McChrystal Relieved of Command

President Obama to call upon General David Petraeus to replace him.

UPDATE: Video.

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Petraeus Faints at McCain's Stupidity

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General David Petraeus apparently passed out after answering questions asked by Senator John "Loser 2008" McCain. According to witnesses, it wasn't so much the line of questioning about the war in Afghanistan that caused the commander of the U.S. Central Command to faint, but rather the stupidity of McCain's hackneyed "path to success/arbitrary deadline" talking points that he's been regurgitating since his failed presidential campaign over 18 months ago.

Watch:


Several witnesses close to Petraeus heard him mumble of McCain's statements, "Oh, not this bullshit again" just before passing out. A source close to Petraeus noted that the General would do anything in order to get McCain to "shut the fuck up." "He's seen some pretty fucked up shit in his years of war, but anything McCain says is just too much to bear" said the source.

When McCain stopped his diatribe in mid-sentence, ranking Chairman Senator Carl Levin assumed that McCain has shit his diaper again as he had in so many other prior occasions and called for the Capitol Cleaning Crew. An amendment to replace McCain's chair on the bench with a toilet has been stalled due to the latest Republican filibuster on financial reform.

Quote of the Day

"I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we've perhaps taken expedient measures, they've turned around and bitten us in the backside. We decided early on, in the 101st airborne division, we just said, we decided to obey the Geneva Conventions...

...we have found that the use of interrogation methods in the army field manual that was given the force of law by Congress, that that works."

~ General David Petraeus explaining his disagreement with the Dick Cheney doctrine of enhanced interrogation, AKA torture.

So Much For The Commanders On The Ground

THINK PROGRESS: Newsweek reported that while Petraeus recognized that al-Qaeda in Iraq has been significantly diminished, he refused to say the terror group had been “defeated.” Moreover, Petraeus acknowledged that the recent successes in Iraq may have been possible without the surge:

Petraeus is careful not to credit all the progress to the surge of U.S. troops in 2007. The sea change came last year from a series of movements now known as the Awakening. […] So would the Sunni Awakening have succeeded without the surge? Possibly, he concedes.

As we all know, McCain insists that the Anbar Awakening was part of the surge (even though it took place months before the surge was even announced) and now we see he disagrees with one of the people he said he would rely heavily on if elected President during the Saddleback forum. Hmmm...

I'll expect the McCain campaign to berate Petraeus for daring to disagree with a former P.O.W. - maybe they'll send Cindy McCain to Iraq to straighten him out.

Progress In Iraq

General David Petraeus:

"I've repeatedly noted that we haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible."

Please tell me again how the surge has worked and how everything is going well in Iraq. Wait, I'll let "Johm" McCain tell me:

"...while the job of bringing security to Iraq is not finished, as the recent fighting in Basra and elsewhere vividly demonstrated, we're no longer staring into the abyss of defeat and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success. Success, the establishment of a peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state that poses no threats to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists, this success is within reach."

So according to Petraeus we "haven't turned any corners" and "haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel" and the progress is "fragile and reversible," while Mr. Straight Talk thinks "success is within reach." This man is definitely going off the deep end, while conflating Al-Qaeda in Iraq with Iran and Shiites again!

Altogether now: Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a small obscure extremist SUNNI sect, right Johm?

MCCAIN: There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view Al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?

PETRAEUS: It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was, say, 15 months ago.

MCCAIN: Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shiites overall…

PETRAEUS: No.

MCCAIN: … or Sunnis or anybody else.

...Sigh...

Petraeus Speaking Now on Iraq Status

Gen. Petraeus is currently giving his update on security in Iraq. I have a feeling he'll say either one of two things:

A - The surge worked and security is going well, therefore me must stay in Iraq to continue giving them a chance at political reconciliation, or

B - Violence, although down initially has now escalated exponentially in recent weeks, therefore me must stay in Iraq to continue giving them a chance at political reconciliation.

UPDATE: Here's an AP article... I wasn't far off.

"Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended"

Those words were spoken by our intrepid leader on May 1, 2003, and we all know how it's turned out so far. Five years later, 3,862 more US troops have been killed (that's 97% of the casualties) and tens of thousands wounded since that claim, along with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

That comment along with "the surge is working" always makes my blood boil. After 15 months of the escalation of troops called the "surge," all you have to do is look at some headlines from yesterday and today to see how well it has worked.

