Reid's unfair attack on Petraeus

Michael O'Hanlon:

Sen. Harry Reid's recent statements questioning the forthrightness of Gen. David Petraeus in reporting on conditions in Iraq are unseemly and unfair. Gen. Petraeus is a remarkable general, one of our best in modern American history, and his bravery and commitment to the nation in Iraq and elsewhere have been exemplary.
There is a legitimate question behind Mr. Reid's statements. How much do we really want to trust the diagnosis of how a war is going to a man hired to go out and win that war, and a man in uniform sworn to obey his civilian leadership, no less? But before getting to that, it is important to take on Mr. Reid's critique, because it is wrongheaded and should be retracted.
First, a word on Gen. Petraeus, whom I have known for 20 years since we were in doctoral studies together at Princeton. Those who also know him will not be surprised to learn that while most of us took the standard five or six years to finish our Ph.D.s at the Woodrow Wilson School, Gen. Petraeus was done in two. He has been a prodigy throughout his career, and admittedly a little lucky too, surviving a bullet to the upper right chest and a failed parachute among smaller mishaps.
Gen. Petraeus' preparation for this job could not have been much better. He has experience with stability operations from the Balkans, including a stint leading an effort to capture war criminals that had a more daring and dangerous side to it than most of the peacekeeping in Bosnia. Of course, he commanded the 101st Air Assault division in the initial invasion of Iraq, and after a very brief respite at home returned to that country to train Iraqi security forces for the first year after sovereignty was restored in 2004. Then he spent a year and a half as the Army's leading developer of doctrine at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., culminating in late 2006 in publication of a combined Army-Marine Corps manual on counterinsurgency that is highly regarded among theorists and practitioners in the field alike -- and that provided much of the intellectual basis for President Bush's new Iraq strategy.
The Senate majority leader should have been more careful in questioning the integrity of someone with such a track record....
... anyone who listens to Gen. Petraeus' press conferences knows how concerned he remains about the levels of violence in Iraq, the difficulty of clamping down on al Qaeda bombings, the potential for Shia militias to stop exercising restraint soon in the face of those bombings, and most of all the lack of political progress among the Iraqi leadership. Gen. Petraeus has not been guilty of happy talk on Iraq before, and I doubt he will become guilty now.
...
Rather than pillory Gen. Petraeus, Mr. Reid might better think of how we can get him some help by September when the big showdown is expected over the next Iraq spending bill....

It would be a mistake to expect anything statesman like from Harry Reid. That word is unlikely to ever be applied to his conduct. He is a partisan who has sold out to the kook wing of the Democrat party and the more trouble he is in politically the kookier he sounds. That explains in large part his intemperate and insulting remarks about two honest military men. He was getting heat from the kooks who most want to lose in Iraq and reacted by adopting their language. If he were more interested in the success of the country, he would avoid such groups. To the extent that they may have the interest of the country in mind at all they are deeply misguided.