Petraeus and Iraq
Well at long last we’ve had the Petraeus report that Bush has been telling us all along will determine his policy for the next year. My conclusion? It was a total waste of time. Newsweek has a good angle on it here: Hirsh: Rating Petraeus’s Report to the Hill
The real problem is that the general and Bush both want the same thing: delay. The general’s reputation is on the line and apparently he doesn’t mind playing politics to keep his head. I am sure he remembers what happened to all the other generals who stood up to Bush: they’re all fired. No one wants to tell the truth. They cook up numbers to try to make things look better when we can all see quite plainly that things are nowhere near settled.
The whole [point of the “surge” was not to produce good looking numbers of deaths [although that surely would be nice] because death counts are more a result of local tactical conditions rather than overall strategic conditions. The point was to stabilize the place so a government could take root. It hasn’t. So the surge failed.
The notion that there will be some troop reductions next year because of the surge’s “success” is also nonsense. The reductions are coming anyway: the army simply has run out of gas and needs to rotate troops home, whether we’re winning or not. No amount of spin alters that fact.
This whole war was an abomination: it was an evil and unnecessary enterprise foisted on an gullible public by a warmongering cabal of neo-conservative ideologues, none of whom have ever served in the military [don’t forget that Bush ducked national service]. It has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands; it has cost a fortune; it has produced a fertile base for terrorists; and has enhanced to power of Iran. On any strategic assessment it is an unmitigated failure.
Moreover the American public has been totally separated from the pain of war: there has been no tax to finance it; no emergency draft to stock the army with manpower; no cutbacks at home to provide materiel for war; no factories diverted to wartime production; no sacrifice at all. The whole thing has been a national disgrace.
And what did we get?
Nothing.
Except more terrorists; casualties [that Bush doesn’t even have the guts to acknowledge]; debt; lost reputation and world influence; and bitter division at home.
Bush likes to style himself a “wartime” president. What a joke. All he wants to do with this Petraeus report is to punt. His policies have all failed. And rather than stand up and say so, he ducks like the utter coward he has always been. Bush wants to shove this mess onto the next president. He’ll probably succeed.
What an incredible way to run a country. What a mess.
