MUDGE’S Musings
So it’s MUDGE‘s hometown paper, the oh so conservative Chicago Tribune.
So, Steve Chapman, also of Reason magazine, is on its editorial board.
So, it’s not your father’s (or grandfather’s or great-great-great-grandfather’s Tribune.
Petraeus the latest general with rose-colored glasses
Steve Chapman
September 13, 2007
Gen. David Petraeus says the Iraq war is going well, and I believe him. I believe him the way I believe the coach of a perennial football doormat who, every August, assures fans he expects a winning season. Coaches don’t get paid to admit they’re bound to lose, and generals who are tasked with military missions don’t get paid to announce that they can’t get the job done.
Petraeus is, by all accounts, an experienced, capable and intelligent commander. So when he says that “the security situation in Iraq is improving,” the natural impulse is to trust his battle-seasoned judgment. The Bush administration encourages this notion by suggesting that the opinions of military commanders are the only sound guide to policy.
But if high-ranking military officers are a good barometer of the future, I have a question: Where are the generals who told Americans when things were about to get worse in Iraq, as they have over and over? Which of them warned that insurgent attacks would steadily proliferate in 2005, after elections that were supposed to quell violence? What guy with stars on his shoulders forecast that Iraqi civilian deaths would double over the course of 2006?
Who told us that last year’s military strategy of “clear and hold” would fail — as even the administration admitted afterward that it had? Who predicted that the average number of Americans killed each month this year would be 34 percent higher than last year?
Not the top brass, which has consistently taken an optimistic public stance since the beginning. In November 2003, Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, said achieving victory would require hard work but said “it will be done.” In November 2004, Marine Lt. Gen. John Sattler said we had “broken the back of the insurgency.” In March 2006, Abizaid assured us, “We are winning.” Three years ago, Petraeus himself said that “18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress.”
But of course, there’s been no progress, except for Halliburton, and maybe the outfit that supplies the Pentagon with body bags and the guys who furnish Walter Reed with prosthetics. Their business is, I’m sure, over the top.
[Per L-HC’s reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article — but then please come on back!]
More false optimism on the Iraq war — chicagotribune.com
This week’s championship level performances by Petraeus and Crocker fooled very few — except for 535 of our finest citizens who were elected to represent the 300million of us who count on them to get to the truth.
If confident predictions by generals could be taken as gospel, this war would have been over long ago. But the totality of evidence gives no more reason to think we will do any better in the future than in the past. Given the choice, it’s better to have commanders who believe they can overcome any adversity than commanders who are easily discouraged. But sometimes, as we have learned repeatedly in Iraq, optimism is just another word for self-delusion.
Steve Chapman, from his right-of-center point of view, has no trouble seeing through the cock-eyed optimism.
It’s not just the knee-jerk peace-niks who want our young people home. Establishment type Tribune writers want that too.
Saw a bumper sticker the other day:
January 20, 2009
Bush’s last day
Congress, do the American people, especially its courageous women and men combatants, have to wait that long?
It’s it for now. Thanks,
–MUDGE
Left-handed Complement 
[…] Or, politics: impeachment (first Cheney, then Bush); Michael Bloomberg; this horribly mismanaged war. […]
[…] quoted Steve Chapman previously here at Left-Handed Complement (here and here, for example). He’s on the editorial board of our home town paper, the Chicago Tribune, and […]