How Petraeus Created the Myth of His Success

 http://truth-out.org/news/item/12997-how-petraeus-created-the-myth-of-his-success
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | Report
Tuesday, 27 November 2012 17:43


Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, right, holding a meeting with community leaders in Mosul, Iraq on April 30, 2003. (Photo: Ruth Fremson / The New York Times)

Part One: How the Myth Began - Petraeus in Mosul

Introduction

The discovery of his affair with Paula Broadwell has ended David Petraeus' career, but the mythology of Petraeus as the greatest US military leader since Eisenhower for having engineered turnarounds in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars lives on.

A closer examination of his role in those wars reveals a very different picture, however.

As this four-part series will show, Petraeus represents a new type of military commander, whose primary strength lay neither in strategy nor in command of combat, but in the strategic manipulation of information to maintain domestic political support for counterinsurgency wars of choice, while at the time enhancing his own reputation.

The series will show how Petraeus was engaged from the beginning of the Iraq war in creating a myth about himself as a commander with unique ability to defeat insurgents, that he knew he had failed in his first two commands in Iraq and that he did not believe that war was winnable.

But the account will also show that Petraeus eventually began to believe his own myth of himself as successful counterinsurgency strategist. The shift from deception of others to self-deception is the dominant theme of his command of the war in Afghanistan.

Although David Petraeus has demonstrated intellectual interests unusual in the military elite, the dominant personal trait he had displayed during this Army career, as one civilian friend told a journalist, is that he is "insanely ambitious." 

His drive to get ahead was evident from the beginning of his career. He married the daughter of the superintendent of West Point, Gen. William Knowlton within weeks of his graduation. He depended on the patronage of a series of powerful senior officers, first the NATO Supreme Commander, then the Army chief staff, and finally the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry H. Shelton, for whom he worked from 1997 to 1999 to get plum assignments.

Petraeus wrote a PhD dissertation at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School in 1987 which reflected his interest in military officers as political actors. He examined the ways in which the military leadership had influenced decisions on the use of force since the Vietnam War, showing how they had used various tactics to oppose US combat in Central America and Lebanon, which they were against.

In a final section of the dissertation, however, Petraeus lamented the fact that the military had not been more open to preparing for participation in "small wars" or "low intensity conflicts" - which he declared to be inevitable in the future. He was already staking a claim to be a leading specialist on such wars.

The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq was not the "small war" Petraeus had in mind. But it was his first opportunity to gain combat experience, which had eluded him up to that point in his career, as commander of the 101st Division in the assault on Baghdad. Petraeus quickly revealed his concern with building his image through favorable media coverage. He gave Washington Post correspondent and senior editor Rick Atkinson virtually constant access for nearly two months. Atkinson's account of that experience makes it clear that Petraeus expected that extraordinary access to result in a series of glowing dispatches about his performance as commander and was quick to let Atkinson know when his stories did not meet expectations.

Petraeus hinted to Atkinson that he was dubious about the whole Iraq adventure. There were too few troops, he said. How many would be needed? "Eight divisions and eight years," Petraeus answered. And Petraeus famously told Atkinson he wondered "how this ends" on several occasions during those weeks.

The "Pacified Mosul" Story

It was in Mosul, where he was commander from April 2003 to February 2004, that Petraeus's reputation as the military's number-one effective counterinsurgency strategist was firmly established in the news media. By the summer of 2003, Mosul was already known as the place for the news media and Congressional delegations to visit, because it was the one place where they were hearing the news was good. 

Congressional delegations would all get a PowerPoint briefing describing the positive things happening in Mosul - a police force being built, roads being fixed, insurgents being tracked down, and millions of dollars distributed for local development projects. The slogan "Money is ammunition" was always included in the briefing slides.

Petraeus understood that the Kurdish presence in Mosul could only help the Sunni insurgents in that majority Sunni city and sent the Peshmerga militiamen back to Kurdistan. He could see that the orders from Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer for disbanding the Iraqi army and radical de-Baathification were disastrous, and he was able to partly work around them. He chose a former Baathist general as his police chief.

But the main message that Petraeus and his staff pushed on politicians and journalists in the latter half of 2003 and early 2004 was that they had the insurgency under control. 

Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Vernon Loeb embedded with the 101st in Mosul in Fall 2003 and was given "unfettered access" to Petraeus and his command headquarters. Loeb has recalled how Petraeus had "largely pacified" Mosul in 2003.

Revealing the degree to which the Post and other major media outlets were willing dupes of Petraeus, Loeb turned up again as the ghostwriter for Broadwell's fawning biography of Petraeus, which glorifies Petraeus' accomplishment in Mosul. In that account, Petraeus is said to have returned to the United States "[a]fter pacifying Mosul."

Loeb was not the only Petraeus fan at the Post. Military correspondent Tom Ricks, who wrote a glowing blurb for Broadwell's book, had excoriated other generals in his own book Fiasco for their failed tactics against the insurgency in 2003-04, but praised Petraeus' performance in Mosul. Ricks cited a January 2004 summary from Petraeus' staff in Mosul showing that there were only five "hostile contacts" per day in the division's area of operations that month, compared with 25 meetings per day between the division and local Iraqi figures.

Ricks concluded that Mosul was in "remarkably good shape." But he and other journalists who bought Petraeus' "pacified Mosul" line failed to ask what the trend line of insurgent attacks had been over the previous seven months. That information was compiled in a December 2006 student thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). That study reveals that the monthly total for attacks in and around Mosul had been only 45 in June but had increased to 72 in August, 81 in October, 112 in November, 121 in December.

The five attacks per day in January cited by Ricks was the equivalent of 150 a month - more than three times the number in June - and represented one-fifth of the insurgent attacks countrywide recorded by the US command that month. And as Ricks acknowledges elsewhere in his book, 25 US troops had been killed in November alone in a clear signal of the growing power of the insurgency.

Did Petraeus Abandon "Cordon and Search"?

Petraeus has been credited by Ricks and other journalists with having abandoned violent "cordon and search" operations used everywhere else in Iraq that alienated the entire Sunni population, and having replaced them with "cordon and knock" operations. In the softer version of targeted raids, the targets' homes were surrounded and the targets were invited to give themselves up peacefully. But again, the NPS thesis, based on the actual documents and the testimony of officers in Petraeus's command, tells a rather different story.

It turns out that Petraeus did not end kill-or-capture raids in Mosul: he continued to use them to kill or capture those believed to be hardcore insurgents, according to the NPS study. The less violent sweeps were used to capture "less dangerous but potentially active members of insurgent groups without alienating entire neighborhoods," the authors wrote. And when insurgent attacks went over 100 for the month of November 2003, Petraeus ordered a major increase in the level of cordon-and-search raids in December, hitting 23 targets simultaneously in one night. The number of suspects detained in Mosul soared that month to 295 - nearly three times the average over the previous five months.

Those targeted raids on suspected insurgents depended on intelligence gathered by Petraeus' own command, Special Forces operating in the area and the CIA. But how reliable was that intelligence? It is widely acknowledged that, especially that early in the war, US intelligence on the insurgency was woefully weak. The International Red Cross disclosed in a February 2004 report on detainee abuse in Iraq that US military intelligence officers had estimated that 70 to 90 percent of Iraqis they had detained were innocent. Petraeus' operation, as elsewhere in Iraq, had to rely on Iraqis volunteering information as to who was an insurgent, and, as Ricks relates, Petraeus told him "there were so many phony tips passed by Iraqis feuding with each other that this softer approach helped sort those tips without unnecessarily insulting Iraqi dignity."

One of Petraeus' brigade commanders, Brig. Gen. Joe Anderson, told the authors of the NPS thesis that the "surge" in targeted raids in December 2003 had "effectively removed many former Ba'ath Party members from the streets of Mosul." Considering that there were tens of thousands of former Baath Party members in the city,Anderson's vague remark hardly convinces that the raids struck a serious blow to the insurgent organization.

Collapse and Failure in Mosul

The insurgents in Mosul were building up patiently and methodically for an uprising in the city. During the weeks after Petraeus and the 101st were replaced in Mosul by Task Force Olympia in February 2004, the insurgents kept their heads down. TheCIA warned in May that the Sunni insurgents were being deliberately quiet, and that it wouldn't last. The following month, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, head of Special Operations Task Force in Iraq, told Coalition Forces Commanding Gen. George Casey that Mosul had become a safe haven for al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.

