Access For Accolades

by digby

The Man Called Petraeus is back to stroking right winger journalists again:

A soldier and scholar like Gen. David Petraeus, commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq, knows history is never over, but judgments must be made. This week, I spoke with Petraeus in a half-hour interview that touched on numerous difficult subjects, including establishing the “Rule of Law” in Iraq and the Iraqi Army’s “surge” in professional capabilities and numerical strength.

At one point, I suggested that the military-diplomatic “tandem” of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker provides a model for improving “unified action.” That’s the dry, wonkish term for coordinating and employing every “tool of power” America possesses to achieve a strategic goal. Petraeus demurred on the compliment, but said: “I can just not imagine a better diplomatic wingman than Ambassador Ryan Crocker. … We were determined to achieve unity of effort.”

Petraeus said that began with their integrated campaign plan. In every governmental endeavor, but especially in an intricate, complex war, economic and political development programs must reinforce security and intelligence operations.

The question of achieving strategic goals in Iraq threaded the entire interview. At one point, I posed the question this way: In Iraq, are we at a moment of strategic change?

“We’ve been at moments of strategic change,” Petraeus replied. “These are not light-switch moments … what you have is more of a rheostat — many, many rheostat moments — where in small areas, local areas, districts and eventually provinces there is an ongoing transition and has been an ongoing transition for the Iraqi forces to step more into the lead and the coalition forces to step back and provide enablers.”

You’d think that Petraeus’ people would have learned their lesson from this earlier dustup with Glenzilla, who documented the right wing noise machine’s symbiotic relationship with the military even before it was revealed that the military had a program to lie to the MSM. And here they go again.

But then, he probably has to. When he says things like, “I can just not imagine a better diplomatic wingman than Ambassador Ryan Crocker. … We were determined to achieve unity of effort,” you can hear a future campaign speech (although he may want to work on the mil-speak and cut the last sentence to “we were determined to work together to get it done.”) Keeping his relationships to the rightwing military hero fetishists well oiled is very important to building the myth of TMCP. Who cares what we think?

As far as what TMCP actually said in the interview, I haven’t a clue. It sounds something like, “we’ve made progress in many small ways that are impossible to measure and we won’t see results for years, but we know it’s a big success, huzzah!”

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