Move over MoveOn. The latest issue of American Conservative magazine, which maintains a Ron Paul-esque opposition to the Iraq war, features a cover story by Andrew Bacevich blasting Gen. David Petraeus:
In common parlance, the phrase "political general" is an epithet, the inverse of the warrior or frontline soldier. In any serious war, with big issues at stake, to assign command to a political general is to court disaster--so at least most Americans believe. [...]
David Petraeus is a political general. Yet in presenting his recent assessment of the Iraq War and in describing the "way forward," Petraeus demonstrated that he is a political general of the worst kind -- one who indulges in the politics of accommodation that is Washington's bread and butter but has thereby deferred a far more urgent political imperative, namely, bringing our military policies into harmony with our political purposes.
Bacevich, a Boston University professor and retired Army colonel, is described by Steve Clemons as "one of the most articulate leading thinkers among military-policy dissident conservatives who have exposed the inanity of this war and the damage it has done." In May, his 27-year-old son Andrew J. Bacevich was killed on duty by an IED explosive in Iraq.