Jon Stewart: Considers the Petraeus Report

... and concludes that it has a lot on common with an M.C. Escher vision of reality.



See it here ...

Senator John Warner (D-VA): “Does that make America safer?”

General Petraeus: “Sir, I-I don’t know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted out in my own mind, uh-what I have focused on and been riveted on is how to accomplish the mission of the Multi-National Force Iraq.”

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Actually, I have a great deal of sympathy for Petraeus and for his answer. Petraeus is not there to determine if his actions are making America safer. He's there under orders and tasked with making his mission in Iraq work. Whether our presence in Iraq is making us safer or not is not part of his mandate, it's a policy question and I don't think we want our generals making policy decisions. It would not be good for our generals to be forming opinions (particularly publicly) about whether or not their missions were "making us safer".

The decision to be in Iraq was made at levels far above General Petraeus' position and his orders resulted from those decisions. For him to question whether or not his orders were politically effective (politically in terms of the broader picture) could very easily put him in a position of questioning his orders.

In the past several years several well known generals have resigned because they found themselves questioning their mission. Their choice was to accept their mission or resign so they could express opinions about their mission. They chose to resign. General Petraeus chose to accept his mission.

I believe the only way Petraeus could publicly express an opinion that suggested the mission was a failure in terms of the degree to which it enhances our overall protection would be to resign as others have. In order to pursue his mission he must accept at the onset that those who made the decision to be in Iraq made the right decision. Only with that assumption could a soldier of honor follow his orders.

In the meantime, how many general officers under the Bush administration have been relieved of their duties for expressing thoughts contrary to the Alice-In-Wonderland views of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? How many careers have visibly crushed, side tracked or destroyed (not counting those behind the scenes) for questioning policy?