Are Petraeus and Westmoreland Birds of a Feather?

By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 07 September 2007

The killing in Hawijah, Iraq, of 18-year-old Cpl. Jeremy Shank of Jackson, Missouri, (population 12,000) merited an article in the Southeast Missourian. Corporal Shank was killed on September 6, 2006, and I was in that part of Missouri when his body came home for burial. According to the Pentagon, Shank was on a "dismounted security patrol when he encountered enemy forces using small arms."

Corporal Shank's death came two years after President George W. Bush greeted then-Prime Minister Iyad Allawi at the White House, proudly announcing "months of steady progress" toward a free Iraq, despite persistent violence in some parts of the country. His death came two weeks after National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley acknowledged that the mid-2006 upsurge in violence meant that the new challenge in Iraq "isn't about insurgency, isn't about terror; it's about sectarian violence." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki underscored the point, "The most important element in the security plan is to curb the religious violence."

So what was the mission of Corporal Shank while on security patrol, and who were the "enemy forces" he encountered? Was his mission to prevent Iraqi religious fanatics from killing each other?

On September 7, 2006, the day after Shank was killed, President Bush in effect mocked Jeremy Shank's death by drawing the familiar but bogus connection to 9/11:

"Five years after September the 11th, 2001, America is safer - and America is winning the war on terror [and] will leave behind a more peaceful world for our children and our grandchildren."
Not for children and grandchildren of Jeremy Shank.

Put Themselves in Harm's Way?

At the First Baptist Church in Jackson, the Rev. Carter Frey eulogized Shank as one of those who "put themselves in harm's way and paid the ultimate sacrifice so you and I can have freedom to live in this country." That was a stretch - a staple of FOX and other "news," but still a stretch. And I have been asking myself in the year since how many young men and women like Jeremy Shank have been, and will be, killed trying to stop Shia and Sunni from killing one another. A few weeks after Shank's death, President Bush described "our job" as being "to prevent the full-scale civil war from happening."

Was/is that the mission? And is it worth what is so facilely called the "ultimate sacrifice," or the penultimate one - tens of thousand veterans trying to adjust to life without an arm or leg?

Is it quite correct to say they put themselves in harm's way? Or was it their commander in chief who put them in harm's way? Is it truly possible that he remains determined to keep treating our young men and women as disposable soldiers for the rest of his term? And will those in Congress who are supposed to represent those young men and women go along with that? Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was entirely correct when she insisted in a recent op-ed that the "threshold question in any war is: What are we fighting for? Our troops, especially, deserve a convincing answer."

The sacrifices of Shank and his family and others and their families are being mocked by glib sloganeering.

Decision Time

Today is September 7, 2007, a year and a day since Corporal Shank was killed. In a few weeks we will know where the small-town Shanks of America stand in the priorities of members of the House and Senate. As far as the president is concerned ... well, he does not seem to be very concerned at all. They should simply smile appreciatively as he presents them with a rubber turkey, and then populate the backdrop for photo-ops.

More unconscionable still, those Shanks clearly sit low on the priority lists of those senior generals who command them - generals like the sainted David Petraeus, smart enough to know the war cannot be won, but not courageous enough to come out and say it. The Shanks are merely what we used to call "warm bodies" to throw into the fight.

For many of us with some gray in our hair, we've seen it all before - and, ironically enough, exactly 40 years ago. What Gen. David Petraeus has set in motion, or at least condoned, is the massaging of data to justify what his boss, President Bush, wants to do in Iraq; namely, to keep enough troops "in the fight" in order to stave off definitive defeat before he and Vice President Dick Cheney leave office in January 2009. That's what the "surge" is all about, and Petraeus is smart enough to know that only too well.

Like his apparent role model, Colin Powell, he can bear four stars on his shoulder, but he must also bear on his conscience thousands of dead and wounded Shanks as a result of his eagerness to play in the Bush/Cheney charade. A more precise counterpart to General Petraeus is the late Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of our forces in Vietnam. The argument over whether or not the " surge" is working brings back un-fond memories of the deliberate smoke-and-mirrors approach Westmoreland forced on intelligence analysts in Saigon - and Washington - including deliberate falsification of the numbers on enemy strength.

It would be tempting to sift through the ample grist of the week and cite, for example, the demonstrable failure of the surge to meet its stated aim; the key judgment of the latest National Intelligence Estimate that the current government in Baghdad "will become more precarious over the next six to twelve months;" the conclusion of a blue-ribbon group of retired generals that it is necessary to rebuild the Iraqi police from scratch; the amply justified fear on the part of analysts in the General Accountability Office and the intelligence community that the Army will continue to do all it can to water down their assessments; and, not least, the controversy over the various methodologies being used to track the security situation in Iraq, including such basics as what incidents to count and how to categorize them.

