WAS PETRAEUS JUST PRETENDING NOT TO HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT WITHDRAWAL?

An earlier post took Petraeus’s stumbling about at a House of Representatives hearing when he was asked how he would conduct a withdrawal of U. S. troops from Iraq as a sincere revelation. He had not thought out a plan of withdrawal; he knew of no plan that had been thought out. A friend – a professor of law, and hence better acquainted with the varieties of human duplicity – insisted that Petraeus knew all about such plans. He was just pretending not to know so as to escape talking about them. This interpretation may do more credit to Petraeus’s intelligence, at the expense of discrediting his sincerity. It is still the case, on this interpretation as well as the other, that we need to know the cost of withdrawal under the best plan for withdrawal to know whether it would be so bad as to justify keeping our troops in Iraq. Deliberately or not, Petraeus was thwarting debate on this subject.