The press seems to have latched on to General Petraeus as a “commander on the ground” who opposes Obama’s plan as a sort of counter-weight to Maliki supporting Obama’s Iraq plan and is using him to try to show that Obama wouldn’t listen to “commanders on the ground” despite what he says.
There are several problems with this argument, however.
The first is ignorance, possibly willfully, about the difference between strategy and tactics and what the job of a general is. It is the President’s job to set strategy, and it is the general’s job to implement it. The President is the Commander-in-Chief meaning he has the final say. Does he listen to his generals to get input on what the strategy should be? Sure, and Obama said that he would take their advice into consideration, but he is, to borrow a Bush phrase, the decider. If we just did whatever the top military man thought was right, we’d made them the commander-in-chief, but we didn’t.
The second is that the military is not some unitary monolithic thing where everyone thinks the same. If you can find one general who believes on thing, you can probably find another general who thinks the opposite, so finding a general who support’s Bush’s position isn’t exactly a sign that all the commanders on the ground agree with Bush.
The third item deals with General Petraeus himself, and the fact that Bush appointed him to replace General Casey in overseeing the Iraq War for the very reason that he supports the surge and Casey did not. In this light, Petraeus hardly holds an unbiased and objective opinion in the matter as his support for the surge is the reason why he holds the position that he does.
If he didn’t support the surge, Bush would have just replaced him with someone who did. In that sense, one can’t really take the words of the top commanders at face value in a political campaign over what should be done with Iraq, since those commanders are in their positions for the very reason that they support the current administration’s (and presumably that party’s presidential candidate’s) position.
As a result, what commanders think we should do shouldn’t really be a part of the political dicussion because, despite what the press would like us to believe, they are not unbiased actors in the debate.
