Friday June 1 General Petraeus Redux

In October, A Shattered Peace: Versailles, 1919 and the Price We Pay Today will hit bookstores across the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

That’s about the time that General Peter Petraeus, in charge of the Surge in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker will be heading back to the United States to report Congress and the President on the results of the Surge. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a press conference on June 1 in Hawaii, “there'll be a lot of people looking at the situation, a lot of people looking at General Petraeus' and Ryan Crocker's report, and all of that integrated together to present the president with a picture of where we are.”

Perhaps more troubling, however, was a throwaway line that Secretary Gates added in response to a question from NPR’s George Raz:

“Clearly, the Petraeus-Crocker report will be central, but what I tried to convey at the press meeting last week was that there will be other sets of eyes looking at that. That report isn't just going to shoot straight to the president without any additional evaluation by other people who've been following this for a long time.”

The question, of course, is what the evaluation from these other sets of eyes might add to or even dramatically alter in terms of the report’s conclusions. In the coming months, this blog will monitor the events on the ground in Iraq, or as A Shattered Peace calls it, Mesopotamia, as well as the events in each of the other regions whose futures were so dramatically, often perniciously, altered by the peacemakers in Paris in1919.

At the same time, the author of this blog, and the book to which it is so intimately linked, welcomes the comments of readers on all sides of the political divide. Our hope is to provide a degree of journalistic and historical balance that is so often lacking in these times of deep division within the United States and much of the world where this blog and this book will be read.

Had Harold Nicolson and a host of others had their way 88 years ago, there would likely have been no need for a Surge or indeed for any other American military activity in Iraq, or Mesopotamia. This blog as well as the book, A Shattered Peace, is attempting to extend the historical perspective into the present and on into the future – chronicling the price we are paying today for those transformations of people, history and boundaries taken at this key historical turning point.