U.S. Planes Attack Militia Strongholds in Basra Fighting

One killed, 14 wounded in Baghdad Green Zone attack

Stay Low, U.S. Warns Those in Green Zone

Thursday: 225 Iraqis, 1 US Soldier, 3 US Contractors Killed; 538 Iraqis Wounded

Of course, when the shit hits the fan, you better find a reason for the rapid destabilization over these past few weeks. We wouldn't be silly enough to realize that Muqtada al-Sadr's militia ending their cease fire is a likely cause for the sharp rise in violence when the Bush boys have the chance to fan the flames of war against Iran.

The most senior US general in Iraq has said he has evidence that Iran was behind Sunday's bombardment of Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

Gen David Petraeus told the BBC he thought Tehran had trained, equipped and funded insurgents who fired the barrage of mortars and rockets.

He said Iran was adding what he described as "lethal accelerants" to a very combustible mix.

Lethal accelerants. Combustible mix. Scary words. That's easy enough to state now that CENTCOM Commander Admiral William Fallon, the only vocal opponent of a possible attack on Iran, is now out of the way - forced into retirement by Bush and his band of war mongers.

But sure, let's keep our collective heads in the sand and say that the surge is working, we're winning the war (which has "largely ended") and tune in to Dancing With The Stars to see the latest has-been who got booted.

Listen to Commanders... Unless They Disagree

The Pentagon on Friday ruled out including Adm. William Fallon as a witness before Congress when the top U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Baghdad testify next month on the way ahead in Iraq.

Adm. Fallon was in vocal opposition regarding any military action in the current run up to attacking Iran. Is it any surprise that a dissenting voice of high ranking stature in the military is being silenced?

In declaring that Fallon would not join Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker as witnesses before Congress next month, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said the decision had nothing to do with Fallon’s views on Iran or the reasons for his unexpected resignation and retirement.

Sure it doesn't.

“I know there have been requests, in fact, from members of Congress to have Adm. Fallon testify with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, and I can tell you that Admiral Fallon will not be testifying” with them, Morrell told a Pentagon press conference.

Surprise! Surprise!

Petraeus: Iraqis Not Making "Sufficient Progress"

Well slap my ass and call me Sally! More proof that the surge "worked."

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

The general's comments appeared to be his sternest to date on Iraqis' failure to achieve political reconciliation...

And before you go making up excuses about reduced violence, blah, blah, blah, let us not forget why we started the surge in the first place.

George W. Bush, January 10th, 2007:

I've made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people -- and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this. Here is what he told his people just last week: "The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation."

...A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.

Our purpose for the surge was to give the Iraqi government more time to get its shit together. That hasn't even begun to happen. In fact, while our troops were dying over the summer, the Iraqi Parliament took a vacation. A fucking vacation! The surge has not worked. No benchmarks met equals failure.

Fallon Calls Petraeus "Chickenshit"

Why Didn't Bush Defend Him?

With all the uproar regarding this past week the MoveOn.Org ad, where was Chimpy and the rest of his Republican thugs when CENTCOM Chief, Admiral William Fallon called General Petraeus an "ass-kissing little chickenshit"?

In January, President Bush replaced Abizaid and Casey, who were “surge” skeptics, with Adm. William Fallon and Gen. David Petraeus. This week, Petraeus — in the first public hearings since taking on his new role — delivered his Iraq assessment to great media fanfare. But where was his boss, Admiral Fallon? Inter-Press Service suggests animosity between the two might be one reason for Fallon’s absence:

Fallon told Petraeus [in March] that he considered him to be “an ass-kissing little chickenshit” and added, “I hate people like that”, the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

...Nice...

Hypocrite in Chief

As I sat mouth agape on my couch listening to Chimpy's latest press conference, a press gaggle riddled with so-called journalists who only agree with what the President has to say, my brain began to melt at the nonsense that was oozing out of his mouth.

Of course they saved the best question for last asking him his opinion of the MoveOn.Org "Petraeus/Betray Us" ad.

BUSH:

I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an attack not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. Military. And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad. And that leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like Move-On-Dot-Org — or more afraid of irritating them, than they are of irritating the United States military. That was a sorry deal.

