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There are two parts to the Petraeus-is-trustworthy spin: that he's competent and knows what he's doing, and that he's not political and not partisan. But when you examine the evidence, this fantasy falls apart.
But just because we've alienated both the Sunnis and the Shi'ites in Iraq, that doesn't mean we can't also upset the apple cart of our only success story in the country to date: the Kurds in the north of the country.
We have long succored the Kurds. The Kurdish region in Iraq is about the only place American soldiers can walk around without fear of imminent attack from the native populace. We have cultivated this relationship for a long time, and it is paying off dividends in many ways.
As I write this, the United States Senate is many hours into a remarkable all-night session debating how to end the Iraq war. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called this marathon session to highlight the Republicans' obstructionism on putting together a reasonable plan to end the slaughter of U.S. troops in Iraq. Republicans, of course, decried the all-nighter as merely a political stunt.
They're right. It is just a political stunt. But it's a doozy!
. . . The mainstream media had lots of fun with the Pentagon funding a "gay bomb" and other fantastical projects last week (and the late night talk show hosts had even more fun with it). The fact that the Pentagon funds some wacky projects shouldn't actually come as news to anyone familiar with the story of the "hafnium bomb" -- an idea for a grenade-sized nuke that has about as much evidence of ever becoming reality as cold fusion.
I guess I really shouldn't mock the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), too much, since they're also the folks who brought us the very internet you are reading this on. See? Some of their stuff turns out OK.
General Petraeus, the officer in charge of our military presence in Iraq, is scheduled to report to Congress in mid-September on how the surge is doing. After he does so, Democrats are going to find themselves holding a winning hand for ending the war in Iraq -- as more and more Republicans start voting with them. But how they play their cards is going to be important in determining exactly how the war should be ended, how fast it will happen, and how many troops will be left in Iraq.
Now, there are many ideas on how to end the war from the Democratic side, and in September the party is going to have to hammer out a strategy for how to proceed -- and they'll need both a detailed strategy for the military withdrawal, and also a legislative strategy for how exactly to go about enacting the end of the war.
Congressional vagaries and loopholes mean there are countless ways the Democrats could manage to end the war in September. There is simply no way to cover every contingency here, or even predict exactly which path such legislation could take. Having said that, there are several tactics which are currently being discussed among Democratic leaders. Here are the major options as I see them now:
The magic numbers of Republicans jumping ship to watch for: 60 to 70 in the House -- 17 or 18 in the Senate. When Democrats hit both those numbers, the end of the war in Iraq will have truly begun.
John Boehner can call it: "dramatic erosion of support in the GOP," if he likes. I personally prefer the term: "rats leaving the sinking ship of Bush's Iraq fiasco."
While the article does not conclusively prove that the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Veterans Administration (VA) are intentionally doing so in order to save money, it does raise many disturbing questions. Questions that should be addressed by congressional committees, and by the new blue-ribbon commission (headed by Bob Dole and Donna Shalala) charged with investigating the state of veterans' health care.