President Petraeus? Iraqi official recalls the day US general revealed ambition

Uruknet ^ | 13 September 2007 | Patrick Cockburn

[tlb]

General David Petraeus, expressed long-term interest in running for the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew him at that time.

Sabah Khadim, then a senior adviser at Iraq's Interior Ministry, says General Petraeus discussed with him his ambition when the general was head of training and recruitment of the Iraqi army in 2004-05.

"I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, 'No, that would be too soon'," Mr Khadim, who now lives in London, said.

General Petraeus has a reputation in the US Army for being a man of great ambition. If he succeeds in reversing America's apparent failure in Iraq, he would be a natural candidate for the White House in the presidential election in 2012.

His able defence of the "surge" in US troop numbers in Iraq as a success before Congress this week has made him the best-known soldier in America. An articulate, intelligent and energetic man, he has always shown skill in managing the media.

But General Petraeus's open interest in the presidency may lead critics to suggest that his own political ambitions have influenced him in putting an optimistic gloss on the US military position in Iraq .

[tlb]

Why not. Wesley Clark opened the door.

[Principled]

Or the original GW general who got this ball rolling...

[piasa]

Uruknet was in the past the mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party, though the country-code holder was living in the US.

[Mac1]

on fox he looked a good candidate to this Brit

[freema]

Ping

[Cementjungle]

Right on cue, someone (gee, wonder who?) is putting out hit pieces on this general.

[piasa]

(Anti-Ameican) Iraqi Baathist Web Site Backing Sappy Cindy Sheehan
Moonbat Central via Discover the Network ^ | 8/22/05

Uruknet, the web site of Iraqi Baathist backers of Saddam Hussein, nominally based in Italy, the sort of people who lop off heads of Western captives, is devoting much of its space to celebrating Sappy Cindy Sheehan’s jihad against America and against Dem Joos.

Uruknet routinely runs anti-American screeds from a motley collection of far-leftists, neonazi rightists, and Islamofascists. You know, the familiar axis of evil. It currently also features a piece by ultra-moonbat Jude Wanniski calling for Saddam Hussein to be restored to power, entitled “Are We Really Better Off Without Saddam?”

[Jaysun]

President Petraeus....... I dunno. Maybe he can change his last name to something more English or Irish. That seems to be the requirement. Someone should have told Giuliani.

[GeronL]

why should we believe this is even true?

[gondramB]

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be President.

But I don’t think being point man on Iraq is going to help anybody do that.

[GeronL]

lol. just like IPS, these leftist pseudo-news websites are following the Democrat Party-line in attacking the General.
They sound a lot like the MSM except they are even less credible as sources

[GeronL]

An Iraqi pro-Saddam 'news' source is not to be trusted. Neither is the IPS for that matter. As a matter of fact I would bet these 2 are just the tip of the iceberg of leftist so-called news organizations trying to become the sock-puppets to get their dumb attacks picked up in the so-called MSM.

I bet someone who could dig deeper might figure out this process, maybe even infiltrate it.

[piasa]

Before the war in Iraq- before all the media pundits were screaming Iraq can't possibly work with al qaeda because Iraq is secular and al qaeda is Islamist I found the site while looking for screeds by Saddam Hussein. At the time that was pretty much all the site contained. When the no-connection mantro became shrill it was a simple matter to visit the site and pick up a fuming, roiling vile little speech of Hussein's and post that puppy for people to see that he was very much aiming to please Islamist ears with his prose, filled as it was with quotes for the Quran, repetitive pleas to Allah & and piece-be-upon-Muhammeds, and other verbal imagery from radical Islamist wet dreams, etc.

I don't think Uruknet was operating out of Italy then - I seem to remember it being operated out of a server in Richardson Texas linked to some of the terror charity web sites, Hamas and so on. I may be wrong there but it was connected tosome other questionable group in the US.

Now that it's in Italy it's probably managed by the Anti-Imperialista Camp folks- same wingnuts associated with the french 'priest' Father Benjamin of Oil-for_food fame, who claimed according to Zenit to have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

[Joe Boucher]

If you compare the good general to the current crop of dems running he at least is coherent.

[GeronL]

The Holy Land Foundation, the trial is going on right now BTW

[piasa]

Yep- Iraq’s country code “.iq” was held by Bayan Elashi of Infocom.

[piasa]

As I recall it looked like someone was tipping the guy off as much as two months in advance that the feds were on his case.

[piasa]

Hussein used Uruklink.net [the probable predecessor or uruknet] as a choke through which to run all of Iraq’s internet access and control the flow of info geting into Iraq.

[piasa]

ping...

[Beckwith]

Patrick Cockburn is a long-time critic of Bush, Blair and the Iraq War - - it follows he's a critic of Petraeus.