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General Petraeus fell ill at a hearing on Capitol Hill this morning.
As I noted yesterday, the attitude in Washington regarding the war in Afghanistan is now at panic level. Articles in this morning’s New York Times and Washington Post reinforce that view, and in a remarkable turn of events, General David Petraeus has fallen ill this morning while testifying on Capitol Hill.
The screen capture above shows the note CSPAN ran when Petraeus fell ill and the hearing was halted. Petreaus did return just a few minutes later to reassure Senator Carl Levin, who was chairing the hearing, that he had been "just a little light-headed", but Levin replied that he and his colleagues were going to "overrule" that decision and postpone resumption of the hearing until Wednesday morning.
The Washington Post article, headlined "Concern on Capitol Hill about Afghanistan war grows", opens in this way:
A series of political and military setbacks in Afghanistan has fed anxiety over the war effort in the past few weeks, shaking supporters of President Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy and confirming the pessimism of those who had doubts about it from the start.
The concerns, fed largely by unease over military operations in southern Afghanistan that are progressing slower than anticipated, spurred lawmakers to schedule last-minute hearings this week to assess progress on the battlefield and within the Afghan government.
The article then goes on to describe the attitude in the White House
Senior military and defense officials, none of whom was authorized to discuss relations with the White House, said congressional questions and a series of negative stories in the media have increased requests for explanations. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen "is certainly aware that there is angst" in the White House, one military official said.
The New York Times article is headlined "Setbacks Cloud U.S. Plans to Get Out of Afghanistan", and opens:
Six months after President Obama decided to send more forces to Afghanistan, the halting progress in the war has crystallized longstanding tensions within the government over the viability of his plan to turn around the country and begin pulling out by July 2011.
Within the administration, the troubles in clearing out the Taliban from a second-tier region and the elusive loyalties of the Afghan president have prompted anxious discussions about whether the policy can work on the timetable the president has set. Even before the recent setbacks, the military was highly skeptical of setting a date to start withdrawing, but Mr. Obama insisted on it as a way to bring to conclusion a war now in its ninth year.
The Times goes on to quote Bruce Riedel:
“Things are not looking good,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a regional specialist at the Brookings Institution who helped formulate the administration’s first Afghan strategy in early 2009. “There’s not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for.”
Both articles state that overall Afghanistan progress and strategy will not be reviewed until December. Will the current level of panic allow them to wait that long, or will the timetable for review be accelerated?
36 Comments
Since the war itself is pointless except as a vehicle for “defense” spending and military careers, why bother with panic? Wouldn’t it just be easier to declare the whole war a secret on the grounds of “national security”? That way if it’s lost nobody needs to know.
One of those perfect solutions I wish I had thought of. Problem solved.
I don’t get the “panic” either. I strongly protested going into Afghanistan because it was a “lost cause” before it even began. IF they had sent in a strike force to REALLY capture bin Laden… well, ok, maybe. But I knew they were NEVER going to capture the son of the Bush Family’s best friends, the bin Ladens.
The ONLY reason why Cheney sent troops to Afghanistan was to make money for himself. So what’s happening now?? Is Cheney somehow LOSING money?? That’s the only reason why I can see these folks going into panic mode. They certainly don’t give a shite about loss of life on either side, and that’s for darn sure.
The ONLY other reason I can see for panic is that they’ve finally figured out that there’s all these minerals to plunder, and now they think they cannot steal them to enrich themselves. ?? they would probably panic over that lost opportunity, I guess.
How many humans are dead from his brains and the big worry is he doesn’t feel good ?
A four star ass
Looking at the video, I wonder if Petraeus was simply lulled to sleep by McCain’s monotonous spewage …
Cataplexy is one of the possibilities. But it would have to be an abnormal sleep phenomenon like cataplexy to make someone’s head hit the table with the thump we hear on the audio track.
The Obama strategy for Afghanistan is to blunder and bluster through. The fact that we never had a policy to justify keeping an army there or all of the myriad contradictions of the McChrystal plan, killing civilians in order to save them, building a modern army out of illiterates from ethnic groups that hate each other, and asking Afghans to trust a shifty government that is as weak as it is corrupt, these are the realities which are coming back to bite Obama and his generals.