And there he is once again, with the usual "if you're anti-war then you are against the troops" bullshit. Bush insists that the Democrat-IC Party is making this a political issue, when all the while he's the one who set up General Petraeus as his front man. He's the one who crossed the line with using a military man as the latest mouthpiece for this administration.

I suppose it was alright and not "disgusting" when the Bush campaign slung mud at John McCain and Max Cleland. And where was the outrage after John Kerry was swiftboated?

If General Petraeus has betrayed anyone, it's himself. He wrote the book on battling counterinsurgency in which he quotes one soldier is needed for every 40 on the ground. That would equal approximately 650,000 US troops, the same number Generals Shinsecki and Abizaid said would be needed for success in Iraq before they were fired or resigned rather than deal with the know-nothings of the Bush administration.

Keith Olbermann's special comment was on point when it came to Bush's remarks yesterday:

OLBERMANN:

...you were the one who inappropriately interjected General Petraeus into the political dialogue of this nation in the first place!
Deliberately, premeditatedly, and virtually without precedent, you shanghaied a military man as your personal spokesman — and now you’re complaining about the outcome, and then running away from the microphone?

... The Republican Hamstringing of Captain Max Cleeland and lying about Lieutenant John Kerry met with your approval? But a shot at General Petraeus — about whom you conveniently ignore it is you who reduced him from four-star hero to a political hack — that merits this pissy juvenile blast at the Democrats on national television?

... Mr. Bush, you have hidden behind the General’s skirts, and today you have hidden behind the skirts of ‘the planted last question’ at a news conference, to indicate once again that your presidency has been about the tilted playing field, about no rules for your party in terms of character assassination and changing the fabric of our nation, and no right for your opponents or critics to as much as respond.

That, sir, is not only un-American — it is dictatorial.

The worst part of all of this is that 22 Democrats in the Senate bit hook, line and sinker into the Bush bait and voted on a non binding resolution to condemn the MoveOn ad.

Don't they have better things to do than waste time talking about an ad? By the way, they just denounced free speech. I suppose we can just scratch out the 1st Amendment to the Constitution.

Iraqi Ministry and the Black Market Weapons Deal

It seems that this little story was mostly ignored by the mainstream media. Do you remember hearing of the $40 million black market arms deal between Iraqi and Italian partners for over 100,000 weapons? I'm sure the Fox News conservative pundits covered this, no?

Associated Press:

The Associated Press has learned that Iraqi government officials were involved in the deal, apparently without the knowledge of the U.S. Baghdad command — a departure from the usual pattern of U.S.-overseen arms purchases.

Why these officials resorted to "black" channels and where the weapons were headed is unclear.

The purchase would merely have been the most spectacular example of how Iraq has become a magnet for arms traffickers and a place of vanishing weapons stockpiles and uncontrolled gun markets since the 2003 U.S. invasion and the onset of civil war.

Some guns the U.S. bought for Iraq's police and army are unaccounted for, possibly fallen into the hands of insurgents or sectarian militias.

Some guns? SOME GUNS?! I don't think 190,000 missing assault rifles and pistols qualifies as "some". In my book, that qualifies as a "shitload".

"They really have no idea where they are," Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Centre for Defence Information, told the Washington Post, which reported the GAO's findings. "It likely means that the United States is unintentionally providing weapons to bad actors."

Bad actors? Does that mean we'll see Steven Sagal or David Caruso roaming the streets of Baghdad with an AK-47 in their hands? I think you should replace "bad actors" with "the fucking insurgency", Ms. Stohl.

Here's the kicker: "...weapons distribution was rushed and failed to follow established procedures, particularly in 2004 and 2005. During that period, security training was led by General David Petraeus, now the top US commander in Iraq. "

And Petraeus, our fearless leader, the man who wrote the book on counterinsurgency, the savior of Iraq who'll give his long-awaited assessment of the results of the surge in September (which will be written by the White House), blames the missing weapons on a clerical error.

"Some percentage" of weapons the U.S. military provided to the Iraqi army and Iraqi police units were not tracked by serial number because there were no procedures in place to do so within the Iraqi units, Petraeus said in an interview broadcast [August 7th] on Fox News Radio's "Alan Colmes Show."

