Monday, September 10, 2007

General Petraeus Testifies Before Congress

Here's a question or exchange you won't hear from the committee as General Petraeus testifies before Congress:

Congressman: Some time ago Bush and Cheney sent a well known general to the United Nations to testify on their behalf. They used him to make their case. They knew that with his integrity and the respect he commanded all across the country, people would believe him.

General Petraeus: Mmhmmm.

Congressman: You know who I'm talking about, don't you?

General Petraeus: Tell me.

Congressman: That would be Secretary of State Colin Powell.

General Petraeus: Yes, I knew Colin back when I was a colonel and he was --

Congressman: How do we know Bush and Cheney haven't done the same thing with you?

General Petraeus: I can tell you right now that I wrote my own testimony. No one at the White House wrote a word of it.

Congressman: Colin Powell wrote his own testimony, too.

General Petraeus: Colin Powell talked about our intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons. This argument about war strategy and deployment decisions is different.

Congressman: Not so. The question of whether you're a trustworthy source is what matters here.

General Petraeus: Are you suggesting I'm not trustworthy? I'm here to tell you the truth.

Congressman: Colin Powell thought he was telling the truth. He was a loyal soldier and secretary. He couldn't see that the president and vice-president depended on his reputation for integrity. Now look at his reputation. Bush and Cheney didn't even thank him when he resigned. He left in ignominy while Bush celebrated his second inauguration.

General Petraeus: I've thought about my reputation going into this.

Congressman: Think some more. William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams both had good reputations before they accepted command of our forces in South Vietnam. Because they served a president who didn't square with the American people, their names are forever associated with failure.

General Petraeus: But that's why I'm here. To point the only way to eventual success. No one in the army wants failure.

Congressman: We've already failed. The only question we have in front of us now is, how can we minimize the cost of our failure? What can we do to regroup and recover?

General Petraeus: My reputation stands with how our soldiers perform in Iraq. If they perform the mission their country gives them, I'm proud of them. I know I'll have their respect.

Congressman: I'm sorry general, but historians aren't going to give a damn about how your soldiers feel, or what they think. We're all proud of our soldiers, you know, and we all respect the hard work you've done over there. But you're going to be judged by the company you keep.

General Petraeus: As I said, the company I keep in Baghdad is the best, because the U. S. Army is the best.

Congressman: You're still having trouble extracting yourself from your military environment. I mean the company you keep here in Washington. Nobody trusts President Bush anymore, so nobody trusts you. That is, no one trusts you unless you prove you're independent of him.

General Petraeus: How do you recommend I do that, congressman?

Congressman: Show that you're willing to be fired. Prove that you're not speaking for the president.

General Petraeus: That's pretty hard. Everyone knows that's just what I'm doing.

Congressman: Well no. You have a chance here to speak your mind entirely. You have a chance here to criticize Bush and Cheney. Can't you see the situation you're in here? You haven't been in Baghdad that long.

General Petraeus: You tell me my situation, congressman.

Congressman: You have a full range of opinion about the war in this room. People have made up their minds about the question of whether the war is a failure or not. People still aren't so sure about the best thing to do, given where we are now.

General Petraeus: Go on.

Congressman: Another thing people are sure about, though most won't say it, is that we need new leadership. Everyone is looking for a new direction from someone who is trustworthy.

General Petraeus: And you've suggested already that our president isn't trustworthy, that we won't receive good leadership from him or his advisors.

Congressman: That's right.

General Petraeus: You think I can give the leadership people need?

Congressman: You're just about the only one at this point, general.

General Petraeus: I serve at the president's pleasure, congressman - I'm not going to deny him in public.

Congressman: That's the problem, isn't it?

General Petraeus: Look, don't you think I should just give my report?

Congressman: People won't listen to you if they think you're presenting the party line.

General Petraeus: That's a Stalinist phrase, you know, "presenting the party line."

Congressman: That's shows you how far we've come since 9/11, general. People see the folks in the White House as nothing more than a pack of propagandists.

General Petraeus: And I can represent the pack, or speak my own mind.

Congressman: That's it, general. You can't just tell us you wrote your own testimony. If you need to tell us that, you have a credibility problem right at the start. You have to show us why we should believe you.

General Petraeus: Alright, I'm willing to lose my job. I'm willing to receive orders to return home.

Congressman: You know what else you can do?

General Petraeus: What?

Congressman: Appear before this committee tomorrow without your uniform.

General Petraeus: You think that's going to make me more trustworthy?

Congressman: That's how far we've come, six years after 9/11. That's how far we've come.

Monday, September 03, 2007

From Whittaker Chambers to George W. Bush

Excerpt from Sam Tanenhaus in The New RepublicNR, "The End of the Journey," July 2, 2007:

World War II, Chambers wrote, "simplified the balance of forces in the world by reducing them to two." This was more or less what most Americans, including American intellectuals, believed in 1952. But Chambers typically went further, embracing a Manichaean dualism, though even this had its Marxist angle. As a practiced revolutionary, he knew - as did Lenin and Trotsky, for all their fealty to "historical materialism" - that political movements rise to power not on the wings of theory but through the politics of irreducible choice.

This was the lesson absorbed by American conservatives their prolonged moment of ascendancy, which looks now to be ending. The movement's first national experiment with the politics of polarizing choice came in the presidential election of 1964, and the results were disastrous. But four years later Richard Nixon, who until Chambers's his death remained his friend and in some sense his disciple, succeeded in shattering the post-war consensus by rallying a "silent majority" of God fearing, law-abiding citizens to seize the whip from the unbelieving elite - the people who (in Nixon's view, not entirely wrong) had never forgiven him for exposing Hiss. Another master of divisiveness, Ronald Reagan, posthumously awarded Chambers the Medal of Freedom, and more than once startled aides by reciting passages of Witness from memory. The book's tonalities are likewise audible in the scripts that Reagan wrote for his popular radio addresses in the 1970s, when he was mounting his run at the presidency, and also in his notorious formulation "the evil empire," derived from Chambers's description of communism as "the focus of the concentrated evil of our time."

The epithet "evil empire" distressed many in the civilized world when Reagan first uttered it in 1983. But he was speaking in terms the Soviet themselves understood; he gave voice to the binary theology that joined the two great powers in their death struggle. In the 1980s, and Chambersian absolutism was very much in vogue, the official view of the Reagan White House was that the Soviet Union was not only "permanently evil" but indestructible, growing in reach and in charismatic might even as the evidence oppositely pointed to a dysfunctional economy, a political spoils system rotten with corruption, republics seeing with ethnic patriots, satellite countries in rebellion. But when the collapse came, the Manichaean belief that America had singly "won" the cold war seemed vindicated. Our theology had triumphed. Even a conservative such Fukuyama, updating the dialect along Hegelian rather than Marxian lines, credited the triumph to "the realm of consciousness or ideas, since consciousness will ultimately remake the material world in its image." Since then Fukuyama has acknowledged that he and other neoconservatives were wrong.