Archived material Access restricted Article
Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Sat 09/22/2007 View Fri 09/21/2007 View Thu 09/20/2007 View Wed 09/19/2007 View Tue 09/18/2007 View Mon 09/17/2007 View Sun 09/16/2007
1
2007-09-22 Home Front: Politix
MoveOn Unmoved By Furor Over Ad Targeting Petraeus
Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.
Posted by Fred 2007-09-22 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11127 views ]  Top
 File under: Iraqi Insurgency 

#1 They know the secret of short attention span
Wut?
Posted by MiniGun 2007-09-22 03:22||   2007-09-22 03:22|| Front Page Top

#2 U.S.-IRAQ: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge

By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Sep 12 (IPS) - In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

That extraordinarily contentious start of Fallon's mission to Baghdad led to more meetings marked by acute tension between the two commanders.

Fallon went on develop his own alternative to Petraeus's recommendation for continued high levels of U.S. troops in Iraq during the summer.

The enmity between the two commanders became public knowledge when the Washington Post reported Sep. 9 on intense conflict within the administration over Iraq. The story quoted a senior official as saying that referring to "bad relations" between them is "the understatement of the century".

Fallon's derision toward Petraeus reflected both the CENTCOM commander's personal distaste for Petraeus's style of operating and their fundamental policy differences over Iraq, according to the sources.

The policy context of Fallon's extraordinarily abrasive treatment of his subordinate was Petraeus's agreement in February to serve as front man for the George W. Bush administration's effort to sell its policy of increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq to Congress.

In a highly unusual political role for an officer who had not yet taken command of a war, Petraeus was installed in the office of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, in early February just before the Senate debated Bush's troop increase. According to a report in The Washington Post Feb. 7, senators were then approached on the floor and invited to go McConnell's office to hear Petraeus make the case for the surge policy.

Fallon was strongly opposed to Petraeus's role as pitch man for the surge policy in Iraq adopted by Bush in December as putting his own interests ahead of a sound military posture in the Middle East and Southwest Asia -- the area for which Fallon's CENTCOM is responsible.

The CENTCOM commander believed the United States should be withdrawing troops from Iraq urgently, largely because he saw greater dangers elsewhere in the region. "He is very focused on Pakistan," said a source familiar with Fallon's thinking, "and trying to maintain a difficult status quo with Iran."

By the time Fallon took command of CENTCOM in March, Pakistan had become the main safe haven for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda to plan and carry out its worldwide operations, as well as being an extremely unstable state with both nuclear weapons and the world's largest population of Islamic extremists.

Plans for continued high troop levels in Iraq would leave no troops available for other contingencies in the region.

Fallon was reported by the New York Times to have been determined to achieve results "as soon as possible". The notion of a long war, in contrast, seemed to connote an extended conflict in which Iraq was but a chapter.

Fallon also expressed great scepticism about the basic assumption underlying the surge strategy, which was that it could pave the way for political reconciliation in Iraq. In the lead story Sep. 9, The Washington Post quoted a "senior administration official" as saying that Fallon had been "saying from Day One, 'This isn't working.' "

One of Fallon's first moves upon taking command of CENTCOM was to order his subordinates to avoid the term "long war" -- a phrase Bush and Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates had used to describe the fight against terrorism.

Fallon was signaling his unhappiness with the policy of U.S. occupation of Iraq for an indeterminate period. Military sources explained that Fallon was concerned that the concept of a long war would alienate Middle East publics by suggesting that U.S. troops would remain in the region indefinitely.

During the summer, according to the Post Sep. 9 report, Fallon began to develop his own plans for redefine the U.S. mission in Iraq, including a plan for withdrawal of three-quarters of the U.S. troop strength by the end of 2009.

The conflict between Fallon and Petraeus over Iraq came to a head in early September. According to the Post story, Fallon expressed views on Iraq that were sharply at odds with those of Petraeus in a three-way conversation with Bush on Iraq the previous weekend. Petraeus argued for keeping as many troops in Iraq for as long as possible to cement any security progress, but Fallon argued that a strategic withdrawal from Iraq was necessary to have sufficient forces to deal with other potential threats in the region.

Fallon's presentation to Bush of the case against Petraeus's recommendation for keeping troop levels in Iraq at the highest possible level just before Petraeus was to go public with his recommendations was another sign that Petraeus's role as chief spokesperson for the surge policy has created a deep rift between him and the nation's highest military leaders. Bush presumably would not have chosen to invite an opponent of the surge policy to make such a presentation without lobbying by the top brass.

Fallon had a "visceral distaste" for what he regarded as Petraeus's sycophantic behaviour in general, which had deeper institutional roots, according to a military source familiar with his thinking.

Fallon is a veteran of 35 years in the Navy, operating in an institutional culture in which an officer is expected to make enemies in the process of advancement. "If you are Navy captain and don't have two or three enemies, you're not doing your job," says the source.

Fallon acquired a reputation for a willingness to stand up to powerful figures during his tenure as commander in chief of the Pacific Command from February 2005 to March 2007. He pushed hard for a conciliatory line toward and China, which put him in conflict with senior military and civilian officials with a vested interest in pointing to China as a future rival and threat.

He demonstrated his independence from the White House when he refused in February to go along with a proposal to send a third naval carrier task force to the Persian Gulf, as reported by IPS in May. Fallon questioned the military necessity for the move, which would have signaled to Iran a readiness to go to war. Fallon also privately vowed that there would be no war against Iran on his watch, implying that he would quit rather than accept such a policy.

A crucial element of Petraeus's path of advancement in the Army, on the other hand, was through serving as an aide to senior generals. He was assistant executive officer to the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Carl Vuono, and later executive assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen.
Henry Shelton. His experience taught him that cultivating senior officers is the key to success.

