Michael, let me take a shot at answering some of your questions.
How can two guys with very similar history be so diametrically opposed on that war, this war and the honor of some of the men who fought it?
I think you'd be amazed at similarly UW and I see the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. But let's just address the Iraq war.
I know that he's much more circumspect in his criticisms of the Iraq war and the way it was handled but then he has the ears of some of those hawks who can actually affect policy and he has to be very careful with how much truth he feeds them at one time. Too much truth and they spit it out, so it's a little at a time and hope some of it feeds into their brains.
For that reason don't expect him to say that the invasion and occupation was a mistake, but I'd be surprised if he wasn't very skeptical about the basic idea of nation building. I'd be surprised if he wasn't dismayed at the notion of using American military forces to try to hand's-on police the people of a middle eastern nation. And I'd be shocked if he agreed with many of the heavy handed tactics that have been employed by generals who have, before Petraeous, been nodding heads to Bush/Cheney "tough guy" meddling in Iraq.
With respect to just the question of tactics, as opposed to strategy;
I suspect he would agree that it was a mistake to use blunt military force in a futile attempt to crush the resistance of those who were violently opposed to "our vision" of a unified, democratic Iraq.
I suspect he would agree that it was a years' long mistake to try to criminalize Al Sadr and other opposition leaders and to steadfastly and totally refuse to "negotiate" with the "terrorists" who were, in reality, for the most part simply politically motivated insurgents.
I would suspect that he would agree that years' long actions like those we took to reduce Fallujah to rubble, to bomb buildings and neighborhoods in order to kill a few insurgents and to generally shoot first and ask questions later did a lot more harm than good in terms of winning the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people and therefor crippled our efforts to enlist their aid in identifying and countering insurgents.
And I'd suspect that he'd agree that if the writing is on the wall that the Iraqis are incapable of reaching a national reconciliation because of ancient animosities, religious differences or recent events, we'd better accept that there's nothing we can do to change that militarily, accept the fact that partition will occur either violently or by agreement and get our troops the hell out of there as soon as possible.
Now, I may not be 100% right but I'd guess I'm pretty close to the mark. Why do I think this?
As I said, we share many of the same images, we've walked the same trails, we've each paid a personal price and we've had a lot of years to let things settle into wisdom.
Read some of his posts carefully, including those that highlight those who roundly criticize the "go along to get along" officer corp who are supposedly running the war in Iraq and you'll see that I'm probably right. Ed |