I shall resist the temptation. Rather, I believe it will be much more instructive to show that this kind of thing has happened before within the lifetimes of half of us; that it was an unconscionable performance on the part of General Westmoreland and his Pentagon bosses, and that thousands more Shanks - not to mention Vietnamese - died as a direct result of the dishonesty.

Vietnam Flashback

My flashback was occasioned by press reports yesterday that senior Army officers in Baghdad were trashing the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate and the GAO analysis on grounds that they employed "flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency."

Speaking of flawed counting methodology, someone has inserted into the president's mouth the claim that:

"Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al-Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year."
Finally, some good news! But wait. As a homework assignment, I invite readers to look up what has been said previously about how many al-Qaeda fighters may be in Iraq. Then do some arithmetic and try to calculate how many of them may now have been killed more than once.

Falsifying the Data

It was exactly forty years ago that my CIA analyst colleague, Sam Adams, was sent to Saigon to have it out with the Army intelligence unit there. After several months of exhaustive analysis, Sam had connected a whole bunch of dots, so to speak, and concluded that there were more than twice as many Vietnamese Communists under arms as the Army had on its books. Bewildered at first, Adams quickly learned that Westmoreland had instructed his intelligence staff to falsify intelligence on enemy strength, keeping the numbers low enough to promote the illusion of progress in the war.

After a prolonged knock-down-drag-out fight, then-CIA Director Richard Helms decided to acquiesce in the Army's arbitrary exclusion from its enemy aggregate total paramilitary and other armed elements numbering up to 300,000. These categories had been included in previous estimates because they were a key part of the combat force of the Communists. The Adams/CIA best estimate was total Communist strength of 500,000.

The doctored estimate went to the president and his advisers in November 1967, just two months before the country-wide Communist offensive at Tet in late January/early February 1968 proved - at great cost - that Adams's figures were far more accurate than the Army's. Years later, when Adams and CBS exposed this travesty, Westmoreland sued, giving Adams his day in court - literally. Subpoenaed documents and the testimony of Westmoreland's own former staff in Saigon established the accuracy of Adams's charges, and Westmoreland withdrew his suit.

Right up until his premature death at age 55, Sam Adams could not dispel the remorse he felt at not having gone public with his findings. He believed that, had he done so, the entire left half of the Vietnam memorial would not be there, because there would be no names to carve into the granite for the last few lingering years of the war.

Ellsberg's Regret

More recently, Daniel Ellsberg expressed great regret that he did not disclose earlier deceptions, as well as those witnessed during 1967-68 when the administration of Lyndon Johnson worked up plans to expand the ground war into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam - right up to the Chinese border, perhaps even beyond.

Early in 1967, Westmoreland addressed a joint session of Congress and congratulated himself on the "great progress" being made in the war. What Congress did not know, but Ellsberg did, is that the war was going poorly, and that Westmoreland was on the verge of getting President Johnson to agree to sending 206,000 more troops for a widening of the war that threatened to bring China in as an active combatant.

Leaks to The New York Times put the kibosh on those plans. One patriotic truth teller leaked the 206,000 figure, which the Times published on March 10, 1968. Emboldened by that, Ellsberg himself told the Times about the suppression of the accurate 500,000 count of Vietnamese Communists under arms, the Donnybrook between CIA analysts and their fettered counterparts in Saigon, and other information about the games Westmoreland was playing. The Times used those materials for major stories on March 19, 20 and 21. On March 22, President Johnson announced that Westmoreland would be leaving Vietnam to become chief of staff of the Army, and the general was told there would be no change in strategy to expand the war.

Things like that can happen quickly.

On March 25, 1968, Johnson complained to a small gathering of confidants:

"The leaks to The New York Times hurt us ... We have no support for the war ... I would have given Westy the 206,000 men."
Moral to the story: patriotic truth telling can prevent wider wars. Please take heed, those of you privy to plans for expanding the war in Iraq into Iran or elsewhere.

Spinning Hope

There will be lots of spin in Washington these next few weeks, and "hope" will be the byword. In his August 28 speech on Iraq, the president set the tone:

"All these developments are hopeful - they're hopeful for Iraq, and they're hopeful for the Middle East, and they're hopeful for peace."
Bush goes on to mention that General Petraeus will be heard from shortly. Indeed, over the past several weeks, the president has been punctuating virtually every other public sentence with "General Petraeus" or "David." It is as though Bush is expecting what might be called a "Petraeus ex machina" to extricate himself from the deep hole Cheney and he have dug together.

