The WaPo’s Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza sat down with House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) yesterday, who told them that a positive progress report on Iraq from Gen. David Petraeus would likely split House Dems and undermine the party’s efforts to press for a withdrawal timetable.
Clyburn … said Democrats might be wise to wait for the Petraeus report, scheduled to be delivered in September, before charting next steps in their year-long struggle with President Bush over the direction of U.S. strategy.
Clyburn noted that Petraeus carries significant weight among the 47 members of the Blue Dog caucus in the House, a group of moderate to conservative Democrats. Without their support, he said, Democratic leaders would find it virtually impossible to pass legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal.
“I think there would be enough support in that group to want to stay the course and if the Republicans were to stay united as they have been, then it would be a problem for us,” Clyburn said. “We, by and large, would be wise to wait on the report.”
Clyburn added that a generally positive, optimistic assessment from Petraeus would be “a real big problem for us.”
Conservatives, of course, erupted, suggesting Clyburn is rooting for failure. “A ha!” they said, “A leading Dem has finally admitted that good news is a ‘real big problem’! We knew it!”
Please. As Steve M. explained, “He’s not saying that actual success in Iraq would be ‘a real big problem’ for Democrats. He’s saying that a deeply politicized piece of GOP propaganda from Petraeus disguised as an honest report would be a problem, because Petraeus is so well regarded.”
That said, Clyburn is probably right in his assessment of the caucus. Supporters of a sensible Iraq policy seemed to have the momentum — polls have shown strong national support for withdrawal, Dems have been united, and Republicans who hadn’t already broken party ranks, were at least hinting that they wanted to.
In this sense, Petraeus may throw the political chessboard in the air, issuing a positive report that will bolster the president’s policy. The problem, of course, isn’t encouraging news; it’s the skepticism about Petraeus’ objectivity.
I realize that the general has developed a very strong reputation, but Petraeus’ report need not necessarily be embraced at face value. As Andrew Sullivan noted, “There’s concern he’s not a disinterested party in a critical debate. There is worry that by talking to partisans like Hugh Hewitt, he will only undermine his credibility. There is legitimate scrutiny of his forecasts in the past.”
Dick Polman had a great recent piece about Petraeus’ credibility, as did Glenn Greenwald, but let’s also not forget the NYT’s Frank Rich, who had a powerful column on the general over the weekend.
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. […]
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.
Something for everyone to keep in mind.