The contrasting styles of the two men converged with their conflict over Iraq to produce one of the most intense clashes between U.S. military leaders in recent history.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

Posted by Besoeker 2007-09-22 03:27||   2007-09-22 03:27|| Front Page Top

#3 One of Fallon's first moves upon taking command of CENTCOM was to order his subordinates to avoid the term "long war" -- a phrase Bush and Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates had used to describe the fight against terrorism.

Based on his posture towards China, I was afraid fo this. Fallon was a mistake for CENTCOM, a serious mistake.
Posted by lotp 2007-09-22 06:56||   2007-09-22 06:56|| Front Page Top

#4 Always check the track record...

Gareth Porter challenged the main rationale offered by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969 for continuing the Vietnam War, and argued that there would not be a Communist "bloodbath" in South Vietnam after the U.S. withdrew its forces from Vietnam. He wrote a series of articles and monographs on the bloodbath argument.

His first monograph was The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam’s Land Reform Reconsidered in 1973. He challenged the account of mass killings in North Vietnam's land reform (see Land reform in Vietnam) by Hoang Van Chi, Bernard Fall and others. Instead of tens or hundreds of thousands killed, Gareth Porter claimed that only a few hundred people died. His arguments were disputed by several critics in special hearings before Congress. Gareth Porter replied to these critics in another hearing.

He also wrote a detailed exposé in 1974 of an account by U.S. Information Agency official Douglas Pike on what has been called the "Huế Massacre" by Vietnamese Communists during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Porter alleged that Pike manipulated the official figures for civilian deaths in the destruction of Huế during Tet, primarily by U.S. bombing and artillery, to arrive at his figure of nearly 4,000 civilians murdered by the Viet Cong, and that Pike’s hypothesis about the Communist policy during the occupation of Huế was contradicted by captured Communist documents and other evidence.

In 1976-77, continuing his challenge to the bloodbath argument, Gareth Porter rejected early accounts of the mass killings by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. With George Hildebrand he wrote a book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, which accepted the Pol Pot regime's rationale for the deportation of millions of people from Phnom Penh and other cities. Critics have argued that the book's sources included official statements by the Pol Pot regime. Testifying before Congress in May 1977, Gareth Porter said that "the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people" was "a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a Readers Digest book." Senator Stephen J. Solarz was so shocked by this testimony that he compared Gareth Porter to those who deny the murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Gareth Porter rejected this comparison.

But in an appearance on The Today Show in August 1978, Porter agreed that the Khmer Rouge regime was guilty of mass killings and mass starvation. He reiterated that view in articles during the 1980s in The Guardian, The Nation, and Foreign Affairs among others.
Posted by tu3031 2007-09-22 08:25||   2007-09-22 08:25|| Front Page Top

#5 MoveOn Unmoved By Furor Over Ad Targeting Petraeus
The furor isn't really intended to make MoveOn.org (a wholly owned subsidiary of Clinton, Inc.) "feel bad". They will do what they do.

The furor was righteous in that David Petraeus is an eminently honorable man. It also happened to neatly show which Dems will stand under MoveOn's banner and which ones will slink away when the wider public shows their disapproval.
Posted by eLarson 2007-09-22 08:39|| http://larsonian.blogspot.com]">[http://larsonian.blogspot.com]  2007-09-22 08:39|| Front Page Top

#6 What Larson said, with a bark.
Posted by Thomas Woof 2007-09-22 10:24||   2007-09-22 10:24|| Front Page Top

#7 When you have no honor, not even a point of reference for honor, cannot even define the word in a traditional sense, then of course you do not see honor in anyone else.

This used to be confined to the "fringe" elements of the dem party, but it's now the core. An entire party without honor, eschewing their responsibilities as Americans in order to score a few cheap political points against a man they have built up in their minds as Satan himself.

Why am I not surprised?
Posted by mcsegeek1 2007-09-22 11:50||   2007-09-22 11:50|| Front Page Top

#8 Military sources explained that Fallon was concerned that the concept of a long war would alienate Middle East publics by suggesting that U.S. troops would remain in the region indefinitely.

I don't give a rat's ass how alienated "Middle East publics" become just so long as they know one thing: Fear. The sooner they become petrified with the fear of pissing off American even one more time, the better off things will be.

Fallon's conciliatory attitude towards China and refusal to consider an attack on Iran make him a dubious source of criticism against Petraeus.
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-09-22 14:23||   2007-09-22 14:23|| Front Page Top

#9 I wonder how much of what Gareth Porter "reports" is actually true. All we have are the words of more "anonymous sources". I do know there's a lot of infighting among senior officers, but I doubt even an Admiral would make such PUBLIC statements about a subordinate. Things like that have gotten more than one senior officer fired.

"MoveOn" needs to move on - preferably to somewhere in the Aleutians that doesn't have Internet access.
Posted by Old Patriot">Old Patriot  2007-09-22 17:00|| http://oldpatriot.blogspot.com/]">[http://oldpatriot.blogspot.com/]  2007-09-22 17:00|| Front Page Top

#10 I'm hoping you're right, OP. But what I've read about Fallon in other press accounts leaves me a bit uneasy.
Posted by lotp 2007-09-22 20:18||   2007-09-22 20:18|| Front Page Top

23:33 Glenmore
23:30 smn
23:26 McZoid
23:22 smn
23:19 Frank G
23:15 Secret Master
23:13 smn
23:01 DarthVader
22:52 smn
22:52 Pappy
22:45 Redneck Jim
22:44 trailing wife
22:43 Zenster
22:43 Zenster
22:42 Mike
22:36 Pappy
22:35 smn
22:31 Zenster
22:31 3dc
22:27 Zenster
22:21 Zenster
22:20 Abdominal Snowman
22:18 smn
22:12 Procopius2k









Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com