From a practical standpoint, Petraeus added, it was more important to get the weapons to the Iraqis as they started to enter the fight against a strong insurgency than it was to keep meticulous records.

Sure, why do we need to keep track of 190,000 weapons with silly little things like serial numbers? That's just a little technicality, right? I mean, why bother writing stuff like that down? There's no possible way that if you give an Iraqi officer or policeman a weapon, that he'll just turn around and sell it to the nearest local militia warlord to whom he's more loyal, right? That just doesn't happen, does it?

190,000 missing weapons chalked up to bookkeeping deficiencies... unbelieveable. Were these the same accountants in charge of the $9 billion missing in Iraq back in 2005 that's still unaccounted for?

What a bunch of clowns.

Petraeus Schmetraeus

LA TIMES: Administration and military officials acknowledge that the September report will not show any significant progress on the political benchmarks laid out by Congress. How to deal in the report with the lack of national reconciliation between Iraq's warring sects has created some tension within the White House.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

So much for the decisions being made by "commanders on the ground, not by political figures in Washington, DC"... but at this point, didn't we all see this coming a mile away? You didn't expect Bush to keep his word, did you?

Did I Say September? I Meant November

Remember that troop surge that Chimpy announced in January which started in February and decreased violence in Baghdad in March but increased sectarian strife everywhere else in April to the point of making the "Green Zone" not so green in May and got congressmen on both sides of the aisle to voice their disappointment in June but W. wouldn't budge in July until General David Petraeus made his assessment in September because Bush insisted that the war should be run by the commanders on the ground, not the politicians in Washington? Yeah, that surge.

All we heard was September September September September September. Well, the old September is the new November.

CNN- Thursday, July 19th: "In order to do a good assessment I need at least until November," said Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, a deputy to Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq.

But on Friday, Odierno clarified his statements.

"There is no intention to push our reporting requirement beyond September,"he said. "Nothing I said yesterday should be interpreted to suggest otherwise. My reference to November was simply suggesting that as we go forward beyond September, we will gain more understanding of trends.

In other words, if they are looking at November, September means nothing. Let's all take a vacation in August while more soldiers and civilians die in Iraq.

The September Surprise

They’ll Break the Bad News on 9/11
Frank Rich - New York Times

BY this late date we should know the fix is in when the White House's top factotums fan out on the Sunday morning talk shows singing the same lyrics, often verbatim, from the same hymnal of spin. The pattern was set way back on Sept. 8, 2002, when in simultaneous appearances three cabinet members and the vice president warned darkly of Saddam's aluminum tubes. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condi Rice, in a scripted line. The hard sell of the war in Iraq — the hyping of a (fictional) nuclear threat to America — had officially begun.

America wasn't paying close enough attention then. We can't afford to repeat that blunder now. Last weekend the latest custodians of the fiasco, our new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and our new ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, took to the Sunday shows with two messages we'd be wise to heed.

The first was a confirmation of recent White House hints that the long-promised September pivot point for judging the success of the "surge" was inoperative. That deadline had been asserted as recently as April 24 by President Bush, who told Charlie Rose that September was when we'd have "a pretty good feel" whether his policy "made sense." On Sunday General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker each downgraded September to merely a "snapshot" of progress in Iraq. "Snapshot," of course, means "Never mind!"

The second message was more encoded and more ominous. Again using similar language, the two men said that in September they would explain what Mr. Crocker called "the consequences" and General Petraeus "the implications" of any alternative "courses of action" to their own course in Iraq. What this means in English is that when the September "snapshot" of the surge shows little change in the overall picture, the White House will say that "the consequences" of winding down the war would be even more disastrous: surrender, defeat, apocalypse now. So we must stay the surge. Like the war's rollout in 2002, the new propaganda offensive to extend and escalate the war will be exquisitely timed to both the anniversary of 9/11 and a high-stakes Congressional vote (the Pentagon appropriations bill).

General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker wouldn't be sounding like the Bobbsey Twins and laying out this coordinated rhetorical groundwork were they not already anticipating the surge's failure. Both spoke on Sunday of how (in General Petraeus's variation on the theme) they had to "show that the Baghdad clock can indeed move a bit faster, so that you can put a bit of time back on the Washington clock." The very premise is nonsense. Yes, there is a Washington clock, tied to Republicans' desire to avoid another Democratic surge on Election Day 2008. But there is no Baghdad clock. It was blown up long ago and is being no more successfully reconstructed than anything else in Iraq.

