Petraeus skeptics are legion, it seems

WASHINGTON - Last week, the Republican Party tied its political hopes to one man: General David H. Petraeus.

President Bush made a rare prime-time speech endorsing Petraeus's recommendations. Congressional Republicans spent much of their time at last week's hearings lionizing Petraeus and condemning the liberal group MoveOn.org for its ad headlined "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?"

On Friday, four days after the MoveOn.org ad ran, GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani unveiled a Web video accusing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton of engaging in "orchestrated attacks" with the liberal group. Clinton's offense: She said, at a Senate hearing, that Petraeus's report requires "the willing suspension of disbelief."

Clinton based her skepticism on other analyses, including one by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, that did not share Petraeus's optimism about the troop surge. But Giuliani and some other Republicans have suggested that all complaints about Petraeus are unwarranted personal attacks - part of what Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, called "a smear campaign" that seeks "to impugn the name of a highly respected man of integrity."

If so, much of the American public is apparently complicit. On the eve of Petraeus's testimony before Congress, an ABC News/Washington Post poll indicated that 53 percent of Americans were expecting the general to exaggerate progress in Iraq. And even after Petraeus's testimony, Fox News found that a plurality of 40 percent thought Petraeus's case was slanted toward the Bush administration, while only 35 percent thought it was "truthful and objective." The remaining 25 percent didn't have an opinion.

The people answering these polls probably didn't intend to demean Petraeus's integrity. Many probably assumed that any commander is likely to offer a fairly generous assessment of his own strategy. Expecting Petraeus to provide a totally dispassionate, detached assessment of his own work would be like accepting every CEO's analysis of his or her company's quarterly reports at face value.

Past reports by Army generals may have fueled some of the public skepticism. In January 2004, as Iraqi support for the Coalition Provisional Authority was collapsing and the insurgency was gaining steam, the American commander General Ricardo Sanchez declared, "We have had tremendous success in both preventing and defeating some of the terrorist attacks against the people of this country and also against the coalition forces."

Sanchez's comments were probably accurate in their limited scope - meaning that "some of the terrorist attacks" had been thwarted. But they gave a false sense of reassurance to the American people.

In the summer of 2005, when Americans began expressing deep disillusionment with the war, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, declared the Iraq war "a success."

"Absolutely, I think it's a success," Myers told PBS's Jim Lehrer. Myers didn't fully explain himself, but one can reasonably assume that he meant the military was succeeding against some very tough obstacles. Still, his comments gave a false sense of a war approaching its conclusion.

And remember the battle of Fallujah? Today, many consider that bloody fight at the end of 2004 to have been a mistake for two reasons. First, after the troops cleaned out the city, insurgents crept back in, undermining the military gains. Second, while US commanders were focused on Fallujah, a Sunni stronghold in Anbar Province, Shi'ite militias took control of some Baghdad neighborhoods, creating one facet of the security problem that Petraeus is now trying to address.

At the time, Americans heard General Thomas Metz, the multinational force commander, declare, "We have achieved our objectives on or ahead of schedule, not only in Fallujah, but also across Iraq."

More recently, there was Operation Together Forward, in which US troops policed Baghdad neighborhoods alongside Iraqi units. The operation did not succeed in pacifying the neighborhoods, and some Iraqi police units have been accused of actually sparking violence, by engaging in sectarian warfare that has fueled virtual ethnic cleansing of some districts.

"My intent is . . . to point out there have been a lot of successes in this operation," said General William Caldwell IV, the spokesman for the multinational force, in July of last year. "We are seeing Iraqi security forces - the local police, the national police and Iraqi army forces - coming together as one team, sharing intelligence, coordinating among checkpoints . . ."

Now, Petraeus is proclaiming success - based largely on his statistics showing that in "eight of the last 12 weeks" violence has dropped in Baghdad. The president and his party are hoping that the general's optimism will breed confidence in the war. But the American people have reasons to be skeptical, and the polls show that they are.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.