With all due respect to Gen. David Petraeus, who I believe is making a good-faith effort to evaluate Iraq from a military perspective wherein "stalemate" does not necessarily compute, the war is no longer a military problem. It is a political problem with profound long term strategic implications for the United States, which is why it should be no surprise that President Bush, once perfectly willing to overrule his commanders in order to get us into this war on his terms, now insists on deferring to them slavishly. Petraeus's pronouncements before Congress Tuesday, rooted in the paradoxically obvious notion that we have made enough progress to justify our continuing presence in Iraq, but not enough to leave, confer legitimacy upon the Bush administration's non-strategy of buying enough time for the President to duck out the back door and leave his successor holding the bag. Thus does Petraeus come of as a bit of shill, regardless of his own intentions, because in a way, he is: the President and his coterie are taking advantage of the General's stature because they know that the American public is by-and-large too trusting or too stupid to scrutinize the statements of a man whose very uniform connotes honor and integrity. He needn't even be a party to this scam; after all, the beauty of a president deferring to his military commanders is that, ultimately, he's the one giving the orders.
