Casey Pays Price For Rejecting McCain Doctrine

General George Casey has paid a price for rejecting the McCain Doctrine in Iraq. Josh Marshall puts it this way:

This is precious. Apparently Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is going to go after outgoing Iraq commander Gen. George Casey in his nomination hearings to become the next Chief of Staff of the Army.

Said Sen. McCain: ""I have very serious concerns about General Casey's nomination. I'm concerned about failed leadership, the message that sends to the rest of the military."

'Failed leadership' here, of course, is code for toeing the Bush line for the last two years and then resisting the new effort to dig the US even deeper into the mess of Iraq. In other words, Casey becomes the lamb in whose blood the sins of the Iraq War dead-enders (Bush, McCain, et al.) are washed clean.

Comic, Orwellian, so many possible descriptions.

Some people are saying that General Casey shouldn't have toed the line for Bush as long as he did. I ask you - where's General Petraeus right now? Why isn't he speaking out honestly? (I'm sorry, but I don't suspect that he is, and there are many reasons for that, I suppose, given his position.) When the McCain Doctrine falls apart, what will we have gained by giving the faintest praise to McCain for treating General Casey in this manner? He'll just do the same thing to General Petraeus when this surge fails to cover for a *ramped-up version* of the same worst foreign policy I could imagine - a policy on which John McCain is putting his permanent stamp.

* example of what I mean by "ramped-up version":

"US President George W Bush's State of the Union address appears to confirm other indications in recent weeks that he is not merely sending more troops to Iraq to do more of the same, but has adopted a new strategy of fighting all three major Iraqi Arab political-military forces simultaneously." [link to Bush's Three-Front Blunder]

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A year ago, I wrote about an inner-military argument that was occurring under the radar. It relates to General Casey in that, one short year ago, he was still willingly denying that a civil war with armed militias were threatening any chance for what anyone could come close to calling "success" in Iraq. Here's the rub, though. The Generals who were coming through at that time and saying something true about the actual facts on the ground one year ago were removed or are now "retired."

From Karen Kwiatkowski [as quoted at my Rational Liberal blog at Syracuse.com a year ago]:

"The cost in human lives, spirit, and hope on all sides, as well as the financial cost may not have been worth it for those "piling on" and going "defeatist" in the reality based world, but who cares? The reality-based world is an ugly place. The Casey-said, Sanchez-said debate prefigures a year ahead that may be remembered as the year the reality-based world rudely intruded on the Potomac, shattering what is left of the facade and completely exploding the myth that Bush-Cheney policies have made either the Middle East more democratic, or America safer." [link]

Dr. Kwiatkowski knew exactly what she was talking about then, and we can see where this is going now. Generals John Abizaid and George Casey were skeptical of a troop "surge" and they were removed and blamed.