Iraq, Iraq, Iraq

Exit polls tomorrow night will undoubtedly show voters went into the booths worried about health care, home foreclosures, job security and other fallout from an impending recession.

Their concerns are understandable, but they may want to recall that a little over a year ago, in November 2006, their ballots gave control of Congress to Democrats with a mandate to stop the war in Iraq.

That did not happen and since then voters have been lulled by an Imperial President, using Gen. Petraeus as a human shield, into forgetting that American deaths there now total 3,945 at a cost to taxpayers exceeding $10 billion a month.

All the Republican candidates, except Ron Paul, are in favor of continuing to do that.

As for the Democrats, in 2002, I wrote to Sen. Hillary Clinton pleading with her not to give George W. the power to invade Iraq and warning that, if she did, I would never vote for her for any office. Tomorrow I will keep that promise.

McCain's Hundred Year War

He is not talking about Iraq on the campaign trail, but John McCain has a good deal to say in today's Wall Street Journal on the first anniversary of the Surge.

So much, in fact, that he needs his Senate colleague, Joe Lieberman, to help him do the heavy lifting in proclaiming, "The Surge Worked," that "conditions in that country have been utterly transformed...al Qaeda has been beaten back, violence across the country has dropped dramatically. The number of car bombings, sectarian murders and suicide attacks has been slashed."

Yesterday, the US military announced, six American soldiers were killed when a house rigged with explosives blew up north of Baghdad during a new offensive targeting al Qaeda guerrillas, adding to the more than 835 who have died since last February.

The gains in Iraq, McCain tells us, "are thrilling but not yet permanent. Political progress has been slow. And although al Qaeda and the other extremists in Iraq have been dealt a critical blow, they will strike back at the Iraqi people and us if we give them the chance, as our generals on the ground continue to warn us."

If we wait until President McCain takes office next January, perhaps he will tell us then how many troops we will have to keep there for how long (perhaps less than the 100 years he recently mentioned). Maybe he will reveal his plans to speed up the "slow" political progress in a small country that keeps draining the lives of our most patriotic young people and billions of dollars that could be saving and improving lives back here.

In his Wall Street Journal victory lap, McCain concedes that "mismanagement of the Iraq war from 2003 to 2006 exposed our government's capacity for incompetence." Voters are going to want to know how, sharing Bush's blindness about our interests in the Middle East, McCain is going to do better.

Certainly not by making Joe Lieberman his Secretary of State.

Petraeus: "Can't Kill Our Way Out"

In a place some Americans may have heard about long, long ago, our man in charge is still trying to figure out how to pacify a country where enemies and allies keep changing all the time and hand their political hot potato back to them.

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Gen. David Petraeus says "the Iraqis have formed 160,000 police, soldiers, border police, and other security force elements during the past year. To be sure, there’s an uneven nature to their quality, to their capability, and to their level of training and equipping, but they’re significant in quantity.

"And quantity does mean quality in counterinsurgency operations, because you’ve got to secure so many infrastructures against the terrorist and insurgent and militia elements...(O)nly when they can handle it we will have this transfer."

Asked about working with former enemies, Petraeus makes a distinction: "Some were what we call fence-sitters; some were oppressed and some probably were shooting at us, but you don’t kill your way out of this kind of thing. You can’t kill or capture everybody in an insurgency. What you have to figure out are the irreconcilables, and ideally you want these numbers as small as possible because they have to be killed, captured, or run off."

When will that be? The General can't say. Meanwhile, the number of confirmed US deaths has passed the 3900 mark. Killing our way out is not a one-way street.

When the Presidential candidates start debating "victory" in Iraq, maybe Petraeus can tell them--and us--exactly what we have won.

Bush's Blood-Soaked Shell Game

After six months of hiding behind Petraeus, the Decider will emerge tomorrow to tell a grateful nation that he accepts the General’s plan to start drawing down troops from Iraq.

Americans who haven’t been following the shell game closely may believe the President is finally responding to their desire to start getting out. But of course he will only be v-e-r-y slowly removing the 30,000 troops he added this year and ensuring that the war will go on until he leaves office in January 2009.

If Congress fails to act, another 1500 young people will die, ten times that many may be maimed and another $100 billion that might have been spent on education, housing, health care and infrastructure will be shipped to Baghdad to keep a collapsing country together until a new President inherits the wreckage. Bush’s Pottery Barn rule is you break it, you sweep the pieces under the rug.

Congressional Democrats will huff and puff but, more likely than not, endangered Republican “centrists” will decide they have enough political cover to survive next November and do nothing to end the war but cluck sympathetically for the voters.

Compared to this bunch, the old carnival sharpies gave the rubes more of an even break.