Petraeus joins generals called by Congress - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Petraeus joins generals called by Congress

WASHINGTON— Gen. David Petraeus faced lawmakers Monday with glittering stars and the weight of an unpopular war on his shoulders.

Much as Gen. William Westmoreland defended another divisive conflict — the Vietnam War — with steely jawed optimism four decades ago, the Iraq war commander spoke forcefully to his questioners and asked them to give escalation a chance. He rattled off statistics, cited charts and declared, “it is possible to achieve our objectives in Iraq over time,” perhaps the closest approximation to optimism now.

Starting this month with a Marine Corps unit, he said he believes the troop buildup that President Bush ordered in January can be more than five brigades smaller by the end of this year; troop strength probably will be back to the pre-buildup 130,000 by the middle of the next.

The Republicans who admire him and the Democrats who warily respect him — while sharply challenging his progress report — listened raptly in the ornate hearing room. A protester who called Iraqis “beautiful people” and accused Petraeus of lying was quickly removed during his remarks. Other discordant voices were similarly silenced before he began.

At the moment of highest anticipation, when Petraeus was finally asked to speak after lengthy opening statements from lawmakers, his microphone failed. In the awkward minutes that followed, two more protesters made a commotion and were removed from the room.

The hearing recessed for five minutes because of the technical glitch. At one point, speakers screeched like feedback at a rock concert, an embarrassing turn for a hearing that some lawmakers called the most important of the year.

As lawmakers delivered their opening statements, Ryan Crocker, the ambassador to Iraq, sat with his hands folded in front of him and tapped his thumbs together in a sign of impatience. Petraeus looked down from time to time at his own remarks, and seemed to be practicing his lines, lips moving as he silently mouthed the words.

Generals command keen attention in Congress; even Westmoreland, speaking to a joint session of Congress at the height of the tempest over Vietnam, was interrupted 19 times for applause in a half-hour speech in 1967.

Petraeus testified in the shadow of a parade of generals called to account for wars won and lost.

Congress has a rich and checkered tradition of dealing with generals. Some of the most inept civilian advice on the conduct of warfare ever came from a committee that thought it knew better than Abraham Lincoln’s commanders how to run the Civil War.

History has also judged that, at times, the civilians did know better.

Another committee cut Gen. Douglas MacArthur down to size in 1951, deftly exposing the flaws that had led President Truman to remove him as Korean war commander for insubordination. A hero to millions when Truman sacked him, MacArthur left the hearing room closer to plainly human.

Chalk one up for lawmakers, who are inevitably second-guessers in a time of war.

“There’s a lot of people who are armchair generals who reside here in the air-conditioned comfort of Capitol Hill,” observed Sen. John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, Vietnam War hero and stout defender of the 2007 troop increase.

In the Civil War, the hawkish Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War pressed outdated tactics and demands for quicker, tougher action on military officers schooled in doctrine and seasoned on the battlefield. There was no air conditioning, but plenty of hot air, in the view of historian Bruce Tap, author of “Over Lincoln’s Shoulder.”

“They were ideologically moral men who advocated just and ethical causes, but they were also narrow-minded partisans, blinded by their own sense of importance and self-righteousness,” he wrote in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association in 2002.

“Most of the time, they consumed time and resources with little practical influence on the Northern war effort.”

Generals are more likely to be venerated on Capitol Hill than roasted, even when wars are going badly. It is the commander in chief, a role delegated by the Constitution to the president, who takes the heat.

“There’s not much political pay dirt in attacking generals,” said John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State and an authority on war, the presidency and public opinion. “Anyway, it doesn’t do any good. Except maybe for MacArthur, they do try to stay out of politics, and they’re generally pretty good at that.”

But testifying has not always been a great career move.

Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer, a regular Army lieutenant colonel testifying using his mainly honorary wartime rank, embarrassed his superiors when, in congressional testimony, he verified allegations that federal agents had taken money meant for American Indian reservations. By some historical accounts, the resulting shortages on the reservations sent Indians back out to fight.

Custer’s 1876 testimony cost him his command. He got back his command in time to engage those Indians at Little Big Horn and die there with his men.

Less dramatic but unmistakable consequences befell Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff who upset his civilian bosses in 2003 when he testified that it might take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after the coming invasion.

His words were prophetic, but he was out of the job within months. He left with the warning, “Beware a 12-division strategy for a 10-division army.”

In 1967, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson attributed much of the anti-war sentiment to partisan objections to him and felt there was a positive story to be told about Vietnam.

Westmoreland stepped forward with his “light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel talks” to members of Congress and the press, Mueller said. “Objectively, you could say that things were better.”

But as it turned out, he added, “the tunnel was very long.”