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Peter D. Feaver accuses Moveon.org of a "McCarthy-Army-Welch moment" for accusing General David Petraeus of being politically motivated:

The advertisement alleges, without evidence, that Petraeus is not going to give his honest, professional assessment of the situation in Iraq but instead will be "cooking the books" to curry favor with the Bush White House.

Right. No evidence whatsoever.

Just because the general has a history of making specious positive assessments of Iraq, as recalled by Paul Krugman:

...Gen. Petraeus has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters.

I've written before about the op-ed article Gen. Petraeus published six weeks before the 2004 election, claiming "tangible progress" in Iraq. Specifically, he declared that "Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt," that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward" and that "there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security." A year later, he declared that "there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi security forces."

And just because not one independent assessment - not one - has found progress in Iraq, either politically or in terms of stopping the violence (apart from the depressing abatement of violence in areas that have been ethnically "cleansed" to the point that there's no one left for the killers to kill) doesn't, in Feaver's view, constitute evidence of Petraeus's being politically motivated.

Nor does the fact that he gave his report to Congress on September 10th.

It's all just a coincidence. The guy making the progress report for a White House that has spent six years linking the war in Iraq to 9/11, just happens to give his report on that war to Congress on 9/10.

And we have a bridge for sale over the Charles River.

Hilariously, though, Feaver goes out of his way to condemn the MoveOn piece as:

...so vicious, so public, and so deliberate, the attack on Petraeus cannot be ignored by either side in the Iraq debate. Supporters of the war are duty-bound, like Joseph Welch, to rise and ask of war opponents, "Have you left no sense of decency?"

Feaver actually uses the word "vicious" twice in the piece, in case you didn't get the talking point: it was a "vicious" attack.

We'll await his insistence that supporters of GOP candidates and the war are duty-bound to rise and ask war supporters, members of the Bush Administration, and all their lackeys in the press, "Have you no sense of decency" for the unprecedented onslaught of vicious personal attacks and accusations of lack of patriotism or even treason made against anyone who opposed the war in Iraq -- even though most of the facts cited by war opponents turned out to be true while those cited by supporters turned out to be false.

As recently as last week, President Bush accused anyone in favor of withdrawing from Iraq -- and that would be 62% of Americans -- as "being seduced by the allure of defeat."

Excuse us? Who is he saying is "seduced by the allure of defeat"? 62% of Americans?

What f***ing allure does defeat have for anyone, let alone 62% of the people he's supposed to be working for?

We're waiting for the first war supporter to rise up and condemn that vicious and divisive rhetoric.

Maybe Peter D. Feaver will be the first?