In November 2004, about 200 insurgents attacked in Mosul, and the police force about which Petraeus had boasted to Congressional delegations disappeared, as Reuters reported November 20, 2004. Three thousand two hundred of the city's 4,000 policemen deserted simultaneously from seven police stations. The insurgents made off with hundreds of weapons and radios, thousands of police uniforms and as many as 50 police cars.

The former officer from Saddam's special forces whom Petraeus had picked as his police chief, Gen. Muhammad Khayri al-Barhawi, escaped with a bag of cash.

After the debacle in Mosul, Petraeus' successor, Gen. Carter Ham, told Reuters the police had been thoroughly infiltrated by the insurgents. The senior analyst for Iraq at the Joint Staff Directorate for Intelligence, Col. Derek Harvey, concluded that Barhawi had been secretly working with the insurgents for some time. Petraeus defended his choice of Barhawi, arguing that he had been genuinely committed to the American counterinsurgency effort at the beginning but had eventually come under heavy pressure from the insurgents.

The fact that the Iraqi forces he had organized in Mosul had collapsed like a house of cards and that his hand-picked police chief had defected was hardly ever brought up in the media coverage of Petraeus, however. Years later, former diplomat who served in Iraq during the period called Petraeus "the Teflon General."

The Mosul experience may have bruised his ego, but it also showed Petraeus that he could manage public perceptions of his performance in command so that both he and war would both come out looking good - even though his early statements and later demeanor suggest he knew Iraq was a losing cause.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

GARETH PORTER

Gareth Porter, an independent investigative journalist and historian covering US foreign and military policy has been awarded the Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 by the UK-based Martha Gellhorn Trust.

Petraeus, Supporter of Military's "Spiritual Fitness" Program, Should Have Been Fired Years Ago

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12869
By Mikey Weinstein, Alternet | Op-Ed

"How the mighty have fallen ," the headlines blared in a mournful tone. Far from falling in a blaze of glory on the battlefield, this time the storied General fell on his own sword . The proverbial "sword" in this pathetic spectacle was the hypocrisy of retired General and CIA Director David Petraeus, the "warrior scholar" and avatar of asymmetric warfare himself, and an intoxicated ambition dangerously fed (and ultimately, doomed) by the personality cult built up around him. This arrogant arc of ego-inflation culminated in a disastrous and humiliating extramarital affair between Petraeus and his adoring, hubristic hagiographer. Had not even the Director of the CIA clearly internalized the maxim, "loose lips sink ships"?

"Extremely poor judgment," assesses the General. Really? Well, let's see. "Poor judgment" is leaving your credit card back at the restaurant where you just finished eating. "Extremely poor judgment" is failing to go back to retrieve it. What Petraeus did here went far beyond "extremely poor judgment."

"What went wrong?" So ask the yellow "journalists" and "embedded" hacks swarming about the Potomac. The press had grown so used to singing hosannas about the man (the legend) that their own songs hypnotized them into a frenetic palsy of unrestricted ardor , regardless of the dubious consequences of his strategies overseas . Indeed, this set-to was yet another classic case of the echo chamber undermining basic journalistic integrity, not to mention the national security interests of the American people as a whole. The yellow journalism worm is now exhibiting its rapid metamorphosis into a tabloid slug as Pravda-esque Pentagon propagandists now perform the dirty work of gutter-dwelling paparazzi . The mother of all weapons of mass distraction now consists of the lurid details of Petraeus’ steamy love life. Meanwhile, from the bloodied borders of Iraq and Syria to the war-scarred mountains of Pashtunistan, the world keeps burning… as do the charred fringes of servicemember morale, good order and discipline.

As far back as 2007, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation ( MRFF), the civil rights foundation that I head, was shining the floodlight on matters of infidelity far graver than the General’s prurient peccadilloes.

