Perhaps Gen. Petraeus’ choice of media venues should have been predictable. After all, he’s part of a larger partisan operation.
Another new arrival in the West Wing set up a rapid-response PR unit hard-wired into Petraeus’s shop. Ed Gillespie, the new presidential counselor, organized daily conference calls at 7:45 a.m. and again late in the afternoon between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the U.S. Embassy and military in Baghdad to map out ways of selling the surge.
From the start of the Bush plan, the White House communications office had been blitzing an e-mail list of as many as 5,000 journalists, lawmakers, lobbyists, conservative bloggers, military groups and others with talking points or rebuttals of criticism. Between Jan. 10 and last week, the office put out 94 such documents in various categories — “Myths/Facts” or “Setting the Record Straight” to take issue with negative news articles, and “In Case You Missed It” to distribute positive articles or speeches.
Now, it isn’t exactly a big surprise that a Gillespie-run public-relations team in the White House would be fully integrated into Gen. Petraeus’ team, but it does reinforce what observers have known for quite a while now: Petraeus is a part of the president’s political operation. That’s not necessarily a criticism. It is, however, a realization that Petraeus’ testimony is not that of a neutral, dispassionate observer.
As Ezra said the other day, “Next week, Petraeus will not be acting as a general and he will not be acting as a soldier; he will be acting as a media campaign. He is the White House’s press strategy.”
Kevin Drum explains in a terrific post this afternoon that Iraq hawks have entered their third and least-persuasive stage.
First, there were War Hawks, who insisted that invading Iraq was a necessary endeavor. Second, these folks became Pottery Barn Hawks, who insisted they could clean up the mess they created.
And now they’ve transformed again, into Chaos Hawks, who insist that a withdrawal strategy would be even worse than the status quo.
Having admitted, however, that the odds of a military success in Iraq are almost impossibly long, Chaos Hawks nonetheless insist that the U.S. military needs to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Why? Because if we leave the entire Middle East will become a bloodbath. Sunni and Shiite will engage in mutual genocide, oil fields will go up in flames, fundamentalist parties will take over, and al-Qaeda will have a safe haven bigger than the entire continent of Europe.
Needless to say, this is nonsense. Israel has fought war after war in the Middle East. Result: no regional conflagration. Iran and Iraq fought one of the bloodiest wars of the second half the 20th century. Result: no regional conflagration. The Soviets fought in Afghanistan and then withdrew. No regional conflagration. The U.S. fought the Gulf War and then left. No regional conflagration. Algeria fought an internal civil war for a decade. No regional conflagration.
Ordinarily, state party conventions are a chance for rank-and-file partisans to get a steady diet of red-meat, base-rallying rhetoric. Yesterday, at the California Republican Party’s convention, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) tried a different tack.
“In movie terms, we are dying at the box office. We are not filling the seats,” the California governor said. “Now, while the number of California Republicans has been declining, the number of independents has been growing. They may well outnumber both political parties in just 20 years.” Schwarzenegger made the comments in an address to the California Republican party state convention.
“The real opportunity for Republicans is that independents generally agree with our core principles,” he said. “I want to make the Republican Party welcoming to these Independents.”
Schwarzenegger added that the GOP can become a majority party by “expanding into the center, not falling back upon ourselves into a smaller and smaller corner.”
California Republican activists responded with enthusiastic agreement, realizing that their numbers are dwindling and that it’s time to move away from the edge of the far-right cliff. Oh wait, that’s not what happened at all.
“The Republican Party should stick to its core principles,” said Mark Zappa, 48, a promotional business owner from Gilroy who said he was “very disturbed” by the governor’s call to open the Republican Party to independent voters as the Democrats do.
“If you have to sway your beliefs just to satisfy society, you don’t have a moral basis,” Zappa said. “Does that mean you’re marginalized? Possibly.”
If Democrats are really lucky, Republicans will continue to ignore everything Schwarzenegger said.
Sen. Craig to file papers to withdraw bathroom sting guilty plea.
Greg Sargent has a good catch here at Horse’s Mouth. In Michael Gordon’s rather credulous piece in the Times on Saturday he cited military numbers showing a drop in civilian casualties across Iraq in August. This was proffered as a counter to the recent GAO report. But less than a week earlier another article in the Times cited Iraqi Interior Ministry numbers showing precisely the opposite.
We’ve been hearing a lot about improved security conditions in Iraq and Baghdad. And there’s been a lot of talk about percentage declines of deaths of one sort of another. But one thing we’re going to be listening for tomorrow and Tuesday is some actual data, some numbers. And so far there’s been very, very little in the way of hard numbers coming out of the US command in Iraq.
In fact, as near as we can tell, a lot of the numbers, the key metrics about what’s actually happening on the ground remain classified.
And not just the numbers themselves.
A few days ago we flagged Karen DeYoung’s piece in the Washington Post about critics questioning the alleged decline in violence in Iraq. And one key point she focused in on is the methodology that the folks in Baghdad are using to derive their numbers. Is it really true that it matters how a person is shot (in the front of the head or the back) for whether or not they get counted? Is it true that we’re not counting Sunni-on-Sunni or Shia-on-Shia deaths? Or even killings by the folks we’re now allied with in al Anbar province?
The best we can tell the methodology Petraeus’s staff is using to tabulate the numbers also remains classified.
In other words, it’s not just a matter of getting the numbers from Petraeus and his staff and deciding whether you believe them or not. They won’t even tell us what the numbers are — let alone how they came up with them. All they’ll say is that they’re very good. Or in some cases that there’s X percentage drop over the course of the surge. Or an isolated number here or there.
But actual hard numbers? Going back over the last couple years? For some reason we’re not allowed to see those.
Perhaps Petraeus and Crocker will sit down tomorrow and share all this data as part of their presentation. But if not, this is the issue. What possible security need is served by keeping this data secret? And with all we’ve been through, can anyone believe that if the numbers were solid that we’d wouldn’t be being buried in data right now?
Something’s wrong.
Another must-read piece on Iraq, the surge and a lot more in the Post: a lot of key information in this one but one that stands out — Adm. Fallon, head of Centcom seems to think the ‘surge’ is a bust and he’s thought so for some time.
And in more ways than one.
After their Hill testimony Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker will head a couple blocks over to Fox News where they’ll give an exclusive one hour sit-down to Brit Hume.
We knew this was an essentially political song and dance. So that’s beyond confirmation. What this does tell us however is that the White House, Petraeus and Crocker aren’t even interested in keeping up the pretense that this isn’t what’s going on.
It’s a political roll-out, orchestrated by Ed Gillespie out of the White House, with facts so feeble that can’t withstand scrutiny tougher than Fox News.
Petraeus has licensed himself out to the right-wing noise machine.
By all accounts he’s one of the most knowledgeable people on counter-insurgency in the US military. But he’s reduced himself to being no more than another White House press operative, with all that entails for his credibility.