Petraeus & Crocker: We Waited for This?

Even with my “Expectation Meter” set to zero, the opening statements from Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker at today’s House hearings left me wondering how two reports advertised as “balanced” could be so nakedly compromised? I listened — via NPR and the stammering Neal Conan — on the drive down from Duluth and was left pretty much mouth agape. There’s an acid test here for who among the Congressional questioners has the spine to say, “With all due respect General and Mr. Ambassador, this smells like the rankest of bullshit.”

Both men, Crocker, in particular, spun each and every aspect of the Iraq situation in positive terms, with repeated references to our fights against Al Qaeda, Iran and Iranian-supported Shiites and little or none to the wider ranger of violence within each sect and general criminality. Neither offered any reflection on how any of this was unleashed, and Crocker in particular, skipping past all that pesky business of the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, painted a picture of Iraq today so upbeat and brimming with democratic possibilities you’d have thought he was talking about some redevelopment project in suburban Indianapolis.

Whenever either ever so briefly tempered their giddiness and counseled patience on the part of the American public, neither quite had the guts to remind their audience — that’d be be us — that patience means continued death and maiming of American troops and a staggering level of expense projecting out into the foreseeable future.