Wacka-Patraeus: This Time from the Right

Moveon.org has been joined in calling Gen. David Petraeus a traitor by none other than conservative columnist Pat Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative. The difference is that Buchanan's mag does the dirty deed more skillfully.
The cover story of The American Conservative's Oct. 8 issue, by Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, is titled "Sycophant Savior." Bacevich, a West Point grad and Vietnam veteran, has been vocally opposed to the Iraq War from the start. This summer he lost his son, a soldier serving in Iraq, to a suicide bomb attack there. He has long used his clout as a military historian to grind his anti-war ax. This time, though, he has shown that when he cannot convince people by force of argument he is perfectly prepared to stoop to the treason charge.
Bacevich questions the strategy Petraeus outlined in his recent testimony to Congress. But instead of just questioning the general's military judgment, Bacevich asserts that Petraeus has implemented a losing strategy that will kill countless American soldiers solely so he can keep his job.
"There is only one plausible explanation for Petraeus's terminating a surge that has (he says) enabled coalition forces, however tentatively, to gain the upper hand. That explanation is politics -- of the wrong kind."
Petraeus' plan for Iraq "serves to placate each of the various Washington constituencies that Petraeus has a political interest in pleasing," he writes.
Bacevich concludes that Petraeus "has broken faith with the soldiers he commands and the Army to which he has devoted his life."
This is a cleverer way of calling Petraeus a traitor than Moveon.org devised, but it is no less despicable. Pat Buchanan and American Conservative editor Scott McConnell have shamed themselves and their magazine by trumpeting this outrageous smear. A maganize that I read every week has joined the ranks of Moveon.org, congressional Democrats and other anti-war zealots who are so invested in the anti-war cause that they almost hope for an American failure in Iraq just so they'll be proven correct. Americans should denounce this hatchet-job as strongly as they denounced Moveon.org's; it is no less reprehensible.