Hmmm. From twitter:
“just a little light-headed”
Yes, Overweening ambition and a career ending threat (failure) would make you light headed.
… future career as POTUS candidate also under threat …
There’s the cause!
I said last week that the WH is in full panic mode and I still believe it. They have too many plates spinning and seem to lurch from one thing to the next without getting a handle on even one. All that tap dancing and all those lies are now front and center and won’t go away.
Not to detract from you main point, but I wish you would use the plain language description of what happened to Petraeus — the dude fainted.
Your are following the MSM lead of finding some tortured euphemism “falls ill”, etc., so as not to ruin the poor boy’s political career. (If the mighty general can’t face Congress without fainting, God forbid he ever has to face enemy fire, etc.)
To its credit, the NYT does use the headline “Petreaus appears to faint…“.
I put the diary up very quickly as events were unfolding. To me, fainting suggests a loss of consciousness and I didn’t have evidence then, I’m not sure even now, that he lost consciousness. That makes the more nebulous “falls ill” the appropriate description in my book.
Fair enough, but in my book “falls ill” is a euphemism for puking, like Daddy Bush did on the Japanese Prime Minister.
By the way, I didn’t mean to suggest that your intention was to protect Petraeus’ political career! Only some in the MSM, perhaps.
Looks more like he got an unexpected rush from a bong hit.
I hear Monsanto has been growing incredibly strong Frankenweed in the Kush.
Poor ol Petraeus happened to be downwind when McCain ripped one of those old man farts that can gag a maggot in a shithouse on a tuna boat!
Link to video by RT
He looks like he can’t breathe. Along the lines of the title of your blog posting, it may be that he had a panic attack, which can include dizziness, feeling faint, along with a number of other symptoms. The person may also look freaked out, for if not prepared, they may feel they are having a heart attack or otherwise dying.
The attack comes just as McCain is saying they’ll stay in Afghanistan without timeline, and until “success.”
The war in Afghanistan was always doomed. No ruling elite has ever deserved a defeat more than this one, with their preening certainty they could rule the world, even as their own country was left to decay, and indifference to the rule of corporations brought home with a vengeance by the mother of all oil “spills”, and a banking crisis that rewarded the most inept economic regime ever with a trillion dollars in bailouts, so the thieves could still vacation at St. Moritz.
Maybe Petraeus saw an Afghan version of Banquo.
Thanks, Jeff. The timing is certainly interesting, isn’t it?
I thought it looked like a brief seizure, which can happen with a simple faint, but could be more ominous also.
If you’re Petraeus and you know you’re in a quagmire, and you hear McFullofhimself pontificate about victory, no timelines, etc., you might just start to feel like you’re losing it.
Wasn’t inducing the soviet union to invade afhganistan, a strategy that was put in place, in the thought that the Afghan war effort would destroy the soviet union?
conspiracy theory in play here?
And inducing the US to invade Afghanistan, in order to bankrupt and destroy the US, was bin Laden’s stated strategy.
That earlier post today, about the intended audience for the lithium story, was very insightful.
He had an attack of deja vue – weren’t there congressional hearings towards the end of the Viet Nam war and the revulsion from body counts started to set in?
This is good news for Sarah Palin, you betcha!
Certainly puts Petraeus on tap to release ALL his health records. Is this the same thing CJ Roberts has, those wee cerebral events that are sooooo embarrassing out in public?
Rather disqualifying in a POTUS, I’d say, especially after the pretzel incident with the last guy.
~Breaking News~
1 Trillion Dollars worth of water found in Afghanistan. Immediately fly the General back to receive this life-saving miracle substance.(dangling shiny object)
A lightning bolt his the BP ship; Petraeus collapses…if I weren’t an atheist…next thing you know Tim Geithner will get by a truck.
Seriously, speaking of Afghanistan, I’ve been surprised by the lack of coverage given to Obama’s request to abuse — I mean hold — prisoners in Bagram after Aghanistan takes control of the gulag.
Petraeus was treated I think for prostate cancer. The most likely reason he fainted was most likely jet lag, dehydration, and dicey food. I assume something like this because the other possibilities to rule out are more serious like heart attack or stroke, and I didn’t see him being taken away immediately for assessment of these, and if these had been a concern, he should have been.
The Times goes on to quote Bruce Riedel:
“Things are not looking good,” … “There’s not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for.”
