petraeus

An anonymous White House quote on preventive detention has put civil liberties advocates on the offensive.

Not necessarily from the Taliban, but from a military coup responding to the threat the Taliban poses to the viability of Pakistan. Fox News reports that Gen. David Petraeus is telling people privately that the next two weeks (!) are a test of the Zardari government’s survivability. Anonymous sources allegedly familiar with Petraeus’ talks with [...]

Following up on Spencer’s earlier post about President Obama’s meeting today with numerous members of his national security team, the White House released this statement from Obama about the meeting:
“This afternoon, I met with our Ambassador to Iraq, the commander in Iraq, and the overall theater commander in the region in order to get a [...]

The good thing about staying on as defense secretary is that you can fly into Kandahar whenever you feel like it. And, like a baller, you can announce new troop deployments. Yochi Dreazen hangs out with Bob Gates and reports:

When President-elect Barack Obama met with Gen. David Petraeus in July, he struck the right tone. Will the White House relationship with the military keep the same tenor?

On Friday, I flagged an ABC story reporting that Gen. David Petraeus had requested permission to talk with the Syrian government as part of his new job as head of Central Command, only to be shot down by the Bush administration. I speculated that it might be another example of congruence with Sen. Barack Obama’s [...]

Remember how I wrote earlier this month that Gen. David Petraeus’ public statements appeared to implicitly back Sen. Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Here’s another example.
According to ABC, the incoming Centcom commander — who takes over at 10 a.m. today, as a matter of fact — wanted to make a visit to the Syrian government. Of [...]

In the course of a spittle-inflected Small Wars Journal diatribe against my friend Nir Rosen for the alleged moral failing of embedding with the Taliban, Atlantic correspondent Bing West — whose recent book I preliminarily praised in TWI — offers this bit of dubious moral outrage:
Having told the reader what his intent was, Rosen described [...]

Something else that’s interesting in Joe Klein’s interview with Sen. Barack Obama.
Yesterday we saw John McCain severely misrepresent what the impending U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) says, incorrectly insisting that its date-certain deadlines for U.S. troop withdrawals are based on “conditions” on the ground. Here Klein asks Obama to revisit his 2007 questions to [...]

Joe Klein conducted a fascinating interview with Sen. Barack Obama recently, and he’s just put the transcript online.
There’s a lot to sift through, particularly from a foreign-policy perspective. But check out Obama’s account of his July meeting in Baghdad with Gen. David Petraeus, now head of U.S. Central Command and with whom a prospective President [...]