Politics Creates Odd Pair: Sanchez and Democrats
Ex-Iraq Commander Now Criticizing War
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post
It may be among the strangest of political alliances: a former commanding general in Iraq, blocked from a fourth star and forced into retirement partly for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the speaker of the House, desperate to end a war that the general helped start.
But in partisan Washington, the enemy of one's enemy can quickly become a friend, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the new marriage of convenience between Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.
On Saturday, Sanchez delivered the Democrats' weekly radio address. He excoriated what he called the Bush administration's "failure to devise a strategy for victory in Iraq," then embraced Democratic legislation linking continued war funding with a timeline aimed at ending U.S. combat operations by December 2008.
Other senior military figures have turned on the White House, but none as senior as Sanchez, whose command of coalition forces in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 coincided with an explosion of violence, the emergence of a brutal insurgency and a prison-abuse scandal that still haunts the war effort.
For Democratic leaders, Sanchez's address has been a triumph, covered by the media nationwide. It interrupted a stream of stories about declining violence, which had stalled efforts to force a shift of war policy.
But for critics of the war and of Sanchez's command, the radio address was curious. Andrew Bacevich, who was an Army officer in the Vietnam War and now teaches at Boston University, said Sanchez fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the conflict he faced. Sanchez's troops employed "kick-down-the-door" tactics that hardened resistance to the U.S. occupation, and helped turn an insurgency in its infancy into a guerrilla war spinning out of control, he said.
(Continued here.)
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post
It may be among the strangest of political alliances: a former commanding general in Iraq, blocked from a fourth star and forced into retirement partly for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the speaker of the House, desperate to end a war that the general helped start.
But in partisan Washington, the enemy of one's enemy can quickly become a friend, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the new marriage of convenience between Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.
On Saturday, Sanchez delivered the Democrats' weekly radio address. He excoriated what he called the Bush administration's "failure to devise a strategy for victory in Iraq," then embraced Democratic legislation linking continued war funding with a timeline aimed at ending U.S. combat operations by December 2008.
Other senior military figures have turned on the White House, but none as senior as Sanchez, whose command of coalition forces in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 coincided with an explosion of violence, the emergence of a brutal insurgency and a prison-abuse scandal that still haunts the war effort.
For Democratic leaders, Sanchez's address has been a triumph, covered by the media nationwide. It interrupted a stream of stories about declining violence, which had stalled efforts to force a shift of war policy.
But for critics of the war and of Sanchez's command, the radio address was curious. Andrew Bacevich, who was an Army officer in the Vietnam War and now teaches at Boston University, said Sanchez fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the conflict he faced. Sanchez's troops employed "kick-down-the-door" tactics that hardened resistance to the U.S. occupation, and helped turn an insurgency in its infancy into a guerrilla war spinning out of control, he said.
(Continued here.)
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