Canned Peaches, Heavy Syrup
I confess that I listen to a great deal of National Public Radio.
Unlike boring public television, there’s been a something of a radio renaissance at NPR. While the rest of the nation’s airwaves are increasingly homogenized into Clear Channel clones or shrill political agitprop ‚ NPR and satellite radio seem the only sane or interesting oases on the dial (or transponder box).
But just because I like This American Life doesn’t mean that I’m going to give NPR a pass. Rachel Martin’s zippy follow on the retirement of Gen. David Petraeus – now bound for the CIA – traffics in the stale myths that were manufactured to ease his rise to four-star, legends I doubt anyone seriously believes except Beltway reporters and think tank wonks of increasingly dubious credibility.
So let’s fisk her copy, shall we?
1. “The most famous man in the U.S. Army left the military on Wednesday.”
Worldwide, is Petraeus really more famous than Bradley Manning? I think one could make a pretty good argument that even if the name of the PFC doesn’t ring a bell his body of work sure does.
And Manning is still in the U.S. Army, albeit stationed in a place a tad less comfortable than the digs provided to Petraeus in Langley.
This isn’t to say that Manning turned out to be a better soldier than Petraeus, only that I suspect globally he’s better known.
2. I whispered to my colleagues in the press corps, “Is that Gen. Petraeus?” “Couldn’t be,” they responded. “Four-star generals don’t do their own mic checks.”
Damn it. Can we get over the cheap hagiography? Stanley McChrystal living like an aerobic monk in Bagram, Jim Mattis as the “warrior monk” at CENTCOM or all the corn pone dolloped with sugar we’ve had to ingest over the aw shucks Everyman stack of Petraeus pancakes served to us by newspapers – I’ve had my fill and I’m ready to puke.
Generals are pampered creatures. They’re surrounded by large staffs. They have dedicated drivers, valets, press analysts and a retinue of caretakers. The higher they go in the bureaucracy the larger and, typically, more talented their keepers.
When you see a general doing his own work it usually means any of three things: A) He’s micromanaging again; B) He’s putting on a show for easy touches like Rachel Martin; or, C) All the above, the final act of the consummate showman.
After she gushed that, I wonder if she passed a note in homeroom saying that she thought Dave Petraeus was kinda cute.
3. “After being credited with turning around the war in Iraq, he was rewarded with a prestigious job as the head of Central Command based in Florida — overseeing both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but without having to be in a war zone.”
There are two ways one could read this.
First of all, he didn’t “turn around the war in Iraq.” Even his own Baghdad staff has begun to second-guess the “Surge” myth, perhaps because the historical record points to the Iraqis doing much of that on their own, thanks to a brutal civil war won by a confederation of Shiite groups.
Then there’s always been the nagging questions about his CENTCOM post. It was controversial from the start, with many critics concerned that it was asking too much of any man to have to balance responsibilities between Iraq, where he had made a legacy of sorts, and Afghanistan, where he had no stake.
Several Barack Obama loyalists in the White House also told me that they feared Petraeus would run against the president in 2012, a concern I thought was a little overblown (I’m not sure King David could beat him or even win the GOP nomination) but one that spoke to their opinion that the general was always running for something else a tad higher than his present position.
Which is why he also might have been stashed in Afghanistan when his acolyte, McChrystal, imploded for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with prosecuting wars.
Well, wars overseas anyway.
4. As the story goes, Petraeus accepted the job without even calling his wife to talk it over.
He could’ve reached her on the Better Business Bureau’s military hotline. That was before she departed to take a gig in Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, safeguarding military families from predatory lenders who aren’t AAFES.
Chortle, chortle.
5. After his yearlong tour in Afghanistan, he wasn’t made chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or even Chief of Staff of the Army, as many had expected.
Zero people expected that. No, let me get a new count.
Yeah, still zero.
There was no way Obama was going to appoint Petraeus to be the C in the JCS. He liked Hoss Cartwright and, well, I’m not going to get into what lassoed Hoss but Petraeus was never high on that list and no one knew it better than he did.
Long dogged by accusations that Petraeus and McChrystal worked to box his new administration in on an Afghanistan policy that didn’t exactly bear fruit, they sure weren’t going to let him run the military (or even the Army).
They liked Dempsey as CSA. Had things gone better for other candidates for the CJCS throne he would never have risen to seize it.
6. In addition to leading two wars, Petraeus wrote the Army’s now famous field manual on counterinsurgency, or in military parlance, “COIN.”
OK, can we kill this nonsense once and for all? A coterie of military minds came together at Leavenworth to scribble the damned thing. The ringleader for that wasn’t really Petraeus but rather the wonderful Con Crane.
And another thing, if you ever see “COIN strategy” used as a phrase, take a shot. It’s the drinking game that’s sweeping the nation! “COIN strategy” also is a contradiction and explains part of the problem with the gurus of Petraeus. COIN is NOT a process that can substitute for a strategy. It might be a part of a means to an end, but it’s not the end itself.
And if you don’t believe me, if you click your ruby slippers and utter “Marjah” three times you’re not transported magically back to Leavenworth, Kansas.
Your ass is still stuck trading rounds with Muj while his cousin in the Karzai kleptocracy takes your tax money to grow dope to sell to your bum relations back home. What a war. What a “strategy.”
7. “Now rest assured, I am not out to give one last boost to the COIN or to try recruit all you for COINdinista nation,” he said. “I do believe, however, that we have re-learned the timeless lesson that we don’t always get to fight the wars for which we’re most prepared or most inclined.”
As many of you know, I’m the father of the noun “COINdinista” and his twin bastard “COINtra.”
In the evolution of the words – by far the most popular being “COINdinista” – I’ve been flummoxed by how they’ve morphed to serve myths that they were ginned up to lampoon.
