Petraeus' First Meeting with Congress

In his book The Gamble, Thomas Ricks portrays David Petraeus' first meeting with Congress as a huge success for the general, because, Ricks argues, Petraeus played it exactly right. I saw things a little differently.

Basically, Petraeus' masterful argument was that the surge was working. It hadn't achieved its true purpose of enabling political progress and probably never would. But the surge was somehow working. He had no idea how long the surge would take. But he asked to keep the troops in Iraq indefinitely. He couldn't answer as to the goal of the surge, only that it was working and he needed to keep the troops in Iraq.

So keeping troops in Iraq for an indeterminate amount of time and no particular reason was Petraeus' argument for continuing the surge, despite the fact that it didn't achieve it's intended goal. Wow!

Imagine using that line of reasoning with a woman. "I have to go. I don't know for how long. I don't know why. But I have to go. And if you think that should affect our relationship, you clearly don't understand the nature of our relationship."

Or imagine using that argument at work. "The project is a success. I don't know how long it will take to finish and I have no real goal, but it's a success. Let me keep working on it."

The surge "worked" in a very narrow sense. The number of deaths went from an unspeakable amount down to an intolerable amount. That's not a bad thing. But proponents of the surge tend to be dishonest on even this point. They'll tell you, yes, violence in all forms went down if you take the period just preceding the surge to when the surge was at its height. But they won't tell you that the violence in Iraq simply reverted back to before that 2006 spike, to a point when the violence was still unacceptable (Ricks does). You see, everything's relative.

The worst part of Ricks' argument comes in the form of sappy manipulative drivel involving a story about how physically painful the proceedings were for Petraeus because of a recreational skydiving accident. Oh, go cry me a river. If it was a military injury that's one thing, but it was an injury that was Petraeus' own fault for jumping out of plane. Why stick that into the argument but to attempt to create sympathy for poor Petraeus while demonizing anti-war Democrats at the same time? Come on Thomas Ricks, you're better than that.