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2 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA Selling the
president's general By Tom
Engelhardt
You simply can't pile up enough
adjectives when it comes to the general, who, at a
relatively young age was already a runner-up for
Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2007. His
record is stellar. His tactical sense
extraordinary. His strategic ability, when it
comes to mounting a campaign, beyond compare.
I'm speaking, of course, of General David
Petraeus, President George W Bush's "surge"
commander in Iraq and, as of last week, the newly
nominated head of US Central Command (CENTCOM) for
all of the Middle East and beyond - "King David"
to those of his peers who haven't exactly taken a
shine to his reportedly "high self-regard". And
the campaign I have in mind has
been his years of wooing
and winning the American media, in the process of
which he sold himself as a true American hero, a
Caesar of celebrity.
As far as can be
told, there's never been a seat in his helicopter
that couldn't be filled by a friendly (or adoring)
reporter. This, after all, is the man who, in the
summer of 2004, as a mere three-star general being
sent back to Baghdad to train the Iraqi army, made
Newsweek's cover under the caption, "Can This Man
Save Iraq?" (The article's subtitle - with the
"yes" practically etched into it - read: "Mission
Impossible? David Petraeus Is Tasked with
Rebuilding Iraq's Security Forces. An Up-close
Look at the Only Real Exit Plan the United States
Has - the Man Himself").
And, oh yes, as
for his actual generalship on the battlefield of
Iraq ... Well, the verdict may still officially be
out, but the record, the tactics and the strategic
ability look like they will not stand the test of
time. But by then, if all goes well, he'll once
again be out of town and someone else will take
the blame, while he continues to fall upwards.
Petraeus is the president's anointed general,
Bush's commander of commanders, and (not
surprisingly) he exhibits certain traits much
admired by the Bush administration in its better
days.
Launching brand Petraeus Recently, in an almost 8,000-word report in
the New York Times, David Barstow offered an
unparalleled look inside a sophisticated Pentagon
campaign, spearheaded by former secretary of
defense Donald Rumsfeld, in which at least 75
retired generals and other high military officers,
almost all closely tied to Pentagon contractors,
were recruited as "surrogates".
They were
to take Pentagon "talking points" (aka "themes and
messages") about the president's "war on terror"
and war in Iraq into every part of the media -
cable news, the television and radio networks, the
major newspapers - as their own expert "opinions".
These "analysts" made "tens of thousands of media
appearances" and also wrote copiously for op-ed
pages (often with the aid of the Pentagon) as part
of an unparalleled, five-plus year covert
propaganda onslaught on the American people that
lasted from 2002 until, essentially, late last
night. Think of it, like a pod of whales or a
gaggle of geese, as the Pentagon's equivalent of a
surge of generals.
In that impressive
Times report, however, one sentence has so far
passed unnoticed; yet, it speaks the world of
Petraeus, and of how this administration and its
chosen sons have played their cards from the
moment Bush mounted a pile of rubble on September
14, 2001, at Ground Zero in New York City and
began to sell his incipient "war on terror" (and
himself as commander-in-chief). From that day on,
the propaganda campaign, the selling war, on the
American "home front" has never stopped.
Here, in that context, is Barstow's key
sentence: "When David H Petraeus was appointed the
commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of
his early acts was to meet with the [Pentagon's
retired military] analysts." In other words, on
becoming US commander in Iraq, he automatically
turned to the military propaganda machine the
Pentagon had set up to launch his initial surge -
on the home front.
Think of the train of
events this way: In January 2007, pummeled in the
opinion polls, his Iraq policy in shambles and the
Republican Party in electoral disarray, Bush and
his advisors decided to launch a last-minute
home-front campaign to buy time on Iraq. It was,
the president declared in an address to the
American people, his "new way forward in Iraq". In
Vietnam-era terms, the plan itself involved a
relatively modest "escalation" of 30,000 troops,
largely into the Baghdad area - that being all the
troops the overstretched US military then had
available. It gained, however, the resounding
nickname, the "surge". (That word, strangely
enough, had essentially been pilfered from the
heart of "insurgent", a term previously used to
designate the enemy.)
By then, of course,
the president himself was a thoroughly tarnished
brand, not exactly the sort of face with which to
launch 1,000 ships or even 30,000 troops into a
self-made hell against the urgent wishes of the
American people. Instead, he pushed forward his
all-American general - the smart, bemedaled,
well-spoken, Princeton PhD and counterinsurgency
guru, beloved by reporters whom he had romanced
for years, and already treated like a demi-god by
members of both parties in both houses of US
Congress.
