at-Largely (Jeff Huber): Look Who's Not Talking

August 17, 2009
Look Who's Not Talking
Posted by Jeff Huber

Iraq is back in the commode mode. Violence there is on the rise again. According to Colonel Timothy Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, the political goals of the surge have not been met and never will be. Iraq’s government and security forces are choked with ineffectiveness, corruption, cronyism, nepotism, laziness and lack of initiative. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander in Iraq, says these are mere “tactical issues.”

Things look even worse in the Bananastans. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, sold to Congress and the country as the second coming of David Petraeus, is getting his garrison cap handed to him and doesn’t seem to know which way to point his weapon. At his Senate confirmation hearings, McChrystal promised that the “measure of effectiveness” in Afghanistan would not be the number of insurgent guerillas killed but the number of Afghan civilians protected. Upon his arrival in Afghanistan he continued to conduct the airstrikes that have killed so many civilians and ordered a major offensive designed to kill insurgent guerillas.

The major offensive didn’t work out. The guerilla insurgents did what guerillas are supposed to do—they ran away rather than stand and fight a superior force, choosing instead to strike unexpectedly at lightly defended outposts. McChrystal, who is supposed to be an “expert” at fighting insurgent guerilla forces, was “surprised” that the guerilla insurgent forces he was fighting fought the way insurgent guerilla forces typically fight. McChrystal was originally against trying to bargain with Taliban leaders. Now he says he wants to bargain with them.

It’s becoming easier by the minute to believe that McChrystal only eats one meal a day and just sleeps a few hours a night. In an August 11 interview with NPR, McChrystal droned incoherently, sounding like Gen. Jack D. Ripper babbling about “precious bodily fluids” and the evil effects of putting fluoride in children’s ice cream.

In response to these crises, Gen. David Petraeus, chief of Central Command responsible for both the Iraq and Bananastans theaters, says the U.S. will help Yemen fight terror. It sounds like he’s making Iraq and the Bananastans someone else’s problem.

The only successful strategies that “military genius” David Petraeus has been involved with so far have involved feeding David Petraeus’s ambition. He isn’t much of a warrior, but he’s a Rove-class spin merchant.

<more>

http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/08/look-whos-not-talking.html