to questions from other senators about whether he would recommend that America keep 130,000 troops in Iraq a year from now if no progress was made toward national reconciliation. "Don't you think the American people deserve a very specific answer about what is expected from our country in the face of the failure of the Iraqi government and its failure to achieve its political agenda?" she asked. David Petraeus was born in 1952 to Dutch American parents. His father, Sixtus, was a sea captain. Two months after graduation Petraeus married Holly Knowlton, a graduate from Dickinson College and daughter of retired Army General William A. Knowlton who was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) at the time. His doctoral dissertation, "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era," dealt with the influence of the Vietnam War on military thinking regarding the use of force. As battalion commander of the Iron Rakkasans, he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career when, in 1991, he was accidentally shot in the chest during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future Senator Bill Frist. Although Petraeus did not see combat before his 2003 deployment to Iraq, he completed three overseas assignments short of war earlier in his career. During 2001-02, as a brigadier general, Petraeus served a ten-month tour in Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of Operation Joint Forge. In Bosnia, he was the NATO Stabilization Force Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations as well as the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorism Task Force, a command created after the September 11 attacks to add a counterterrorism capability to the U.S. forces attached to the NATO command in Bosnia.

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