At an acrimonious hearing underway of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the surge, retired Major General John Batiste, a former division commander in Iraq turned critic of the war, got on the administration’s case for recently attributing most violence in Iraq to al-Qaeda. The audio gets a little screwy, but bear with us:
I also believe we cannot attribute all the violence in Iraq to al-Qaeda. There’s a tendency now to lump it all together, and call it al-Qaeda. We have to be very careful with that. This is a very complex region. al-Qaeda is certainly a component. But there’s larger components. al-Qaeda is a worldwide organization. It recognizes no national boundaries. And it’s in areas where we ought to be focused.
For this and his other skeptical remarks about the surge — Batiste said the current effort in Iraq is “destroying our military, with little to show for it” — Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) questioned Batiste’s credibility, attacking commercials he made for VoteVets, an antiwar military PAC, calling it an effort to “elect Democrats.” Batiste replied that he is a “die-hard Republican,” and made VoteVets “bipartisan” by joining it. His participation in the group, he said, is “a wake-up call to some Republicans who don’t understand the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
