The Daily Background

Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation Sunday expressed his prediction that the September “surge” report from General Petraeus from political appointees in the White House won’t show any new progress on the political front. Said Shieffer:

excuse me for getting a little suspicious after hearing the White House is proposing some new conditions on the delivery of General Petraeus’ long-awaited report on progress in Iraq – conditions such as the White House wanting the general to deliver the report to Congress behind closed doors while cabinet officers do the talking in public.

And, suddenly we’re told the general won’t actually write the report but that his thoughts will be incorporated in a summary prepared by the White House.

Mind you, this is the report the president has said over and over that he will use to decide where we go from here in Iraq. Over and over, we’ve been told not to rush to judgment until we hear from the general. Now we’re hearing all these new conditions.

It goes without saying that I agree.

One thing that stuck in my mind however, cause I sat through the entire Rove-McCain episode, is McCain’s new talking point about Iraq. He said several times that Democrats were trying to return to Bush’s old Iraq policy, which didn’t really make sense to me. Here are some examples:

“Here we’ve got our opponents wanting to go back to a strategy that failed for four years and abandon a strategy we’ve really only been pursuing for about four months, which is succeeding…”

“But, at the end of the day, to go back to the failed strategy of four years–which, in all due respect, is what that article advocates–I can’t–I don’t think that’s the right strategy…”

“I think [Petraeus is] going to say, `This is succeeding.’ We’ve failed for four
years with a bad strategy. We’ve only been in for four months…”

With all due respect, what the hell is Senator McCain talking about? Schieffer didn’t challenge him his assertions that Democrats (and it isn’t just Democrats who say the surge is a failure at bringing a political solution to Iraq now of course) wanted to return to Bush’s failed Iraq policy, and I can’t understand why not.

I haven’t heard a single Democrat or Republican say that they want to end the surge and just stay in Iraq and go back to whatever the non-strategy strategy that Bush was using before January. Those who say the surge needs to end argue either for a scaled back US presence (the “transition the mission” increased emphasis on training Iraqis approach), or argue for withdrawal. Neither of those are options that President Bush has given a try.

Note: this is the third in an occasional series, with previous editions including What the hell is Ron Paul talking about? and What in the hell is Senator Nelson talking about?

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