FIASCO

I’ve talked very little about the Petraeus hearings because I assumed they would be an uneventful series of mostly unchallenged lies. I was quite wrong. Under withering questioning today, especially by John Warner and Chuck Hagel, both Republicans, Petraeus and Crocker virtually broke down today and admitted the war was a failure. This is not an exaggeration. Petraeus actually answered “I don’t know” when asked whether the war in Iraq was making Americans safer. I believe it was an honest answer. The situation was so dire that late today the White House late today announced that Bush will make a prime-time address to the nation on Thursday night, to announce the “withdrawal” of 30,000 escalation troops, actually forced by lack of replacements, and try to spin it as a winding down of the war.

The U.S. military is broken. There are no more replacement troops available to keep the “surge” going past April of 2008, so Bush is desperately trying to return to the previous status quo of 130,000 troops and keep it that way until his term is up. This is a disgrace. He is now truly on the run and must be forced to begin withdrawing the troops earlier, and much more rapidly.