Petraeus/Iraq roundup.

"Give it some more time."

How shocking. Color me totally unsurprised.

Go ahead and trust BushCo, since they've been right about, oh, say, absolutely nothing.

Duplicitous political wankery.

Balloon Juice:

"When I hear things like “ethno-sectarian deaths,” my bullshit detectors go off."

Bullshit. But SECRET bullshit. Talking Points Memo | It's Classified?:

"...as near as we can tell, a lot of the numbers, the key metrics about what's actually happening on the ground remain classified.

And not just the numbers themselves.

...The best we can tell the methodology Petraeus's staff is using to tabulate the numbers also remains classified.

In other words, it's not just a matter of getting the numbers from Petraeus and his staff and deciding whether you believe them or not. They won't even tell us what the numbers are -- let alone how they came up with them. All they'll say is that they're very good. Or in some cases that there's X percentage drop over the course of the surge. Or an isolated number here or there.

But actual hard numbers? Going back over the last couple years? For some reason we're not allowed to see those."

Stupidly, douchebag lefties now throwing around the words traitor [Betray Us? Petraeus? Seriously?] just like the douchebag right wing pundits who brand anyone who disagrees with them as "against America." Balloon Juice:

"While Petraeus and the military have certainly opened themselves up to scrutiny by handing out exclusives to folks like Fox news, and having PR shops set up to “sell the surge,” or telling us he “can accept” purely political troop withdrawals (something he should not be doing- his job is to state whether we need the damned troops there or not), calling Petraeus a traitor or using rhetoric that implies treason is outrageous. I don’t think he is lying, I don’t think he will lie to the committee- I think that he is trying to win, and is more likely to focus on the positive aspects of the surge than the negative. That may bring his judgement into question in my book, but it does not make him a traitor."

Now with added weak-willed political impotence! Balloon Juice:

"You know, the Constitution lets Congress call any military commander to testify at any time. Apparently a non-trivial number of them think that Petraeus is full of shit and have the data to back it up. Yet, somehow, the only significant voices on Capitol Hill this week are the two guys with the longest history of substance-free cheerleading. Way to go Dems."

Crooks and Liars » White House rewards FOX Propaganda exclusive interview with Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker:

"If there was any doubt to the US public that Gen. Petraeus was being used a puppet for Bush’s war—it should be gone now. Brit Hume of FOX Propaganda was granted an exclusive interview with the general, who is supposed to be giving an honest assessment of the “surge” and the state of affairs in Iraq. Bush might have well as given Rush Limbaugh the honors."

Glenn Greenwald - Political Blogs and Opinions - Salon:

"The whole production was such transparent propaganda that one doubts that Pravda would have been shameless enough to present it. Even the title of the program was creepy. Fox did not even bother to call it an 'interview,' but rather hailed it as a 'Briefing for America.'"

Damn, It’s Nam – Again! by Eric Margolis:

"Today’s much ballyhooed testimony to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq, will report the "progress" his troops are making in Iraq as part of the so-called "Surge" strategy. This lame idea, worthy of World War I thinking, was developed by one of America’s dimmer military minds, retired general Jack Keene, and sold to President George Bush.

...Gen. Petraeus is a very smart, well-respected commander, but one suspects his report will unfortunately be the latest example of "jamais vu" syndrome. And one heartily wishes that the general had the courage to stand up and tell Congress that his men were being killed and wounded in a war that has already been lost. That won’t happen because US officers are taught to be relentlessly optimistic and toe the political party line.

...Institutional memory rarely exceeds ten years. Most of Vietnam’s bitter lessons have been totally forgotten. Guerilla wars are fought not for territory but for control of civilian populations. Recent polls show that 80% of Iraqis want US forces out.

Once again, US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been sent into no-win wars by their poorly informed, badly advised civilian masters, and ordered to keep coming up with rosy progress reports, then blamed when these pointless wars are lost.

...But Bush appears determined to keep the war going until his term expires so as to avoid blame for defeat in Iraq. Congress is trying to lay all the blame for the war on Bush, get him to admit defeat, and evade its own shameful role in authorizing the trumped-up Iraq War."

The Heart of the Matter: Bottoms Up:

"I've seen nothing since to persuade me that Iraq is heading anywhere other than into three separate states. The only thing that's changed is that the Bush administration now seems to have accepted the inevitable three-state outcome. Rather than calling it a "soft partition," though, as Democrat Joe Biden prefers, the favored Republican moniker is "bottom-up approach." Google the phrase and you'll see: BUA is the new Surge.

BUA refers to the strategy of bypassing Baghdad and cutting deals with warlords -- sorry, make that "tribal leaders." Today, the Bush administration describes BUA as a way to put Iraq back together, but the rhetoric is as much a figleaf as the BUA moniker itself. Logically, arming, supplying, and otherwise cementing the power and patronage of warlords will calcify Iraq's de facto division, not reverse it.

Which is a good thing, by the way. As I've argued before, Iraq is breaking up anyway. It's hard to see how fighting the inevitable will lessen the pain.

A few predictions: As ethnic cleansing continues in Baghdad's mixed neighborhoods, we'll see a lower incidence of sectarian killings. The Bush administration will credit the Surge and the BUA with the ease in sectarian violence, rather than acknowledging that the ease is largely the result of a successful campaign of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, General Patraeus and Ambassador Crocker's testimony to Congress this week is part of a campaign intended to conflate correlation (by certain measures, sectarian violence is down; there's also a Surge and a BUA) with causality (violence is down *because* of the Surge and the BUA).

...Did anyone expect Patraeus and Crocker to say anything else?

Of course not. But remember, beyond obfuscation, the purpose of this report wasn't substantive; it was to create another milestone to eat up time. How many times in the last six months did President Bush avoid a question about Iraq by responding, "Let's just see what General Patraeus has to say in September..."

Well, now we know (as though we didn't know then). General Patraeus would like to get back to us in... six months. Any guesses about what his report will consist of then?

(It all reminds me of that child's prank, the sheet of paper that says on the front, "How do you keep an idiot occupied? Turn over." With an identical message on the back.)"