When Mr. Bush announced his "new way forward" in January, he offered a bouquet of promises, all unfulfilled today. "Let the Iraqis lead" was the policy's first bullet point, but in the initial assault on insurgents now playing out so lethally in Diyala Province, Iraqi forces were kept out of the fighting altogether. They were added on Thursday: 500 Iraqis, following 2,500 Americans. The notion that these Shiite troops might "hold" this Sunni area once the Americans leave is an opium dream. We're already back fighting in Maysan, a province whose security was officially turned over to Iraqi authorities in April.

In his January prime-time speech announcing the surge, Mr. Bush also said that "America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced." More fiction. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's own political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, says it would take "a miracle" to pass the legislation America wants. Asked on Monday whether the Iraqi Parliament would stay in Baghdad this summer rather than hightail it to vacation, Tony Snow was stumped.

Like Mr. Crocker and General Petraeus, Mr. Snow is on script for trivializing September as judgment day for the surge, saying that by then we'll only "have a little bit of metric" to measure success. This administration has a peculiar metric system. On Thursday, Peter Pace, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the spike in American troop deaths last week the "wrong metric" for assessing the surge's progress. No doubt other metrics in official reports this month are worthless too, as far as the non-reality-based White House is concerned. The civilian casualty rate is at an all-time high; the April-May American death toll is a new two-month record; overall violence in Iraq is up; only 146 out of 457 Baghdad neighborhoods are secure; the number of internally displaced Iraqis has quadrupled since January.

Last week Iraq rose to No. 2 in Foreign Policy magazine's Failed State Index, barely nosing out Sudan. It might have made No. 1 if the Iraqi health ministry had not stopped providing a count of civilian casualties. Or if the Pentagon were not withholding statistics on the increase of attacks on the Green Zone. Apparently the White House is working overtime to ensure that the September "snapshot" of Iraq will be an underexposed blur. David Carr of The Times discovered that the severe Pentagon blackout on images of casualties now extends to memorials for the fallen in Iraq, even when a unit invites press coverage.

Americans and Iraqis know the truth anyway. The question now is: What will be the new new way forward? For the administration, the way forward will include, as always, attacks on its critics' patriotism. We got a particularly absurd taste of that this month when Harry Reid was slammed for calling General Pace incompetent and accusing General Petraeus of exaggerating progress on the ground.

General Pace's record speaks for itself; the administration declined to go to the mat in the Senate for his reappointment. As for General Petraeus, who recently spoke of "astonishing signs of normalcy" in Baghdad, he is nothing if not consistent. He first hyped "optimism" and "momentum" in Iraq in an op-ed article in September 2004.

Come September 2007, Mr. Bush will offer his usual false choices. We must either stay his disastrous course in eternal pursuit of "victory" or retreat to the apocalypse of "precipitous withdrawal." But by the latest of the president's ever-shifting definitions of victory, we've already lost. "Victory will come," he says, when Iraq "is stable enough to be able to be an ally in the war on terror and to govern itself and defend itself." The surge, which he advertised as providing "breathing space" for the Iraqi "unity" government to get its act together, is tipping that government into collapse. As Vali Nasr, author of "The Shia Revival," has said, the new American strategy of arming Sunni tribes is tantamount to saying the Iraqi government is irrelevant.

For the Bush White House, the real definition of victory has become "anything they can get away with without taking blame for defeat," said the retired Army Gen. William Odom, a national security official in the Reagan and Carter administrations, when I spoke with him recently. The plan is to run out the Washington clock between now and Jan. 20, 2009, no matter the cost.

Precipitous withdrawal is also a chimera, since American manpower, materiel and bases, not to mention our new Vatican City-sized embassy, can't be drawn down overnight. The only real choice, as everyone knows, is an orderly plan for withdrawal that will best serve American interests. The real debate must be over what that plan is. That debate can't happen as long as the White House gets away with falsifying reality, sliming its opponents and sowing hyped fears of Armageddon. The threat that terrorists in civil-war-torn Iraq will follow us home if we leave is as bogus as Saddam's mushroom clouds. The Qaeda that actually attacked us on 9/11 still remains under the tacit protection of our ally, Pakistan.