He became the "face" of the
administration (just as American military and
civilian officials had long spoken of putting an
"Iraqi face" on the American occupation of that
country). In the ensuing months, as New York Times
columnist Frank Rich pointed out, the surging
Brand Petraeus campaign only gained traction as
the president publicly cited the general more than
150 times, 53 times in May 2007 alone. Never has a
president put on the "face" of a general more
regularly.
Now, let's return to that
single sentence from Barstow. Having been put
forward by Bush as his favorite general and the
savior of his Iraq policies, Petraeus seems to
have promptly turned to the Pentagon's favored
military "analysts" for a hand. The general's
initial surge, that is, was right here at home via
those figures the Pentagon had embedded in the
media and liked to refer to as its "message force
multipliers".
Let's keep in mind that one
of those figures, retired US Army General Jack
Keane, a "patron" to Petraeus during his rise in
the ranks, was, along with Frederick Kagan of the
American Enterprise Institute, an "author" of, and
key propagandist for, the "surge" strategy, as
well as the head of his own consulting firm, on
the board of General Dynamics, and a national
security analyst for ABC News.
So, in case
you were wondering why the hosannas to Petraeus
nearly reached the heavens and why the "success"
of the "surge" was established so quickly in this
country (despite four years of promises followed
by disaster that might have called for media
caution), look first to those surging retired
generals and to the general who had already
established himself as a military brand name.
And let's keep in mind that the Times'
Barstow has pulled back the curtain on but one
administration program of deception. It is
unlikely to have been the only one. We don't yet
fully know the full range of sources the Pentagon
and this administration mustered in the service of
its "surge". We don't know what sort of thought
and planning, for instance, went into the
transformation of any Sunni insurgent who didn't
join the new Awakening Movement and become a "Son
of Iraq" into a member of
"al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia" - or, more recently,
every Shi'ite rebel into an Iranian agent.
We don't know what sort of administration
planning has gone into the drumbeat of
well-orchestrated, ever more intense claims that
Iran is the source of all the US's ills in Iraq,
and directly responsible for a striking percentage
of US military deaths there. Recently, according
to the New York Times, "Senior officers in the
American division that secures the capital said
that 73% of fatal and other harmful attacks on
American troops in the past year were caused by
roadside bombs planted by so-called 'special
groups'." (A euphemism for Iranian-trained groups
of Shi'ite militiamen.)
We don't have a
full accounting of the many carefully guided tours
of Iraq given to inside-the-Beltway think-tank
figures like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings
Institution, former military figures, journalists,
pundits and congressional representatives, all
involving special meet-and-greet contacts with
Petraeus and his top commanders, all leading to
upbeat assessments of the "surge". We don't have
the logs of our "surge" commander's visitors these
past months, but we know, anecdotally at least,
that, during this period, no reporter, no matter
how minor, seemed incapable of securing a little
get-together time to experience the general's
special charm.
Put everything we do know,
and enough that we suspect, together and you get
our last "surge" year-plus in the US as a
selling/propaganda campaign par excellence. The
result has been a mix of media good news about
"surge success", especially in "lowering
violence," and no news at all as the Iraq story
grew boringly humdrum and simply fell off the
front pages of our papers and out of the TV news
(as well as out of the Democratic Congress). This
was, of course, a public relations bonanza for an
administration that might otherwise have appeared
fatally wounded. Think, in the president's
terminology, of victory - not over Shi'ite or
Sunni insurgents in Iraq, but, once again, over
the media at home.
None of this should
surprise anyone. The greatest skill of the Bush
administration has always been its ability to
market itself on "the home front". From September
14, 2001, on, through all those early "mission
accomplished" years, it was on the home front, not
in Afghanistan or Iraq, that administration
officials worked hardest, pacifying the media,
rolling out their own "products", and establishing
the rep of their leader and "wartime"
commander-in-chief. As White House chief of staff
Andrew Card explained candidly enough to the New
York Times, when it came to the launching, in
September 2002, of a campaign to convince Congress
and the public that an invasion of Iraq should be
approved: "From a marketing point of view, you
don't introduce new products in August."
Falling upwards As a general
and a personality, Petraeus fit the particular
marketing mentality of this administration
perfectly. Graduating from West Point too late for
Vietnam - he wrote his doctoral
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