Read Gareth Porter's analysis of the causes of animosity between the two.
I didn't know about any of this last night but I found it interesting how Petraeus brushed off Jim Lehrer's question about "who is your boss?" He responded with:
"Admiral Fallon, the Central Command commander, of course up to the secretary of defense. But, in fact, the counterinsurgency manual, what it calls this is unity of effort. It's not unity of command. There's not one of us that's in charge of the other, but there has to be unity of effort."Thanks Nunya for the tip!
Trivia: Did you know that in 1987, Petraeus completed a PhD thesis (in the Wilson Woodrow Center) entitled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam", examining the influence of the Vietnam War on military thinking regarding the use of force.
Here's a PDF version of his thesis.
Judging from the abstract, the General to become, seems to have been too sad that Vietnam had made the military too cautious to use force all the time and he seems to have suggested the post-Vietnam cautiousness to have been a pitfall!
12 comments:
Thanks for the link to my blog. I'm also blogging the Patraeus-Fallon ill-will story.
President Petraeus?
General Confided White House Ambitions to Iraqi Official
It was while Gen Petraeus was in charge of the Security Transition Command that it failed to notice that the entire Iraqi procurement budget of $1.2 billion had been stolen. “It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history,” said the Iraqi Finance Minister Ali Allawi. “Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Dudette, I couldn't stop laughing when I read that, I thought you might like that. 'Sides, you needed to know what more important brass than Petreaus thinks of him.
Anonymous, ye sI heard about that big financial disappearance a while back. Here, we were fearing it has gone through neoconservaive channels to finance further terrorism, if you know what I mean!
Great minds, Naj. Fallon's statements were my lead article as well. :-)
Nice presentation. Notice that the report to congress fell on 9/11! They are still trying to make that connection.
I hope that your suffering is less these days, it helps to express it, I think.
Thanks for the visit.
Naj
You hardly heard Fallon's name mentioned. He is busy as an Admiral with Fleet Command experience would be preparing for what is coming particularly from hs 3 carrier battle Groups in the Gulf.
Funny but the way Bush made it sound Petraeus answered directly to him. I didn't know he wrote on the lessons learned in vietnam.
Why then are they repeating every single one just so Bush can have his way in this still just developing mess?
I know you're laughing at us! Stop it! Stop it, I tell you! It's not easy being the butt of everyone's jokes. Have a little mercy. Stop laughing at us!
We are _NOT_ silly. We're not. It only looks like we're silly. It's those damn Democrats trying to make it look like we don't know which way is up.
Stop laughing at us! We are _not_ silly!
“The American people long ago lost faith in the president’s leadership of the war in Iraq because his rhetoric has never matched the reality on the ground,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The choice is between a Democratic plan for responsible redeployment and the president’s plan for an endless war in Iraq.”
The American people have long ago lost faith in you also Nancy Pelosi!
Petraeus is Bush's lapdog and nobody else.
Servant, Larry:
LOL!
Petraeus also wrote the field manual on counter insurgency which calls for 1 soldier for every 50 people.
The initial recommendations by the generals such as Shinseki and Zinni was that it would take a minimum of 450,000 troops to stabilize Iraq. They were fired.
By Petraeus's own field manual, we need 650,000 troops in Iraq in order to stabilize it.
As many have said in the past, what causes a man, particularly a General, to go against his or her own recommendations?
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