As General Odom says, the endgame will start "when a senior senator from the president's party says no," much as William Fulbright did to L.B.J. during Vietnam. That's why in Washington this fall, eyes will turn once again to John Warner, the senior Republican with the clout to give political cover to other members of his party who want to leave Iraq before they're forced to evacuate Congress. In September, it will be nearly a year since Mr. Warner said that Iraq was "drifting sideways" and that action would have to be taken "if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function."

Mr. Warner has also signaled his regret that he was not more outspoken during Vietnam. "We kept surging in those years," he told The Washington Post in January, as the Iraq surge began. "It didn't work." Surely he must recognize that his moment for speaking out about this war is overdue. Without him, the Democrats don't have the votes to force the president's hand. With him, it's a slam dunk. The best way to honor the sixth anniversary of 9/11 will be to at last disarm a president who continues to squander countless lives in the names of those voiceless American dead.

Surge Smurge

David Cloud and Damien Cave's NY Times article reveals that the "surge" isn't working at the rate the military would have hoped for by this point. This is partly due to the fact that they are relying on Iraqi Security Forces (an oxymoron if ever there was one) to do their part.

In an interview, [Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the deputy commander of the First Cavalry Division,] said that while military planners had expected to make greater gains by now, that has not been possible in large part because Iraqi police and army units, which were expected to handle basic security tasks, like manning checkpoints and conducting patrols, have not provided all the forces promised, and in some cases have performed poorly.

...When planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior American military officer, so the emphasis could shift into restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed.

“We were way too optimistic,” said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for establishing basic security in most neighborhoods, the same month that Bush administration officials have said they plan to review the progress of the plan.

At this point, only about one-third of Iraqi neighborhoods are under American and Iraqi control, because troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face resistance in the remaining 311 out of 457 neighborhoods.

You know what that means: come September, when General Petraeus delivers his assessment, and when the revolting Republicans (take that meaning either way) had said that September was their deadline for their support, Chimpy will once again demand more time... and in all probability will get it from Congressional Republican sheep and spineless Democrats.

Chimpy's Increased Confidence In Gonzo

Welcome to Backwardsland, where people think the exact opposite of the general consensus of the rest of the world.

Chimpy had a brief press conference in the Oval Office today with General David Petraeus at his side. Of course Petraeus sat there looking like a frightened dog and said nothing, just like all the other military personnel Curious George has used as props for other conferences. He expressed concern about the progress in Iraq but stood in his foxhole against the notion of setting timetables to get out. "I believe strongly that politicians in Washington shouldn't be telling Generals how to do their job." Smug bastard.

He was then asked about Gonzales:

Q: "The Attorney General is still getting a lot of criticism over the US attorney situation. Was his explanation sufficient, or is there more he needs to do in order to turn things around?"

BUSH: "The Attorney General went up and, uh... gave a very candid assessment and answered every question he could possibly answer - honestly answer - in a way that, uh, increased my confidence in his ability to do the job.
One of the things that's very important for the American people to understand is that the Attorney General has a right, uh to recommend to me to replace US attorneys. US attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President... in other words, we have named them, and uh, I have the right to replace them with somebody else. And uh, as the investigations - the hearings went forward, uh it was clear that the Attorney General broke no law, did no wrongdoing. Uh... and, some Senators didn't like his explanation but he answered as honestly as he could. This is an honest, honorable man in whom I have confidence."

Increased confidence after the hearing?! A pretty far cry from everyone else in the world who is demanding Gonzo's resignation in light of his abyssmal performance; a hearing which prompted the clearing of his calendar to begin preparations. Why does someone need weeks of preparation for something if all he has to do is tell the truth?

In other news, Boris Yeltsin is dead.


UPDATE (4/24/07 9am): NY TIMES - At Least the Boss Was Satisfied by Gonzales's Answers

“If the attorney general’s hearing performance increased the president’s confidence in his ability to lead the Justice Department, then he’s setting the bar fairly low,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, in a statement on Monday.

One senior Republican Congressional aide at work in Washington on Monday, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, called Mr. Bush’s statement that his confidence in Mr. Gonzales had grown after his testimony “curious”; another senior Republican aide asked, “Was he watching the same hearing as everyone else?”