Wampum

The copywriter responsible for the "Petraeus Betrayus" rhyme made two errors. The second error is in coming close to the Dolchstoßlegende, which in American is all those black "POW MIA" flags and the "we coulda won but for the politicians" nonsense, which I didn't find a lot of when I was at Army Charm School¹, long before David Petraeus was appointed to that command, or to replace George Casey at MNFI. If there is a third rail in politics involving the Armed Forces (and there is), it is the American Dolchstoßlegende. Only Republicans, and then only crypto-putchists, can grasp that rail.

The primary error is mistaking a general officer who has gone off reservation and is now just another political operative, to the profound disappointment of those who expected less subservience to Party, for the failure of doctrine. Since when did the Democratic Party sign off on the doctrinal change explicit in "Counterinsurgency" (FM 3-24)? How can anything short of a stupendous amount of hard liquor or bad meth reconcile the goal of FM 3-24 with the polling data showing 98% of all Iraqis, Kurds, Sunni, and Shi'i, opposed to partition, the primary tactic of the MNFI??? The polling data in Anbar should show a decrease in the number of respondents ticking the "will place IED" box, if "Counterinsurgency" is effective, not the exact opposite.

In How's your diagnostic skill set today? I put the problem out where it belongs -- the doctrine deserves critical reveiw. Petraeus and Crocker are just passing guys, and putting the latter up against a rhetorical wall simply means rinse and repeat while monotonically incrementing the domestic and foreign mortality and morbidity counters.

Is this the problem?

Or is this the problem?

The liklihood I'm going to get one of the MoveOn Fellowships is wicked small, but if I had it, I'd spend it all on doing the damn job right. The Army is not the tool for counter-insurgency. That way lies Operation Phoenix, since insurgency is fundamentally a political movement, and the most effective of the OpFors are teachers and union organizers and so on -- the leaders at the neighborhood level, where the invisible decision is made for, or against, cooperation with one group of armed men, or another.

Is there anyone who thinks the O4-and-below part of the officer corps actually like getting orders that amount to "ignore gravity, walk in the air"? How about the Warrents and the Non-Coms? We should be talking to them, as at present, they don't have anything sensible in front of them.

I strongly support the line MoveOn has taken, to step into the role the majority in Congress, pre-06, and the majority in Congress, post-06, has avoided in whole or in part, for the past six years -- the authority vested in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, the War Powers clause of the US Constitution, which of necessity includes oversight of George Bush's Wars in West Asia.

¹ Command and General Staff College (CGSC), Combined Arms Center (CAC).