Ironically enough, Petraeus was a vocal advocate of military "Spiritual Fitness." Spiritual Fitness is little more than a disingenuous and transparent Trojan horse for Evangelical Christian Fundamentalism within the U.S. Armed Forces. Indeed, it is a sinister Star Chamber, an unlawful means by which nationalism and militarism are merged with sectarian Christian zeal. One of the core components of Spiritual Fitness is matrimonial loyalty, but since when were religious fundamentalism and outright hypocrisy mutually exclusive? But I digress… 

Spiritual Fitness programming has taken various forms. For years, servicemembers have been coerced into attending sappy, saccharine Christian rock concerts. One of these tours, whose headlining acts included performances of songs with repugnant and vacuously vapid titles like "United We Stand When Together We Kneel," had even been openly promoted by General Petraeus as "enormously important to those who wear the uniform."  Needless to say, this Flag Officer endorsement struck MRFF as wholly loathsome and an act of anti-Constitutional treachery of the highest order. 

The next shock came in 2008 as I sat reading an issue of the Air Force Times. It was then that I stumbled on an ad for a book by Army chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy entitled Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel. And who gave a shining, universal endorsement on this book's back cover? None other than the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who stated, "Under Orders should be in every rucksack for those moments when Soldiers need spiritual energy." Upon inspection, the book proved itself to be a disgusting parochial screed promoting Christian religious supremacy while also denigrating the integrity of the 21% of American servicemembers who define themselves as atheists or having no religious preference. 

American armed forces personnel have routinely been made to take part in official "Fitness Assessment" surveys that, believe it or not, actually gauge their Spiritual Fitness. In true Pavlovian fashion, Dominionist conceptions of "Spiritual Fitness" have been passionately drilled in by means of leading soldiers in prayer ceremonies that repeatedly invoke Jesus’ name or stealthily revolve around parochial Christian themes. Just recently, as a part of a national "stand-down" ostensibly meant to address the tragic wave of suicides that have reached tsunami proportions within the U.S. Army, 800 brand new soldiers at Fort Sam Houston in Texas were forced to attend a mandatory training session that ended up, incontrovertibly, as a sectarian, electronic candle lit, Christian prayer vigil . Thirty-eight of these soldiers (the vast majority of whom happen to be practicing Protestants or Roman Catholics), with the brave Staff Sergeant Victoria Gettman in the courageous forefront, swiftly contacted our civil rights foundation for immediate help. A federal complaint against the Army is now contemporaneously pending an ongoing official investigation. 

Spiritual Fitness is a markedly destructive and corrosive agent that has the practical consequence of rampant demoralization, disorientation, and disorder within the armed forces. By endorsing Spiritual Fitness repeatedly, Petraeus revealed a total disregard for both the "No Establishment Clause" of the First Amendment to the Constitution and the "No Religious Test" prohibition of Clause 3, Article VI of the same. It’s no exaggeration – it’s a bare-knuckled fact – that Petraeus was complicit in a de facto mutiny against America's most cherished and beloved governing document.  This violation of his oath to support and defend that foundational bedrock document is a matter of import on a scale far greater than his foolish affair. That dalliance itself constitutes a high crime, if there is jurisdiction extant under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as well as an unforgivable security risk to the Central Intelligence Agency. Hypocrisy writ large by a now erstwhile, all so powerful man. As Noam Chomsky put it, "For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit."

As the record shows, the roots of General David Petraeus’ disgrace run deep – very deep. Petraeus’ established pattern of promoting Spiritual Fitness should have served as a blindingly clear harbinger and clarion signal of his fatal unfitness to serve. Petraeus should have resigned in shame the moment MRFF raised alarm bells regarding his unconstitutional treachery. Perhaps then we would have been saved from four additional years of his "extremely poor judgment"!

Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein is president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and an honor graduate of the Air Force Academy. He previously served as White House Counsel in the Reagan administration and general counsel to H. Ross Perot and Perot Systems Corp. He is the author of the recently released book, "No Snowflake in an Avalanche: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Its Battle to Defend the Constitution and One Family's Courageous War Against Religious Extremism in High Places" (2012, Vireo).

Petraeus Scandal Reveals Surveillance State and Hypocrisy Over Benghazi

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12784

By Jessica Desvarieux, The Real News Network | Interview and Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SLxHr19VCd0

Larry Wilkerson: The traditional concept of privacy is disappearing; Lindsey Graham and John McCain, how dare you?

TRANSCRIPT:

JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.

