Maureen Dowd
tackles the Petraeus scandal in the Wednesday
NYT. After the usual snark ("Peaches Petraeus"), strong finale:
The scandal is a good reminder that, although John McCain and Sarah
Palin urge total trust and blank checks for the generals, these guys are
human beings working under extremely stressful circumstances, and their
judgments are not beyond reproach.
Petraeus’s Icarus flight began when he set himself above President Obama. Accustomed to being a demigod, expert at polishing his own celebrity and
swaying public opinion, Petraeus did not accept the new president’s
desire to head for the nearest exit ramp on Afghanistan in 2009. The
general began lobbying for a surge in private sessions with reporters
and undercutting the president, who was trying to make a searingly hard
call.
Petraeus rolled the younger commander in chief into going ahead with a
bound-to-fail surge in Afghanistan, just as, half-a-century earlier, the
C.I.A. had rolled Jack Kennedy into going ahead with the bound-to-fail
Bay of Pigs scheme. Both missions defied logic, but the untested
presidents put aside their own doubts and instincts, caving to
experience.
Once in Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent conservative hawks from
Washington think tanks. As Greg Jaffe wrote in The Washington Post,
they were “given permanent office space at his headquarters and access
to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to
field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders
were getting from their immediate bosses.”
So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and
maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal.
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1 comment:
Interested to learn he was trying to wear all that fruit salad on a civilian suit. It looked ridiculous on the uniform - like some Bulgarian officer. That was some severe ribbon creep.
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