The spinning will only succeed if Congress is blinded by the nine rows of campaign medals and ribbons on Petraeus's chest, forgets about the Shanks in our Army and Marines, and allows itself to be taken in by the new Westmoreland.



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Ray McGovern served as an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the sixties. He was then a CIA analyst for 27 years and is cofounder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour.
A shorter version of this article has appeared on Consortiumnews.com.

truthout;

If Petraeus' coming "report" says what I imagine it will say, three words that you posted tell people everything they need to know about this issue.........

**** Falsifying the Data****

Since you seem to have some insight into the report can you give us the head's up on what will be false.

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Actually Gen Petraeus should be called Gen Betray-us... as Bush has already written "his" report. If Gen Petraeus wants to keep his job he better be the loyal soldier Gen Colin Powell was. (Gen Powell later had the sense to resign)

its clear your minds are already made up and anything but condemnation will be a lie in your eyes.

its clear your minds are already made up and anything but condemnation will be a lie in your eyes.Exactly.
The negative articles were already written up a week ago so there will be plenty of them for truthout to cut and paste next week.

Since you seem to have some insight into the report can you give us the head's up on what will be false.

It's a bit long, but your answer is here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/05/AR2007090502466.html):

Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq
Military Statistics Called Into Question

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 6, 2007; A16

The U.S. military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration's claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.

Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers -- most of which are classified -- are often confusing and contradictory. "Let's just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree," Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.

Senior U.S. officers in Baghdad disputed the accuracy and conclusions of the largely negative GAO report, which they said had adopted a flawed counting methodology used by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Many of those conclusions were also reflected in last month's pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

The intelligence community has its own problems with military calculations. Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."

Among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), those attacks are not included in the military's statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any significant degree."

Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen -- recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda -- are also excluded from the U.S. military's calculation of violence levels.

The administration has not given up trying to demonstrate that Iraq is moving toward political reconciliation. Testifying with Petraeus next week, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker is expected to report that top Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders agreed last month to work together on key legislation demanded by Congress. If all goes as U.S. officials hope, Crocker will also be able to point to a visit today to the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province by ministers in the Shiite-dominated government -- perhaps including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, according to a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy. The ministers plan to hand Anbar's governor $70 million in new development funds, the official said.

But most of the administration's case will rest on security data, according to military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who would not speak on the record before the Petraeus-Crocker testimony. Several Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were offered military statistics during Baghdad visits in August said they had been convinced that Bush's new strategy, and the 162,000 troops carrying it out, has produced enough results to merit more time.

Challenges to how military and intelligence statistics are tallied and used have been a staple of the Iraq war. In its December 2006 report, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group identified "significant underreporting of violence," noting that "a murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the sources of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the data base." The report concluded that "good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."

Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have called the military's findings into question. The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 civilian deaths in August, making it the highest monthly total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since the AP began collecting data in April 2005.

The GAO report found that "average number of daily attacks against civilians have remained unchanged from February to July 2007," a conclusion that the military said was skewed because it did not include dramatic, up-to-date information from August.

Juan R.I. Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan who is critical of U.S. policy, said that most independent counts "do not agree with Pentagon estimates about drops in civilian deaths."

In a letter last week to the leadership of both parties, a group of influential academics and former Clinton administration officials called on Congress to examine "the exact nature and methodology that is being used to track the security situation in Iraq and specifically the assertions that sectarian violence is down."

The controversy centers as much on what is counted -- attacks on civilians vs. attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops, numbers of attacks vs. numbers of casualties, sectarian vs. intra-sect battles, daily numbers vs. monthly averages -- as on the numbers themselves.

The military stopped releasing statistics on civilian deaths in late 2005, saying the news media were taking them out of context. In an e-mailed response to questions last weekend, an MNF-I spokesman said that while trends were favorable, "exact monthly figures cannot be provided" for attacks against civilians or other categories of violence in 2006 or 2007, either in Baghdad or for the country overall. "MNF-I makes every attempt to ensure it captures the most comprehensive, accurate, and valid data on civilian and sectarian deaths," the spokesman wrote. "However, there is not one central place for data or information. . . . This means there can be variations when different organizations examine this information."

In a follow-up message yesterday, the spokesman said that the non-release policy had been changed this week but that the numbers were still being put "in the right context."

Attacks labeled "sectarian" are among the few statistics the military has consistently published in recent years, although the totals are regularly recalculated. The number of monthly "sectarian murders and incidents" in the last six months of 2006, listed in the Pentagon's quarterly Iraq report published in June, was substantially higher each month than in the Pentagon's March report. MNF-I said that "reports from un-reported/not-yet-reported past incidences as well as clarification/corrections on reports already received" are "likely to contribute to changes."

