Petraeus Leaked Misleading Story on Pullout Plans by Gareth Porter of IPS via Antiwar.com
Yesterday, when I was writing, I referred to Gen. Petreus' statements on Afghanistan as a 'Gen. Petreus is mounting a pre-emptive strike against ongoing 'strategy' reviews...'
Of course, I'm not sitting in Gen. Petreus' office, so I didn't know that as a fact. But it seemed logical from bits I'd heard. I'd heard the Obama White House say they were doing 'strategy reviews'. And it just seemed very natural to assume that a political general like Petreus was not just talking randomly to some reporter, but instead was trying to push a specific point of view out into the media. And to do it before the Obama strategy reviews were finalized to both influence those reviews and to get the first shots in of any media campaigns to try to swing the people and Congress to a particular plan. It just seemed logical.
Today, I'm reading Antiwar.com, and I see a longer piece by Gareth Porter describing the media manipulation that Gen. Petreus is currently involved in concerning timetables to withdraw from Iraq.
One interesting note is that you almost never see mentioned in the media that the withdraw date for American troops in Iraq has already been set. Its in the SOFA that the US and Iraq signed in the waning months of the Bush Administration. From reading the mass media, it appears that the US feels that this agreement is totally optional, and that Gen. Petreus and\or the Obama administration are perfectly free to pick slower withdrawal plans if the choose.
Of course, there are already other news stories out there that say the US is already violating other terms of that agreement.
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