Tell Us Something We Don't Know

There will be gavel-to-gavel coverage today on NPR of the testimony before Congress by General David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker on how things are going in Iraq. There will be breathless coverage tonight on the news programs, and Wolf Blitzer has promised to furrow his brow and work on that monotone of his to make it sound even more sonorous.

Let me spare you all the anticipation so you can feel comfortable doing something else today like, oh, say, giving your parakeet a karma transplant or catching up on your TiVo watching of back episodes of How I Met Your Mother. The general will say that it's too soon to make any decisions about what to do in Iraq; he needs more time for the "surge" to work, and that if we do anything that looks like we're planning to get out with any forseeable deadline, the terrorists will win. If you're not with us, you're against us. Yada yada.

The idea that Gen. Petraeus would say anything else is ridiculous. If he wasn't completely on board with the White House line about the war, he wouldn't be allowed to testify, and if he hadn't been in agreement with the president's foregone conclusion that the war must go on, he'd have been relieved of duty long ago so that he could spend more time with his family. This whole extravaganza isn't anything more than just a lot of show so that the White House and the neocons can say, "See, we told you we needed more time, and now here's the guys in charge over there saying the exact same thing." It's just a distraction -- "Oh, look at the kitty!" -- from what's really going on over in Iraq; the civil war rages on, more people are dying, and our soldiers are caught in the cross-fire. Of course, it's really hard to tell exactly whether or not things are improving or not; according to this piece in the Washington Post, the methodology of counting the violence is not only suspect, it's classified. So we really don't know if thing are getting better or worse, and the likelihood of getting anything that isn't sliced, diced, parsed, and tied up with a lot of caveats and asterisks and conditions is nil. Contrary thoughts will not be entertained.

If there was any doubt that this was all bullshit, the news that Gen. Petraeus will give his first post-game interview to Fox News should settle that question.