As it turned out, there was some educational value in Gen. David Petraeus' testimony before Congress and the American people after all.
It seems he doesn't believe in his mission.
When asked yesterday by Republican Sen. John Warner if all the expense in American lives and treasure is "making America safer" -- which is, of course, presupposed as the objective of any military mission -- the general first hummed, hawed and outright dodged the question by musing about his current focus on "achiev[ing] our objectives in Iraq."
Undeterred, the senator put it to the general again: But is it making America safer?
To which the general said: "Sir, I don't know, actually."
With that, Petraeus not only wandered off the reservation, he bolted. One could almost hear the sundry and panicked hearts being clutched in the White House. The mask was off their #1 guy; their p.r. extravaganza was now a bare-faced debacle.
It's difficult to imagine and nearly impossible to believe that Petraeus didn't know what he was saying. Aside from the four stars on his shoulders, the man has a Ph.D. in international relations, and folks with Ph.D.s in international relations and 160,000 troops at their command tend to give some thought to matters such as Sen. Warner's most fundamental of queries.
In fact, Petraeus did just that in his 1987 doctoral dissertation, "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam," which is posted online.
In it, Petraeus wrote that "many in the military" hold the "conviction that the U.S. military in Vietnam were so hemmed in by restrictions that they could not accomplish their mission. The lesson for those of this persuasion, therefore, is that the military must be given a freer hand in future military operations. Even among the most fervent believers in this logic, however, there is a new recognition that the world is more intractable, and intervention with U.S. troops more problematic. Even those who remain confident that the U.S. could win a protracted small war, if allowed to do so, are acutely sensitive to what General Maxwell Taylor has described as the
great difficulty in rallying this country behind a foreign issue involving the use of armed force, which does not provide an identified enemy posing a clear threat to our homeland or the vital interests of long time friends...."
You want "intractable"? Try Iraq. You want "problematic"? Take Iraq. You want a cauldron of internal conflict in which the "identified enemy" shifts daily and poses no "clear threat to our homeland"? Then Iraq is all yours.
Just leave the American military out of it, Petraeus was saying, because only the most creative writings from the most sophistic neocons could twist such a costly yet hopeless armed intervention into the proposition that it "makes America safer."
While not articulating our contemporary irrationalities that clearly, Petraeus' response to Warner's pointed query was nevertheless profoundly revealing: "I don't know, actually."
Last night on "Hardball," Chris Matthews framed well the mind-bending incongruity of it all. Asked Matthews: Can you imagine Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, upon greeting his troops just before the Normandy invasion in which many would lose their lives, saying "I don't know" if any of this sacrifice -- your sacrifice -- is worth it?
Yet in a way, I suppose, Petraeus' public doubts were indeed congruous. Having the top American military commander in Iraq testify before Congress that he hasn't the foggiest notion of why we're there -- that, in so many words (four exactly), our presence makes us no safer -- makes as much sense as the war in toto.