Black Box Report

Faced with a skeptical and increasingly harried congress, Gen. Petraeus knew that all stick and no carrot wasn't going to get him through his testimony. After all, this wasn't 2006, and Republicans weren't in charge of congress (if they were, there would have been no "new strategy", no surge, and certainly no need to report to congress on the status of progress in Iraq). So he put a carrot at the end of the stick and said while the surge needed more time, it was working just well enough that he was going to recommend that 30,000 troops the exact number of those sent in the surge to begin with - could be brought home next year.

The Some troops are coming home! Hooray!

Hey...waitaminnit...

Hitting pre-surge levels by mid-2008 isn't just a strategic goal. It's a practical necessity. Top military brass admitted more than a month ago that the surge cannot persist after April 2008 without extending tours to 18 months or instituting a draft. Simply put, we're out of troops.

Well, of course we are. Did anyone think we could continue the stop-loss extended tours indefinitely? This has been on the horizon for some time now, but Bush and Petraeus are trying to make lemonade out of those lemons, and in classic huckster fashion, they're trying to buy the publlic's goodwill by giving them a $100 bill - that they just picked out of our own pockets.

So we'll get back 30,000 of our men and women. 30,000 that many didn't want to send in the first place. 30,000 that were never going to be able to do what their commander in chief asked of them - provide "breathing space" for Iraqi political progress that was never going to happen. 30,000 from the 160,000 currently there, leaving 130,000...The same number we had there a year ago. Because things were going so well back then:

Shorter David Petraeus: Things are so godawful in Iraq it's going to take at least a year of increased troop presence to have even a glimmer of a hope of making things as godawful as they were in 2006. Oh, and by the way, people? I can't guarantee they won't get much worse.

An alternate theory is that the surge is working perfectly, it's just our definitions of the terminology that are wrong:

But surges take time, Petraeus pointed out. Did anyone really expect that the surge would bring a rapid improvement or a sudden onrush of success? Did anyone say that the surge would be quick, moving like advancing waves or an unexpected increase in electric current? Surges, of course, don't work that way, as every Democrat should know. Surges need to be given time to grow before we know if they are effective. It might be five to ten years before the surge has run its course and we know if it has ultimately achieved its goals. The alternative, as Petraeus warned, is to be "rushing to failure" in Iraq.

I'm willing to concede Mr. Swift has a point.

And along those lines, who would like to bet that, come mid-July 2008, things won't be going quite as good as Gen. Westmoreland Petraeus is anticipating? If the situation in Iraq "suddenly" got worse - to everyone's surprise - then we couldn't bring the troops home just yet. And we'll have to surge a little more:

The whole point of this exercise is to ensure that Bush's war continues until it's time for him to cut brush permanently. The surge can't have worked because then it could start ending, and the surge can't be not working because then it would a tragic waste of lives and money, so the surge is working just a little bit.. but might work a little bit more soon!

And so once again the Lucy van Pelt administration has planted the football and, once again, a nation of Charlie Browns is invited to kick it.