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The Iraq double talk continues
In the one area where he’s competent or at least not crazy, military affairs, does Ralph Peters have any credibility left? In today’s New York Post, he writes:
HALLELUJAH! For the first time since Baghdad fell, our military in Iraq has a comprehensive, integrated plan to defeat our enemies.The problem is that this is the same Peters who until just one year ago was relentlessly talking up the success or the imminent success of our efforts in Iraq. During those same years, this website, devoid of a scintilla of military expertise, kept repeating that not only were we not winning in Iraq but that we did not even have a strategy by which we could win. And now Peters, who for three years said that we were winning, and who a year ago admitted that we were not winning and had no strategy to win (though he declined to admit that that he had been saying the opposite for the previous three years), is telling us that we have s strategy to win. Excuse my skepticism. Also, it was reported the other day in the New York Times (no link) that the Bush administration is seeking alternative progress reports that will be less optimistic than those of Gen. Petraeus, in order to give the president a basis on which to step down our involvement in Iraq. The Times also noted that Bush lately has been using the word “victory” far less often than in the past. So the Peters column seems like a further instance of the same phenomenon we’ve seen over the last four years: gung-ho supporters of war for democracy imagining that the president has the war policy that they would like him to have. In fact, Peters himself gives the lie to his own pep talk later in the article, where he says:
Petraeus is giving us a lesson in skillful generalship, employing U.S. troops where he must, Iraqis where he can. But, in the end, we can’t win this unless the Iraqis win it for themselves.Whoops. If victory is in the Iraqis’ hands and not in ours, then how can it be the case that “our military in Iraq has a comprehensive, integrated plan to defeat our enemies”? It’s the same obvious double talk (but obvious only to those who pay attention to what government officials and columnists actually say) that we’ve been hearing for four years. The upshot is that in the one area were he’s competent and not crazy, Peters has no credibility. (For evidence of Peters’s madness, see this, this, this, and this.)
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