Well, you must have heard of this big Petraeus scandal involving an extramarital affair. Here to discuss what the media is actually missing behind this story is Larry Wilkerson. Colonel Larry Wilkerson was the former chief of staff for U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. He's currently an adjunct professor of government at the College of William & Mary. And he's a regular contributor to The Real News Network. Thank you for joining us, Larry.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Thanks for having me, Jessica.

DESVARIEUX: So, Larry, what are we missing behind this Petraeus extramarital affair story?

WILKERSON: Some have not missed it, but most have, and that's the fact that I think we're increasingly living in a surveillance state. And in an odd turn of irony, if you will, we actually have captured some of the leaders of this surveillance state—most notably, of course, is the director of the CIA. We have no privacy, really, anymore in this country except the privacy of anonymity. If we are insignificant, if we're small, if we don't bother anyone, then the chances of us being surveilled for some purpose that might be injurious to us is slim. But if we're working anywhere in the government or anywhere associated with things the government touches, which is, as you might suspect, almost everything, then we are surveilled, whether we are on email, whether we're on the telephone, cell or landline, no matter what we're doing. And increasingly we're even surveilled by video—wait until you look up and see that Predator or that Reaper or some other unmanned vehicle flying down your city street. It's coming. The traditional concept of privacy, whether you're a high muckity-muck or just a lowlife dude like me, is disappearing. And I don't think it's going to come back any time soon.

DESVARIEUX: Yeah. The joke has been going that if the head of the CIA can't keep secret that he's having an affair, good luck, average guys out there. That's been the—.

WILKERSON: Yeah. Well, certainly the director of the CIA has more visibility on him. And this is another aspect of it for both he and General Allen that I simply do not understand. In this age, where I know what I just told you and where they know what I just told you in spades, how on earth could they be communicating the way they were and not believe, not know that they were going to be revealed and uncovered?

DESVARIEUX: So let's switch gears a little bit. The president held his first press conference since being elected, reelected, on November 14. What did you make of this press conference, specifically dealing with Benghazi, the Benghazi issue?

WILKERSON: The first thing I made of it was it took him a long time to get passed the sexual peccadillos to even get to substantive issues. And the most substantive issue I would have liked to have seen more coverage of, of course, is what we're going to do with some specifics to achieve some sort of different happening than falling off the budget cliff with sequestration.

But Benghazi was—is a huge issue, too, and I—you know, my response to that, to people like Lindsey Graham and John McCain is: how dare you? Where were you when 3,000 Americans died on September 11, 2001, and George W. Bush was the president of the United States? After all, Benghazi pales when you compare that. And, of course, the answer would be, well, we had the 2004 9/11 Commission. Yeah, 2004—a long time after the events. And there was not this sort of, you know, angst amongst my Republican Party when their president had committed something far worse than Benghazi. And I will also go on and say that the 9/11 Commission was no shining example of how to point fingers at the administration in power when the incident occurred.

So, while I'm not trying to relieve anybody's responsibility with regard to what happened in Benghazi, I'm just saying this is political theater. This is political theater, when we have enormous challenges confronting us right now, when we ought to be having meetings and serious discussions about how to avert this fiscal cliff that we're confronting, when we ought to be having serious conversations about what's happening in Afghanistan, which is looking worse and worse every day, and when we ought to be confronting far more serious challenges than what happened in Benghazi. Let's face it, diplomats get killed. Generals occasionally get killed. Lately, diplomats seem to get killed more often than generals. That ought to tell us something about who's in real danger. But it's a part of the job, as many have said. I think I heard Ambassador Ryan Crocker say that even today.

So this is not an issue that should cause us to have to stop for very long. There are issues, as I pointed out, though, that should cause us to have to stop, deliberate, come to some sort of compromise, some sort of decision. So that's my chief concern with this and with the nature of that press conference.

DESVARIEUX: Well, thank you so much for joining us, Larry.

WILKERSON: Thanks for having me. And let me just say that keep up the good work, because Real News is one of the few outlets allowing this sort of thing to go on, and I really like watching it. I've watched your episodes on the economy and the fiscal cliff we're confronting and the different views on it and everything. I think you've really done a fine job.

WILKERSON: Oh, thank you for that endorsement.

DESVARIEUX: And thank you for watching The Real News Network.