The Argument

The rightwingnutosophere is up in arms over MoveOn.org's potrayal of The General as a 'traitor' and the smearing of his good name. I understand that he was confirmed in an 81-0 vote in the Senate and that both Democrats and Republicans never questioned his integrity, we all wanted some form of success in Iraq and Petraeus appeared to be the best person to acheive that aim however either side defined success.

Betrayal can be defined in many ways and to make the leap to him being a traitor is a bit much, his betrayal is to the truth which, as with all Bush lackeys, he has buried under the murk of propoganda and manipulated figures. That is not treason, afterall, he has the full support of the White House here so how could it be construed as a crime against the state, which is how treason has always been defined.

No, The General is not a traitor, he has merely allowed himself to become a conduit for administration spin and obfuscation, he is therefore, a good soldier, in the mould of a Colin Powell or Westmoreland, a man more concerned with perpetuating and preserving his own legacy than serving the American people and their Constitution.

The press - for the most part - and the right wing have given him a free pass on the self-serving rubbish he presented to the House yesterday but some have looked deeper at the numbers - McClatchy for instance;

A chart displayed by Army Gen. David Petraeus that purported to show the decline in sectarian violence in Baghdad between December and August made no effort to show that the ethnic character of many of the neighborhoods had changed in that same period from majority Sunni Muslim or mixed to majority Shiite Muslim.

Neither Petraeus nor U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about the fact that since the troop surge began the pace by which Iraqis were abandoning their homes in search of safety had increased. They didn’t mention that 86 percent of Iraqis who’ve fled their homes said they’d been targeted because of their sect, according to the International Organization for Migration.


While Petraeus stressed that civilian casualties were down over the last five weeks, he drew no connection between that statement and a chart he displayed that showed that the number of attacks rose during at least one of those weeks.

Petraeus also didn’t highlight the fact that his charts showed that “ethno-sectarian” deaths in August, down from July, were still higher than in June, and he didn’t explain why the greatest drop in such deaths, which peaked in December, occurred between January and February, before the surge began.

And while both officials said that the Iraqi security forces were improving, neither talked about how those forces had been infiltrated by militias, though Petraeus acknowledged that during 2006 some Iraqi security forces had participated in the ethnic violence. (C&L)

We just want the truth, we're adults, we can take it. If it is a godawful mess then tell us so... what this whole Iraq fiasco has taught us is that if we are to lead the world we better have the leadership capable of doing that. The Bush administration has proven itself woefully lacking in that department and, for the most part, the people they chose to take the flack for their incompetence have, incomprehensibly, done so willingly, so Petraeus has no one to blame but himself.

That the Right defends their man from name-calling and smears is understandable, they have nothing left but their irrational cults of personality. However, when the General stood in the bright white light of accountability he was exposed for what he is... a good man caught in a terrible dilema and incapable of telling a terrible truth.