Ernest Hemingway told Lillian Ross in her famous profile of him -- "How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?" -- about the reliability categories in Brit military intelligence during The Battle of the Bulge: there was "Gen" -- general information; "the True Gen" -- semi-accurate but propagandistic stuff.; and "the Real True Gen", which you could operate on. Since the U. S. became a pure sales culture around 1960, with the Kennedy "victory" over Nixon and the consolidation of public opinion by mass media, the Real True Gen is gone from the earth; now we accommodate to a series of True Gen media campaigns -- massive massages of "facts" meant to evoke our "feelings" and focus our confusions for us . . .
There was President Johnson bringing Gen. Westmoreland home in 1967 to reassure a joint session of Congress on the progress we were making in Vietnam; there was Newt Gingrich's conservative "revolution"; there was the massive con job of Cheney, Colin Powell, Rummy and Condi during the run-up to Iraq, planting stories with minions like Judith Miller in the NY Times re Saddam's alleged "yellowcake" nuclear purchases in Niger, and funding of Al Qaeda on a Saturday . . . followed by True Gen sales blitzes on Sunday morning chat shows, citing "proof" in the Times . . .
And now the last ditch attempt to "save" the Iraq war by the sanctification of an Army sage -- who's always been a team player and who failed for three years to train the Iraqi army into a force that could have pacified the country and helped expedite an American draw-down by now.
General David Petraeus slipped into Fort Riley, Va. -- which overlooks Washington on one side and backs on Arlington National Cemetery, where some of the 3,071 U.S. Iraq war dead are buried, and near Walter Reed Hospital, where many of the worst of the 12,476 casualties are housed -- very quietly last week. He had with him three colonels, all PhD's and Iraq veterans, and a Rhodes scholar wearing captain's bars. Petraeus himself holds a doctorate in international relations from Princeton, and graduated with honors from West Point. He's tall, slim, jogs seven miles a day and maintains a techy can-do public projection, meant to reassure condo-owners across the land. The fact that that he managed the 101st Airborne Division during our blitz invasion in 2003, where virtually every officer in the armed forces had a walk-through victory, is being bruited loudly by administration flacks like Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon's press guy: "The one who should be trusted more than anyone is General Petraeus."
The switch in emphasis is obvious. The president and what's left of his crew suffer grievously from what used to be called "the credibility gap." Salesmanship requires a new anchor man. Never mind that the General wrote a Times op-ed before the 2004 election puffing the "progress" in Iraq (and helping re-elect Bush); or that he was too careful after the war really began going downhill in early 2006 to call for a massive troop surge then, because it was politically inexpedient given Rummy's now-discredited views on keeping troop levels down (to avoid another Vietnam) -- perception uber alles; or to have pushed during the nine months he's been over-all commander to seal the Syrian border, and keep the flow of "foreign terrorist fighters" on Bashar Al-Asad's side of the line; or try to interdict Iranian weapons and land mines from continually crossing into Iraq and blowing off the legs of people like his former battalion commander, Lt. Col.Greg Gadsen, the ex- West Point football star . . .
Petraeus is a fine-looking man, a teamie with political potential himself for the Republicans, who has leaked in the last week that he's willing to urge a reduction of 4,000 troops by March, or even February (!) , a battalion, among the 168,000 to 172,000 soldiers on the ground there now (who cost an inflated $3 billion a week to maintain). Retired Marine Commandant James Jones, on the other hand, who headed a commission report critical of the state of the Iraqi Army, slamming the entirely corrupt Iraq Police Force, and making a case for control of the Syrian and Iranian borders, is far too outspoken to be allowed to play in the True Gen League for long:
"Look at Anbar Province!" oinked Rep. Charlie Boustany, R, Louisiana, recently. "It's a model of progress! You couldn't walk down the street there this time last year. . . And now the Sunni tribal chiefs, who used to fight us, are with us!"
"Just because the Sunni chiefs are cooperating now, it doesn't mean they love us," Jones said on national television, "or will be pro-American if we pull out . . ."
For one thing, they're being paid. That's where some of the $3 billion a week is going. But not even the forthright Jones addressed that, and Petraeus, the president's man, isn't expected to either.
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