Fact: After the initial phase of fighting, in the areas under his command, sectarian warfare ultimately escalated and his efforts for political agreements, while worthy, failed.
Fact: In his tour of duty commanding the training of the Iraqi military, his training results were a dismal failure, and all subsequent training programs have been to redo his failed efforts and undo the damage done during that tour of duty.
Fact: There have been major disappearances, losses and/or misplacement of large amounts of Iraqi weapons that were grossly mismanaged (at best) under his command.
I'm not sure if the first criticism is valid because I've read in several accounts of the war that PR was successful with the 101st Airborne in Iraq and it was only after the division was rotated out and replaced by a much smaller unit that the security situation deteriorated. Of course, his training of the Iraqis can only be described as a dismal failure and the weapons charge is very serious.
Ilan Goldenberg has done more good work on the numbers PR has been trying to peddle and finds several anomalies, a major one being the number of Iraqi dead in December:
Anomaly A: Somehow in December, the month that is always cited by the Pentagon and the Administration, Petraeus’s Iraqi dead is actually greater than the MNC-I Iraqi Dead + Wounded. That makes absolutely no sense. You can’t have more dead than dead and wounded combined.
I ask again: WHY BELIEVE PETRAEUS NOW?
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