Hope without Change is like…Cheeburger without Pepsi.
oh the price of imperialism
now that minerals have been found corp america will not let the industrial military complex leave.
we will build military bases away from the cities like in iraq.
this is vietnam all over again.
the same imperialist self serving american mentality that went into vietnam is the same american imperialist mentality that went into iraq and afghan.
most americans are imperialists to the core and dont have a clue they are.
just like most germans and japanese did not know they were imperialists.
capitalism leads to imperialism like a duck takes to water.
and with some of our states; most of their population are out and out war mongers.
and we call our soldiers heros for fighting in these wars for profits.
the very definition of imperialism.
Put the extra war funding that the House took from COBRA, unemployment and Medicaid back where it belongs and stop the rest of it too.
What they were thinking is completely beyond me if this was about “the deficit, the deficit!!!!”
Occurred to me that if we “go green” we wouldn’t so easily be able to war all the time. Maybe that’s one of the reasons the MOTUs don’t want to do it.
I wonder if there is some kind of gang war going on inside the Pentagon, between the human soldiers like Petraeus vs. the imperialists who include both the neocons and the MIC. The soldiers are being forced to tapdance to keep the imperialists’ occupation going, but the crowd just ain’t buyin’ it any more.
Petraeus is “human.” That’s a good one.
Crafty operators like him know how to work both sides of the gang wars to advance their careers.
There’s fainting, and then there’s fainting. Much of it is indeed a self-limited phenomenon that doesn’t imply any serious health problem as its antecedent, and only causes a problem if you injure yourself in a fall while fainting. But fainting can also be a symptom of a heart rhythm problem, and those can be most definitely life-threatening.
Syncope, the technical term for fainting, simply refers to a brief loss of consciousness caused by a temporarily inadequate supply of blood to the brain. Usually the inadequate blood supply is caused by a failure of the body’s usual unfailing mechanisms for keeping the blood pressure on even keel despite frequent changes in factors that would otherwise throw it off kilter. For example, if you stand up, the body has to rapidly achieve the increased blood flow to maintain adequate brain filling pressure by some combination of increasing the heart rate upward, strengthening the force of each individual heart beat, and/or tightening up tension in the walls of the major arteries. Almost all of us have felt at least once a momentary weakness and light-headedness just after standing, that represented a slight failure of this adaptive process. Push that failure a bit, and you have the orhtostatic syncope that some of us get frequently just after standing quickly.
All sorts of other things, from a vigorous cough, to a full bowel or bladder, to nausea, can cause vasovagal syncope, by causing an overeaction , or paradoxical maladaptive reaction, of this usually automatic and reliable mechanism of adjustment. Mostly this happens rarely and sporadically, so that, apart from the risk of trauma from falling, syncope is just a nuisance.
You can also have syncope from having a low effective volume of blood. You can actually be dehydrated itself, but more often this happens when people stand still and upright for a long period of time. Blood pools in their legs because of the absence of the constant leg muscle movements that usually help push blood back up that long column created when man first walked upright. This sort of cause of syncope is inherently self-limited, and not serious.
The problem is that the temporary inadequate blood flow to the brain that is the symptom, syncope, can also be caused by a transient heart rhythm not capable of sustaining adequate blood flow. The risk, if that was the cause of any particular syncopal episode, is that the next time the same dysrhythmia puts in an appearance, it won’t be transient enough. It will persist long enough, not revert to a life-sustaining rhythm quickly enough, that the patient might die.
Because of this one non-self-limiting, potentially fatal, cause of syncope is there lurking among all the other, more common causes, Senator Levin made the right call in insisting that Petraeus go seek medical attention, and not continue his testimony, fit as he might have felt at the moment. Sometimes all it takes is a good history to establish one of the benign causes as the overwhelmingly most likely cause, but it probably takes more time than Petraeus was out of the room to do just that good history, even assuming there was a physician waiting to take that history. And, frankly, I like to augment even my good histories, and I am the best of history-takers, with some heart monitoring, just in case my patient is a smart history-giver who might happen to know the “right” answers to give me to avoid a work up he might really need. Petraeus strikes me as just the type of patient I would be suspicious would be smart enough to know the right answers.
it looks like you might be a doctor?