But in partisan Washington, the enemy of one's enemy can quickly become a friend, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the new marriage of convenience between Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.
On Saturday, Sanchez delivered the Democrats' weekly radio address. He excoriated what he called the Bush administration's "failure to devise a strategy for victory in Iraq," then embraced Democratic legislation linking continued war funding with a timeline aimed at ending U.S. combat operations by December 2008.
Other senior military figures have turned on the White House, but none as senior as Sanchez, whose command of coalition forces in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 coincided with an explosion of violence, the emergence of a brutal insurgency and a prison-abuse scandal that still haunts the war effort.
For Democratic leaders, Sanchez's address has been a triumph, covered by the media nationwide. It interrupted a stream of stories about declining violence, which had stalled efforts to force a shift of war policy.
But for critics of the war and of Sanchez's command, the radio address was curious. Andrew Bacevich, who was an Army officer in the Vietnam War and now teaches at Boston University, said Sanchez fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the conflict he faced. Sanchez's troops employed "kick-down-the-door" tactics that hardened resistance to the U.S. occupation, and helped turn an insurgency in its infancy into a guerrilla war spinning out of control, he said.
"Why he has chosen all of a sudden to attempt to return to public attention, and why he would do it in an overtly partisan way, frankly baffles me," said Bacevich, whose son was killed in Iraq. "And why the Democratic leadership would say, 'Yes, this is the guy who is going to deliver our message' is just baffling. He is a largely discredited figure." In August 2004, when an independent panel faulted the Pentagon's top civilian and military leaders for detainee abuse in Iraq, Pelosi was one of the first to accuse the administration of a whitewash, calling for an independent commission to investigate further. The Army inspector general cleared Sanchez in 2005 of any culpability for Abu Ghraib abuse, but the issue still hangs over his head.
In April, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an active-duty Iraq veteran, published an article in the Armed Forces Journal that accused top U.S. generals in Iraq -- without naming Sanchez directly -- of "intellectual and moral failures" that botched the war effort and misled Congress. Nine former detainees at U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed lawsuits against Sanchez and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In an interview with the Monitor in McAllen, Tex., last year, Sanchez called the prison-abuse scandal "the sole reason I was forced to retire." He has said since retiring in late 2006 that he long believed that the war was severely under-resourced and strategically flawed, but that he should not speak out while wearing the uniform. He did not return e-mails yesterday requesting comment.
The sequence of events that led to Sanchez's pick began on Nov. 17, when Pelosi and Sanchez appeared at a fundraiser in San Antonio for endangered Rep. Ciro D. Rodriguez (D-Tex.) at the home of lawyer Frank Herrera.
Herrera, who has contributed more than $100,000 to Democrats since the early 1990s, said Sanchez was a surprise guest of another invitee. Sanchez knew Rodriguez casually, but the general had become close friends with House intelligence committee Chairman Sylvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), said Peter Brock, a Reyes spokesman. The Reyes connection had put Sanchez into the orbit of Texas's Latino Democratic power players.
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