Perhaps because of the debacle that is Afghanistan, we no longer have the “timeless” COINdinista lesson that population-centric, hearts and minds pacification actually works but rather today the notion that we “don’t always get to fight the wars for which we’re most prepared or most inclined.”
Wow, have we watered down “COINdinista!” It now could stand for something anyone would find in Thucydides, Clausewitz or Sun Tzu.
In a millennium, if great robot minds are speaking of that early 21st century strategic genius Carl “COINdinista” Prine I know that my nefarious plot worked.
I’m also scheming to corner the global frozen orange juice concentrate market. So drink up!
8. In his remarks, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the manual “would not only serve as the blueprint for our success in Iraq and Afghanistan, but would also go on to become a best-seller. Only Dave Petraeus could take a military manual and make it a great stocking stuffer.”
You know where you can stuff that load of BS, Mullen? It ain’t in a stocking.
Listen, the COIN manual actually was a pretty bad blueprint for Iraq. In fact, the “success” (one hates to even call it that) likely was written by the drill bit, the roadside execution and the ethnic cleansing of whole Sunni neighborhoods and villages by Shiite death squads in cahoots with the Ministry of the Interior.
But Con Crane would look pretty silly in a turban and we’re too stupid to invite Moqtada al-Sadr to teach at Leavenworth so we’re left with the myth that we have, not the reality that actually matters.
What’s telling about the COIN manual is how outdated it was the second it hit the presses. I give Con Crane a great deal of credit for herding the cats and being intellectually honest about best practices, but those lessons weren’t imported from Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, they arrived from counterinsurgencies targeting Maoist revolutions a half-century ago.
Most of those who wrote the doctrine were as dead as Mao when the Leavenworth crew began toiling on FM 3–24. I would argue that so was the efficacy of the doctrine.
9. That was a tribute to how Petraeus turned things around in northern Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne, and later with the surge strategy that ultimately helped turn the war.
Horsesh**.
10. “The Army has never really liked David Petraeus much,” said Tom Ricks, who has written two books on the Iraq war and is now with the Center for a New American Security. “They don’t see him as being at the core of their culture. Here is this sort of intellectual guy who doesn’t seem to mind the culture of Washington — reporters and politicians. And at a time when they were saying nothing was working, he found a way to work in Iraq.”
After uttering that, one of the many staffers for Petraeus rushed over and tickled Ricks’ belly as he rolled on the grass like a friskly lil kitten. This is the typical reward for the dutiful Beltway pundit or reporter who is most appreciative of Petraeus.
Based largely on the myths described above, Ricks’ The Gamble was printed on good quality paper, but unfortunately it’s not soft enough to really exploit inside the Port-a-Potty. So I don’t know how much utility it otherwise retains.
But that’s for another blog entry. Here we get Ricks at his most idiotic — slapping the Army for not being “intellectual” or part of the “culture of Washington.”
My ass. Anyone who has spent five minutes in DC can point out no small number of uniformed bureaucrats who scoot nimbly like waterbugs about their lake of DC reporters and politicos, obfuscating and dissembling, building political points and jabbing at their rivals.
Why, Arlington, Va., home of the Pentagon, must be like Mars to DC’s sun – so very far away from those think tanks, journos and politicos in orbit around the glorious star of Capitol Hill.
Ha!
Ricks and others often like to portray Petraeus and former CSA George Casey as being Manichean opposites, but that’s just silly. The son of a general who died during an accident in Vietnam, Casey attended Georgetown and rose along with Petraeus – the guy who married the daughter of his boss at West Point – sometimes at the same commands.
For example, they served together on Carl E. Vuono’s staff. Say what you want about Vuono, but he could spot talent and knew just the rising mid-career officers to pluck for his tutelage.
And surely a warrior-scholar like Petraeus, PhD Princeton, is so much brighter than Gian Gentile, PhD Stanford, the knuckle-dragger who just doesn’t get it, right?
Damn that gets old. War is an intellecutal pursuit. I’ve never met any general or sergeant who was very good at his (or her) job who wasn’t also a bright, learning creature.
NPR probably cut Ricks off when he began to preach about West Point and the other service academies being worse than community colleges, so I’m at least thankful for that.
11. John Nagl disagrees. He helped Petraeus write that counterinsurgency field manual and was in Germany this week, teaching a course for the German military of defense on COIN.
Yeah, I love how NPR frames the debate over the legacy of Petraeus between Ricks and the guy in the corner office just past Andrew Exum’s Lego soldiers. Hey, NPR, for even a greater diversity of voices why didn’t you reach out to Dave Barno? Wasn’t Nagl’s mini-me, Brian Burton, around to propose making Petraeus a 10-star general who could run the CIA and the Marine Corps on the side?
Maybe I missed it, but I don’t see that NPR even identified Nagl as working in the same think tank as Ricks. I don’t know what to make of that. I also don’t know what to make of something called the “German military of defense.” Seems redundant.
Inevitably, it all came down to either of two dissenting opinions: Petraeus is the greatest and smartest general of all time who changed the Army permanently or Petraeus is the greatest and smartest general of all time who couldn’t change the Army permanently because everyone else in the Army isn’t as smart or great as David Petraeus.
OK, I’ll be the first one to say that Petraeus is a very fine mind who deserves an immense amount of credit for capitalizing on the results of several Iraqi civil wars. He works well with diplomats and he certainly can titillate reporters. We’re probably a stronger Army and a better nation for his service to both.
But now that he’s retired maybe I can convince my fellow scribes to quit with the easy hagiography in lieu of serious reporting about one of the most complex men of his generation.
Enough already with the canned Peaches in heavy syrup. Give us something else to eat, OK?
Tags: David Petraeus, Hagiography, Marjah, NPR, Stanley McChrystal
