Petraeus a sycophant, claims former Khmer Rouge apologist

I regularly get startling emails, and one I received last night quotes a long argument -- titled "Petraeus out of step with US top brass" -- by an "analyst" named Gareth Porter who claims that General Petraeus was called a "sycophant" by Admiral William Fallon, chief of Centcom:

WASHINGTON - In sharp contrast to the lionization of General David Petraeus by members of the US Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (Centcom), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad in March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that," the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

Naturally, we have only Porter's word that Admiral Fallon said this.

As it turns out, NRO's Cliff May was sent a link to the same story (although his link was from the leftie IPS site). Putting the phrase "news story" in quotes, May was most amused:

Hey, I'm sure this must be true. No doubt IPS reporters have great military sources.

Now here's the kicker: I didn't come across this story because I'm a regular reader of the IPS. It was sent out to a listserve I'm on by a former U.S. ambassador who was one of the advisors to the Iraq Study Group, the vaunted Baker/Hamilton Committee.

I'm hoping he'll next send us the National Enquirer story about Petraeus being the father of Brittany Spears' baby. And the kid's an alien, too!

Now my curiosity was really aroused. I wondered, if the "facts" are coming from Gareth Porter, how reliable is he? Via Wikipedia, I found a clue:
In 1976-77, continuing his challenge to the bloodbath argument, Gareth Porter rejected early accounts of the mass killings by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. With George Hildebrand he wrote a book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, which accepted the Pol Pot regime's rationale for the deportation of millions of people from Phnom Penh and other cities. Critics have argued that the book's sources included official statements by the Pol Pot regime. [4] Testifying before Congress in May 1977, Gareth Porter said that "the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people" was "a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a Readers Digest book." [5] Senator Stephen J. Solarz was so shocked by this testimony that he compared Gareth Porter to those who deny the murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Gareth Porter rejected this comparison. [6]
Porter later seems to have backed off his genocide denial, but as recently as August (in a piece titled "Bush's "Killing Fields" and the Real Lesson of Vietnam"), he was blaming the genocidal Khmer Rouge on the U.S.

The Cambodia book mentioned in the Wiki entry is reviewed here:

In 1976, Gareth Porter and George C. Hildebrand, both American scholars,3 published a small but significant book entitled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. It is important for two reasons. First, it was the first English-language book purporting to describe the events unfolding in Cambodia in 1975 and 1976. 4 Second, it rationalized everything the Khmer Rouge did and were doing: from the evacuation of Phnom Penh residents and hospital patients to the forcing of monks into hard labor. In the book, Porter and Hildebrand (hereafter P-H) offer what appears to be insurmountable evidence that contradicts reports of atrocities taking place in revolutionary Cambodia, re -christened Democratic Kampuchea.5

Porter's and Hildebrand's Sources

Using "suppressed" documents and "official" bulletins courtesy of the Government of Democratic Kampuchea (i.e., the Khmer Rouge themselves), they argue that the April 17, 1975 evacuation of Phnom Penh was due to the U.S. war on the people of Cambodia, which resulted in the overpopulation of Phnom Penh (from 600,000 to 2-3 million between 1970 and 1975). Furthermore, they claim that the explosion of corruption under the Lon Nol regime was the direct
result of U.S. foreign aid and that, in turn, it exacerbated death, malnutrition, and disease in Phnom Penh, making it uninhabitable. P-H refer to the Khmer Rouge only by their more palatable coalition name of NUFK (National Front for a United Kampuchea, also known as "FUNK" in its French acronyms and used as such throughout this essay).6 They pepper their book with propaganda photos directly from the regime.

Oh, I see. The Khmer Rouge tried to be good, and they were basically good until the evidence came in that they were bad, and then it was clear that Nixon made them do it.

While I don't like to stick my neck out, right now I'm disinclined to believe Porter's uncorroborated hearsay about General Petraeus.

posted by Eric on 10.09.07 at 10:57 AM





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Comments

Shouldn't "National Front for a United Kampuchea" be NFUK?

M. Simon   ·  October 9, 2007 12:20 PM

I doubt that Admiral Fallon would gratuitously insult an up-and-coming subordinate in this fashion. I'm sure he’s astute enough to realize that he could be reporting directly to General Petraeus one day (or indirectly reporting if Petraeus ever becomes his commander in chief).

G. Weightman   ·  October 9, 2007 07:35 PM

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