Petraeus Reprises Sisyphus

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Freshly retired from the Army, Gen. David H. Petraeus will be sworn in today as Director of Central Intelligence. The Princeton Ph.D. is a brilliant, charismatic man used to command and diplomacy. But leaving the military and entering a highly politicized bureaucracy, he faces some daunting challenges.

Petraeus, famous for devising and conducting the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, is credited for succeeding in both even though those accomplishments are entirely Sisyphean. They have created conditions under which we can withdraw in a moment of relative calm, but what we have won with blood and treasure will dissolve soon after we leave. In these Sisyphean results is a metaphor for what will happen when he tries to transform the spy agency while it is under extreme pressure to produce a lot more of the valuable intelligence our nation needs.
Petraeus has, for years, been one of the nation's top intelligence consumers. Now he reverses roles: as DCI, he will be the principal intelligence producer, leading an agency beset by poor morale, politicization, and an inability to produce current and accurate intelligence on many of America's most dangerous adversaries.

The CIA's relationship with Congress is one of the two sources of the agency's morale problem. From his own experience, Petraeus knows how volatile Congress can be. You can be a hero one day -- as his confirmation hearing and 94-0 vote evidence -- and a goat the next. He must remember the September 2007 hearing in which he and Amb. Ryan Crocker testified about the Iraq war. Then-Senator Hillary Clinton called the two men liars, saying that their testimony required "a willing suspension of disbelief."

[NCTexan]

The MoveOn.org ad controversy began when the anti-war liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org published a full-page ad in The New York Times on September 10, 2007 accusing General David H. Petraeus of "cooking the books for the White House". The ad also labeled him "General Betray Us". The organization created the ad in response to Petraeus' Report to Congress on the Situation in Iraq. MoveOn hosted pages on its website about the ad and their reasons behind it from 2007 to June 23, 2010. On June 23, 2010, after President Obama nominated General Petraeus to be the new top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan (taking over the position from retiring General Stanley McCrystal), MoveOn erased these webpages and any reference to them from its website.[

 

wikipedia

Go figure... The puppet-master labels him "Betray Us" and the puppet gives him the CIA.