When Petraeus told an Australian newspaper last week that sectarian attacks had decreased 75 percent "since last year," the statistic was quickly e-mailed to U.S. journalists in a White House fact sheet. Asked for detail, MNF-I said that "last year" referred to December 2006, when attacks spiked to more than 1,600.

By March, however -- before U.S. troop strength was increased under Bush's strategy -- the number had dropped to 600, only slightly less than in the same month last year. That is about where it has remained in 2007, with what MNF-I said was a slight increase in April and May "but trending back down in June-July."

Petraeus's spokesman, Col. Steven A. Boylan, said he was certain that Petraeus had made a comparison with December in the interview with the Australian paper, which did not publish a direct Petraeus quote. No qualifier appeared in the White House fact sheet.

When a member of the National Intelligence Council visited Baghdad this summer to review a draft of the intelligence estimate on Iraq, Petraeus argued that its negative judgments did not reflect recent improvements. At least one new sentence was added to the final version, noting that "overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks."

A senior military intelligence official in Baghdad deemed it "odd" that "marginal" security improvements were reflected in an estimate assessing the previous seven months and projecting the next six to 12 months. He attributed the change to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for his congressional testimony.

The intelligence official in Washington, however, described the Baghdad consultation as standard in the NIE drafting process and said that the "new information" did not change the estimate's conclusions. The overall assessment was that the security situation in Iraq since January "was still getting worse," he said, "but not as fast." --WaPo

What's the unemployment rate in Iraq these days?

What's the unemployment rate in Iraq these days?

Oh, no more than three or four percent, surely (http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-09-05-voa75.cfm). :rolleyes:

Since you seem to have some insight into the report can you give us the head's up on what will be false.

I have not claimed any "insight" into the report. I do think that --especially since this war has been an Orwellian marketing scheme from the start and given the fact that the report will be written by the White House instead of Petraeus-- the report will be filled with bogus PR bullshit and skewed, insupportable numbers.

That the 'surge' is "working". That the situation on the gound in Iraq is very much improved from what it was a few months ago.

Oh, no more than three or four percent, surely (http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-09-05-voa75.cfm). :rolleyes:So Iraq's Minister of Industry and Minerals puts it at 40%? And it's been that way for how many years now? My point, of course, is that regardless of the military situation, Iraq's economy and society remain in a shambles. I don't care what Gen. Petraeus' report says -- it can't change the reality that Iraq is a destroyed nation.

it can't change the reality that Iraq is a destroyed nation.
It's all the liberals' fault!

Brooks....
Exactly.
The negative articles were already written up a week ago so there will be plenty of them for truthout to cut and paste next week.

Looks like I have a lot more work to do, eh?

Aye!

It's a bit long, but your answer is here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/05/AR2007090502466.html):

I'm not sure the NIE sheds much light on the situation. The NIE was written long before the effects of the surge have becme apparent. The NIE is an intelligence community consensus. Thus those assessments have to be in and massaged by a number of people before it gets written and then publicized.

Undoubtedly there are conflicting numbers. I don't dispute that. What is clearly tangible is that the sunni tribes are actively moving against AQI. That in itself is progress. The number of VBIED's has fallen precipitoulsy. In addition violence in Anbar, the most troublesome region has fallen off the face of the map. Diyala and Sal ah din will follow.

What hasn't happened and is completely unreasonable to expect after merely three months is that people that who were distinctly antagonistic would sit down and make peace. Hell, how long has it takent he protestants and the catholics to do it in Northern Ireland.

The trajectory of events is more important than any statistical calculation.

I have not claimed any "insight" into the report. I do think that --especially since this war has been an Orwellian marketing scheme from the start and given the fact that the report will be written by the White House instead of Petraeus-- the report will be filled with bogus PR bullshit and skewed, insupportable numbers.

That the 'surge' is "working". That the situation on the gound in Iraq is very much improved from what it was a few months ago.

Sure you have, you've already determined that they're falsifying the data, even though it hasn't been made public and that it will be filled with bogus PR bullshit and skewed numbers. Clearly you are declaring you know something the rest of us don't.

Now, if you would just read them Brooks, you might learn something.

Oh, I forgot, we no longer have an "Education President" that as George H. W. Bush, the first. W's Dad, who had better sense than occupy Iraq, though his First Gulf war was another mistake. Now if only W would listen to his dad and his dad's advisors. Guess the "Education President" did not rub off on his sons....George, Jeb, Neil...all losers.