Don't Tune In

General Petraeus is going to appear on Capitol Hill tomorrow to tell us that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has achieved some notable successes. Count on it. He could provide a bulleted Powerpoint and stay home. There will be no revelations, no true debate about what we are doing there, at what cost or for how long. There will be posturing and defense, posturing and defense. The MSM is billing this as a debate that will involve all three candidates for President and the key operatives in the war. What a joke.

Instead, it will be a kabuki dance between the already established positions of the two parties. We know the Administration line: Regardless of the facts on the ground, whether we are winning (and need to stay and shore up our victories,) or losing (and need to stay to forestall our defeat,) we can’t leave. Period.

For their part, the Democratic candidates will engage in very tense questioning, (the only unknown being whether the exchange turns ugly and embarrassing) while never actually committing themselves to doing anything “precipitous”.

This is what will pass for “holding them accountable”. No need to keep yourselves tuned in.

I was appalled to hear the MSM line up against General Fallon when he resigned recently for being too honest in his assessment of the military situation of the United States. Let’s all decide, once again, to ignore the real advice of the military.

From Steve Coll at the New Yorker via TPM:

A war born in spin has now reached its Lewis Carroll period. (“Now here, you
see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”) Last
week, it proved necessary for the Bush Administration to claim that an obvious
failure—Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s ill-prepared raid on rival
Shiite gangs in Basra, which was aborted after mass desertions within Maliki’s
own ranks—was actually a success in disguise, because it demonstrated the Iraqi
government’s independence of mind.

But the money quote is:

The suppression of professional military dissent helped to create the disaster
in Iraq; now it is depriving American voters of an election-year debate about
the defense issues that matter most.

God help us all.