Informed Speculation

The big day is tomorrow, as General Petraeus begins his testimony:

The top American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, has recommended that decisions on the contentious issue of reducing the main body of the American troops in Iraq be put off for six months, American officials said Sunday.

General Petraeus, whose long-awaited testimony before Congress will begin Monday, has informed President Bush that troop cuts may begin in mid-December, with the withdrawal of an American combat brigade, about 4,000 troops. By mid-July, the American force in Iraq might be down to 15 combat brigades, the force level in Iraq before Mr. Bush’s troop reinforcement plan.

The precise timing of such reductions, which would leave about 130,000 troops in Iraq, would depend on conditions in the country. But the general has also said that it is too soon to present recommendations on reducing American forces below that level and has suggested that he wait until March to outline proposals on this question.

In typical fashion, the NY Times editorial page takes on Bush for politicizing the report by…politicizing the report:

The military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is to deliver a report to Congress on Monday that could be the most consequential testimony by a wartime commander in more than a generation. What the country desperately needs is an honest assessment of the war and a clear strategy for extricating American forces from the hopeless spiral of violence in Iraq.

President Bush, however, seems to be aiming for maximum political advantage — not maximum clarity on Iraq’s military and political crises, which cannot be separated from each other. Mr. Bush, we fear, isn’t looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public, scare Democrats into dropping their demands for a sound exit strategy, and prolong the war until he leaves office. At times, General Petraeus gives the disturbing impression that he, too, is more focused on the political game in Washington than the unfolding disaster in Iraq. That serves neither American nor Iraqi interests.

Umm-hmmm…so Bush is blind to the truth because he is listening to the field commander?  And the Times is bravely defending the truth by prejudging the situation from their perch in Manhattan?

It gets worse:

We hope that General Petraeus can resist the political pressure and provide an unvarnished assessment of the military situation in Iraq. He is an important source of information, of course, but he is only one source — and he is not the man who sets American policy. If Mr. Bush insists on listening only to those who agree with him, Congress and the public must weigh General Petraeus’s report against all data, including two new independent evaluations sharply at odds with the Pentagon’s claim that things in Iraq are substantially better.

So, if Petraeus agrees with the Times, he’s resisting political pressure to ‘speak truth to power’, but if he says we need more time, as he has signaled he will,  he’s a patsy. This is called ‘defining the issue in a manner in which you can’t lose’, aka ‘spin’.  I would say it is shameful, but it’s really only par for the course for the Times these days.

So, am I just a blind partisan myself? Not at all: I can respect opposition, if it’s reasonable.  Jonathan Rauch is a case in point:

For what an amateur’s view is worth, I tend to believe, with Obama, that the war has devolved into de facto peacekeeping. I see little evidence that Sunnis would accept any political offer that the Shiite majority would abide by, and vice versa. My reading of the evidence is that Iraqi fundamentals are more conducive to war than peace, and that there is not much the United States can do to change that.

Even so, what’s the Democrats’ hurry to end the surge? U.S. combat fatalities are tragic, but withdrawing in the midst of an escalating war could bring even more of them. Nor is it anything like obvious that, as Obama told AP, America’s presence is making Iraq more dangerous for Iraqis by attracting terrorists and encouraging irresponsible politics. As Bush told the VFW, those who said that the people of Vietnam and (especially) Cambodia would be better off under Communism were wrong.

Here is something that Democrats might want to think about before rushing to shut down the surge: If they managed to ram through a withdrawal or timetable on party lines this fall, when most Republicans think the surge is working, they would be flayed for a generation as the party that seized certain defeat from the jaws of possible victory. For years to come, Republicans would insist that Democratic pusillanimity emboldened jihadism, an ugly narrative that some are already rehearsing. (Last month Peter Wehner, who recently left the White House for a post at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, sent out an e-mail pointing to jihadists’ claim that America is a “weak horse” that runs when bloodied. He continued, “If the critics have their way and deny Gen. Petraeus the time he needs to help bring about a decent outcome in Iraq, the jihadists will be right.”)

Fortunately, without Republican support, Democrats can’t pull the plug or impose a strict timetable this fall.

And they don’t need to. The war is on a timetable already, one dictated by military constraints and political reality. “I think everyone understands that, by a year from now, we’ve got to be a good deal smaller than we are right now,” Petraeus said last month. By this time next year, Bush’s reluctance to scale up the Army to match his rhetoric will have caught up with him.

The military schedule synchronizes with the political one. By this time next year, if Iraq has not turned the corner, a good guess is that the Republican presidential nominee will be facing a choice: Promise to wind down the war, or lose the election. Whichever choice the nominee makes, the die will be cast.

Democrats have every reason to be angry at Bush’s evasion of political accountability for the mess he has made in Iraq. Democrats, Republicans, and all other Americans have every reason to be angry at Bush for making the mess to begin with. They have every reason to feel about him the way the wildlife of Prince William Sound felt about Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

But anger does not justify impatience. If Petraeus says he needs more time, he should get it. If he fails, a course correction won’t be long in coming. The 22nd Amendment has seen to that.

That’s exactly right: the President is the Commander-In-Chief, and he’s listening to his General.  His term is limited, and change will be coming soon, regardless.  Let’s hear Petraeus out, and try to ignore politics, impossible though that will seem in the week to come…