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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The Petraeus moment blots out the
world By Tom Engelhardt
The former Cockney flower girl turned
elegant English-speaker Eliza Doolittle caught
something of our moment in these lyrics from My
Fair Lady: "Oh, words, words, words, I'm so
sick of words ... Is that all you blighters can
do?" Of course, all she had to do was be Galatea
to a self-involved language teacher/Pygmalion.
We Americans have had to bear with the
bloviating of almost
every member of Congress, the
full-blast public relations apparatus of the White
House and two endless days of congressional
testimony from General David Petraeus and
Ambassador Ryan Crocker, not to speak of the flood
of newspaper, radio, and TV stories about all of
the above and the bevy of experts who are hustled
out to do the horse-race assessments of how the
general and ambassador performed, whether they
"bought" time for President George W Bush, and the
like.
And - count on it - that's just the
beginning. The same cast of characters will be
talking, squabbling, spinning and analyzing stats
of every sort for weeks to come - with a sequel
promised next spring. Everyone knows that's the
case, just as everyone has known since midsummer
that we would get to this point and, when we did,
that things similar to those said (and written) in
the past few days would indeed be said (and
written), and that nothing the blighters would say
or write would matter a whit, or change the course
of events, or the tide of history, even though
whole forests might be pulped in the process and
it would be springtime for hyperbole and
breathless overstatement in the world of news.
There has been a drumbeat of growing
excitement in the US press, preparing us for
"pivotal reports", a "pivotal hearing", "highly
anticipated appearances", and "long-awaited
testimony" or, as both the Washington Post on its
front page and the American Broadcasting Co (ABC)
World News in a lead report put it, "the
most anticipated congressional testimony by a
general since the Vietnam War".
Petraeus
himself has been treated in the media as a
celebrity, somewhere between a conquering Caesar
and the Paris Hilton of generals. Nothing he does
has been too unimportant to record, not just the
size of his entourage as he arrived from Baghdad,
or the suite he was assigned at the Pentagon, or
even his "recon" walk through the room in the
House of Representatives where he would testify on
Monday, but every detail.
Somehow, when he
refused to give interviews before his
"long-awaited" appearance, lots of Petraeus-iana
slipped out anyway:
He also has taken short breaks for
walks with his wife ... for dinner with their
daughter, who lives in the area, and for lunch
with his wife's parents. On his daily jogging
route he maintains a brisk, steady pace over a
7-mile route, snaking from Fort Myer, across the
Potomac and through Georgetown ...
Sigh ...
So who, exactly, was
so eagerly awaiting the jogging general's
testimony? If a recent Washington Post-ABC News
poll is any indication, a majority of Americans
weren't among that crowd. They had already
discounted whatever he would say - I doubt the
ambassador even registered - as "exaggerated" and
"a rosier view" than reality dictated before his
face and that chest full of ribbons hit the TV
screens. ("Just 23% of Democrats and 39% of
independents expected an honest depiction of
conditions in Iraq.") This was simple good
sense. What exactly could anyone outside
Washington have expected the general - who had a
hand in creating the president's "troop surge"
strategy, is now in charge of the "surge"
campaign, and for months has been delegated the
official Bush administration front man for what
was, from Day 1, labeled a "progress report" - to
say? An instant online headline caught the mood of
the Petraeus moment while his first round of
testimony was still under way: "General Petraeus
sees Iraq progress". Ah, yes ...
And what
in the world could anyone have eagerly anticipated
from America's unbudgeable president? Just what
occurred. And yet, in the US media, and inside
Washington, the drumbeat for "an anticipated
moment of truth" continued, as if something were
actually at stake. Take just one example. On
Sunday, the Washington Post had a hard-breathing
piece by no fewer than six of its best
journalists, with the headline, "Among top
officials, 'surge' has sparked dissent,
infighting".
It focused on a reported
"clash" between General Petraeus and his
theoretical boss, Centcom (Central Command)
commander Admiral William J Fallon. It seems that
the two fell into a near end-of-the-world-style
struggle because Fallon had begun "developing
plans to redefine the US mission and radically
draw down troops". ("'Bad relations?' said a
senior civilian official with a laugh. 'That's the
understatement of the century ... If you think
Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking
at it.'")
Naturally, Petraeus, like Bush,
wanted to continue to surge full strength (as we
now know - not that we didn't before - from his
slow-as-molasses plan to draw down US forces). But
what did that radical Fallon have in mind that led
to a "schism"? According to a source who spoke to
a Post reporter, it "involved slashing US combat
forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010." Imagine
a Centcom commander as a force slasher!
But hold on a moment. Combat forces make
up, at best, less than half of all US forces in
Iraq; so if, by 2010, the good admiral wants only
three-quarters of those combat troops withdrawn,
then we're still left with at least 80,000 or more
troops in that country three years from now.
Well, I'm with Eliza D - and so,
evidently, was the technology of the House hearing
room in which the general and the ambassador
appeared on Monday. After the chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee, Ike Skelton, and
various other congressional representatives
introduced the hearings for what seemed like
hours, the general was finally given the floor for
his "long-awaited" testimony.
His mouth
began to move but in a resounding silence. The
mike had failed and (except for Code Pink
protesters rising from the audience to shout and
be escorted out) the room fell into just about the
only Iraqi silence of these past, "eagerly
anticipated" months - and what a relief that was.
While Skelton fumed, the announcer on the US cable
network MSNBC suggested, "The commander of US
forces in Iraq is apparently powerless over the
sound system in the hearing room."
It was
a moment that had Iraq written all over it. After
all, has anything worked as planned or dreamed
since March 2003?
Of course, 15 minutes
later the mike had been replaced (though the room
lights then proceeded to flicker as if in distant
communion with electricity-less Baghdad). In Iraq,
one suspects, people would have just started
shouting - and the general did finally launch on
his monotonal, mind-numbing, expectably
boilerplate testimony. He promised that, if all
went well, US troops would be back to pre-surge
levels by mid-July 2008, 10 months from now, 18
months from that plan's beginning. "Progress"
indeed.
The general's testimony would be
dealt with in the tones of gravitas that
journalists-cum-pundits and pundits-cum-pundits
reserve for moments like this. Yet, given the
original expectations of the Bush administration,
some of the testimony Petraeus (and later Crocker)
had to offer would have been little short of
hilarious if the subject weren't so grim. (Good
news! Four years after the invasion of Iraq, we
finally have the former Ba'athists of al-Anbar
province, whom our president used to refer to as
"dead-enders", on our side! Even better, we're
arming them and all is going swimmingly!)
Buying a precious extra six-plus months
for the White House, the general also suggested
that it would be premature to think beyond next
July when it came to "drawdown" plans, and that we
should, instead, all reconvene in mid-March for
more of the same.
Sigh ...
You
can, of course, already begin writing the script
for that "eagerly anticipated", "long-awaited",
"pivotal" moment when the
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