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(Sorry for the lack of posting. Been a crazy day.)
1. Gen. Petraeus had kind of a weird day in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, DADT-wise. Since the hearing didn’t focus on it, he didn’t include it in his prepared remarks, but at the same time, this was his major Senate testimony for at least the first half of the year, so he let it be known that he prepared an eight minute statement expressing his views. Only the thing was that since no Senator wanted to yield his or her entire question time to let Petraeus read his statement, he didn’t end up making one, except for a brief indication that he thinks the “time has come” to consider a repeal, provided the Carter/Johnson study doesn’t turn up problems in the implementation.
2. On Israel, I’ll link to Matthew Yglesias, who got the relevant part. For those of you keeping score at home, Petraeus confirmed that he wanted to put Israel and the Palestinian territories under Central Command’s area of responsibility but said he never made a formal proposal to the White House. (Meaning Foreign Policy was mostly-but-not-totally right.) Why?
The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.
OMG LINKAGE RUN AWAY RUN AWAY. And that is the grown-up discussion of Israel that the Foxmans of this world avoid.
Update, 4:10 p.m.: Josh Rogin has a post on what Petraeus said about Foreign Policy‘s reporting.
3 Comments
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And exactly what would General Petraeus do about this linkage? Say something to the Israeli government that hasn’t been said already? Invade? What?
Petraeus is asking to move Israel from the technical domain of the European Command to the Central Command. Do these have 2 different foreign policies? Maybe the State Department has an opinion?
Does Petraeus think that Iran or Iraq or some other Muslim country will be nicer to his Central Command as a result of a bureaucratic shuffle?
Has the European Command been infiltrated by the Intergalactic Zionist Conspiracy?
The deeper I look, the less I see. Please explain.
I think the idea was just to put a warzone into a war command.
My two cents, Petraeus is trying to use logic in addressing a political issue to resolve a military challenge. And as Star Trek teaches us, life and death are seldom logical. The political reality that the Arabs hate Israel and Israel has no interest in changing the situation leads to a political solution that the good general should not be trying to influence.