No More Flack for Iraq

[Joanne98]

No More Flack for Iraq
By Jane Hamsher

While many in the media would like to unquestioningly accept the White House narrative that General David Petraeus walks on water and that all of his claims about progress in Iraq are undoubtedly true, the fact is that Petraeus has a history of extremely bad judgment with regard to the war. In the above video, Glenn Greenwald outlines many of Petraeus’s flawed assessments that have caused fellow military officers to dub him “General Betray Us.”

It’s time for the media to cease treating his statements with open-mouthed credulity, and for politicians in both parties to stop being rolled by the elaborate PR campaign he is leading on behalf of the administration. (Think Progress has a helpful graph which shows he spent 17 days in August flacking for the surge.) The American public wants an end to the war in Iraq and it’s time that our elected officials realize that a vote for any funding bill that does not include binding timelines will only continue to bog us down in a deadly, ill-conceived endeavor which only a fool (or a knave) could think it possible to “win.”

Please sign the petition to be delivered to the Democratic leadership, which says that we do not want the dissembling and statistical manipulation being put forward by Petraeus, Crocker and others to serve as an excuse for prolonging the war. It’s time that they do their job and stand with the majority of the country to oppose this unpopular president and his fiasco of a war.

(Many thanks to David Olson who produces the BackTalk videoblogs and who dropped everything to get this ready in time for Petraeus’s testimony. You can check his previous videos out here, here and here.)
http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/09/10/no-more-flack-for-iraq