Davy P is a peanut. Our man in Iraq. Replacement number infinity. Why, prey tell, focus any media attention on him, positive OR negative when it needs to be square on the republican party’s flawed thought process and failed ideology? Petraeus is just deflecting attention away from the idiot’n chief, as far as I’m concerned, as part of a DELAYING TACTIC for doing what we need to be doing…..leaving Iraq post haste.

Defying past practice and publicly stating that no military solution is possible took more courage than White Agent can imagine. White Agent won’t have to experience a sneering, sanctimonious dressing down from
from Cheney or one of his synchophants. Telling the truth (ie, stating the obvious) has not been a hallmark of prior Bush appointments, whether in the military or public arena. Gen. Petraeus deserves a chance to show that he is not the same cookie-cutter ‘arse-kissing’ Bushie we have all come to recognize.

My wife is getting mad as I have to drive up the hills…and here I am getting stuck in the ‘arsehole’ business in front of the computer…

Bye for now…after four days we may take another look…at the ‘arseholes’…!!!

Arsehole is a very important part of the body and imagine if White Agent ever had this part of his anatomy blocked. He will simply explode!!! Some may say that he has already ‘exploded’ twice while making comments here!!!

On a serious note. The Army is well structured where everyone from the General down to the Privates/Corporals play a crucial role. If a General can “screw up” then even a Private/Corporal can “screw up” too. The Army succeeds as a team and fails as a team.

If we were to take White Agent’s logic further…then the ‘hand’ and the ‘feet’ are more important than the ‘head’. It is like hands and the feet complaining that the brain is an “arsehole” which ’screws us up’.

As in the body every part has a crucial role to play…the army is structured as such, probably more regimented because the officers and men are called upon to sacrifice their life in the line of duty.

They can’t sit back and discuss and make comments when it comes to the crunch and the ‘enemy’ has opened fire.

It is extremely difficult for people in the civvy street to visualise/understand the life and profession of the men and women in the armed forces. Unfortunately, they are taken as bunch of jokers having a gala time at the expense of the tax payers.

White Agent adds: After the blatant and utter failure in Iraq, personally I think half the damn “generals� ought to be lined up and shot for criminal negligence.

Well, here White Agent sounds like Hitler…who incidentally was a corporal and later turned into a mass murderer.

We entrust our kids lives to lifer arseholes like Davy P here, and NONE have ever measured up in my opinion. The heroes of this and any war are privates, lance corporals, corpsmen second class, the occasional staff sergeant, and, the occasional lieutenant. It is Rarely the lifers and never the damn generals.

These lifers are simply career government employees that, “go back to the drawing board�, when our young people’s body’s are stacked up like cord wood after their “general� screw up. Not to mention the masses of civilians laid waste. After the blatant and utter failure in Iraq, personally I think half the damn “generals� ought to be lined up and shot for criminal negligence.

Davy P didn’t “Take the Job� he was ORDERED to DO THE JOB! Hopefully there is one “general� out there that has been learning how to properly deal with the Mideast hordes while living off the government dole all his life. Have you seen what we pay these people?! Happy friggen Easter.

I suspect it will be deja vu all over again.

I’m sure his book will be coming out shortly.

A book about GEN Petraeus has already come out. It is called In the Company of Soldiers, and it was written by Rick Atkinson. The book was released in spring of 2004. It is probably the one source in which people not affliated with the military know who he is.

Petraeus gained some valuable experience as 101st Airborne Division commander in Iraq when they controlled the northern areas of country. The knock against him is his work as the commander in the MNF-I structure to train the Iraqi Army – he took that job in mid-2004 for a year or so. May be the administration and bureaucracy in the Pentagon did not give him the resources to help place a native face on the war against insurgency – something LTC Nagl highlights in his book Eating Soup With A Knife: Lessons Against Counterinsurgency. Nagl’s fingerprints are all over the field manual recently written about how to fight an insurgency. The other knock I have against Petraeus is that the ’surge’ will not be won by early September as he is telling the US politicians to hold out for. The whole ’surge’ troops are six weeks from being in place and the plan is to find ‘conclusive’ success in five months from now (early September time frame)? He and his staff know full and well that insurgency will take years to defeat. Finally, I do feel that Petraeus is going to be saddled with the negatives if the ’surge’ does not end in some sort of relativistic success – the plan to surge is not tailored to how he would want to “separate the fish from the water” – the current ’surge’ plan was devised by a Napoleonic history professor (Kagan) and a retired US Army general (Keene). The ’surge’ plan lacks the resources to succeed when it is compared to the blueprint as shown in the newly published field manual. The ’surge’ plan even lacks the resources Kagan and Keene required to meet the goals of the strategic plan, but they acquiesced when it became aware there were not enough troops to do the work. Petraeus may have to carry the sins of Kagan, Keene, and those political water carriers at AEI who helped these two individuals create the ’surge’ plan.

How many generals have we gone through in Iraq? This one is no more relevant, just getting more press. I’m sure his book will be coming out shortly.

But here’s another deeper problem that few people have addressed. Take a read through Petraeus’s own counterinsurgency document and you’ll notice that he describes the sort of personnel necessary to carry out counterinsurgency. Guess what, they don’t exactly comprise today’s military, no matter how professional our military is. Basically, Petraeus thinks we need a military composed of the cultural sophistication and patience of the Peace Corps and the courage and grit of the Marines. Until that force arrives we cannot really succeed. So Petraeus is doing the next best thing and that is to pursue political reconciliation. But the recent explosion of violence in Tal Afar shows just how superficial the political reconciliation was even there – a place cited in the counterinsurgency manual as a model for success.

The problems are too deep for simple counterinsurgency, especially at this late stage and with this pittance of troops (and underqualified to do the job per Petraeus). It will take many years for even remote success to take place. And even then it’s uncertain what will come about in the end.

Petraeus is a smart man and a relatively honest man for a government official. Pro and anti-war people both recognize that. But that doesn’t mean antiwar people support what Petraeus is trying to do right now. After all, Petraeus himself only gave the mission a 25% chance of success.