One Cheer for Gen. Petraeus

The Obama administration is still deciding whether to bring felony charges against former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, according to Attorney General Eric Holder. As a senior DOJ official in the Clinton administration, Holder arranged apresidential pardon for fugitive tax cheat Marc Rich. As attorney general, he ignored the unconscionable use of the IRS against conservative-leaning organizations seeking tax-exempt status.

This is a political prosecution. Petraeus’ supposed crime, leaking classified information to a girlfriend, is the sort of victimless infraction that never has been brought to the point of criminal prosecution at any time in the past. Petraeus’ offense, rather, is political: He is credited with the 2006-2007 surge that in Republican mythology won the Iraq War before President Obama snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. One risks being run out of the Republican Party on a rail for questioning this mythology, but someone has to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Petraeus improved the optics of the Iraq mess at the end of the second Bush administration, to be sure, but he also helped set in motion the catastrophe that has now engulfed the Levant.

The story already has been told in depth by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Daniel Bolger, whose memoir Why We Lost appeared last year. I reviewed it in Asia Times Online after observing that not one of the mainstream media reviews mentioned the most important assertions in Gen. Bolger’s excellent book: First, that American success in imposing majority rule on Iraq in 2006 set in motion the Sunni insurgency, and second, that America’s sponsorship of the Sunnis in 2007-2008 (the “Sunni Awakening” built with American funds as part of the “surge”) made the insurgency intractable.

Below is an extract from my Nov. 21, 2014 review:

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