this is nuts! WAPO: Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting

[shireen]

I just got my daily email of news stories from WaPo. Under highlights, there was the title, "Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting". So I clicked on it, and noticed something odd. A story from SEPT. 9 was flagged as a highlight in today's email dated SEPT 13. I wonder why ...

You've probably already heard most of the stuff in this article from various sources on DU, but this story illustrates the mess from an interesting angle. Worth reading!


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/08/AR2007090801846.html

Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting
By Peter Baker, Karen DeYoung, Thomas E. Ricks, Ann Scott Tyson, Joby Warrick and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers and Researcher Julie Tate
Sunday, September 9, 2007; Page A01

For two hours, President Bush listened to contrasting visions of the U.S. future in Iraq. Gen. David H. Petraeus dominated the conversation by video link from Baghdad, making the case to keep as many troops as long as possible to cement any security progress. Adm. William J. Fallon, his superior, argued instead for accepting more risks in Iraq, officials said, in order to have enough forces available to confront other potential threats in the region.

The polite discussion in the White House Situation Room a week ago masked a sharper clash over the U.S. venture in Iraq, one that has been building since 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. In an interview, Fallon disputed that description but declined to offer details. Nonetheless, 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."
....

I N S A N E ! ! !

These numbers they're tossing around are PEOPLE!

We're stuck between a rock and a hard place. No matter what happens, more Iraqis will get killed.
There is no good solution. We need to pick the least bad strategy which is get all our soldiers out ASAP. No more surge. Enough! Let the Iraqis solve their problems. Yes, we came in and made a mess. But we CANNOT clean it up, they DON'T WANT US THERE!!!
If we stay, the only thing different is that more of our soldiers will die.

Iraqis are smart people, fully capable of self-organizing to solve their problems. It will be damned hard, and the country will probably end up as distinct ethnic regions the way things turned out in the former Yugoslavia. But Iraqis have proven themselves in the Anbar province where local groups took action to stop the killings. But now, this idiot administration is trying to take credit for it.
:banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

[rodeodance]

1. Fallon overlooks the entire region ME---he feels shortchainged by resources

going down a black hole.

[calimary]

2. That sounds like a pretty reasonable observation to me.

I'll bet he's only one of MANY in the upper and mid-level military brass who have misgivings about what's going on as well as how it's being executed. Lord.

I hypothesized elsewhere here that Petraeus, as a general, circulates among others of his rank and its adjacencies. That's how it is in a chain-of-command structure. You honor those levels. And you have the upper levels present at strategy sessions and other group meetings where candid discussion can be fairly common, and fairly prickly. FOR SURE Petraeus would have been privy to sometimes spirited discussions about whether the surge made any sense and, CERTAINLY whether it was making America safer. I mean, isn't that the reason we're over there? Or at least the reason we've "settle on"? :eyes:

Given that, it is sheer lunacy for Petraeus to sit there in front of Congressional questioners and claim that he was only concerned with carrying out the mission and didn't know what storms were raging about that same mission about whether said mission was helping to keep America safe. He's got to have heard the arguments at briefings and strategy sessions, and even at cocktail parties and other off-duty moments. For him not to have an awareness of whether the surge is helping to keep America safe, when that's the fundamental reason cited for our being there in the first place and is the subject of tremendous public uproar nearly everywhere, is to have a general leading this thing who has his blinders on too tight. They're also cramping his brain, hence the reasoning he's promoting.

The thing to remember here is that the questions that won't go away and probably dominate some of the above-mentioned meetings involve life and death, and very likely multiple international war crimes. Questions that profound become questions of conscience. That's where you get resignations and whistle-blowing, and policy changes, in an effort to reverse or at least slow the insanity.