It seems like Bush has never told the truth about anything. I doubt very much that he has ever tld the truth to his parents as a kid. We have a very clear pattern of a habitual liar and loafer, good for nothing, sponging off his family fortune and getting out of trouble through incessant lying and his family connections. Lying about WMD was the easiest thing in the world for him. Of course he knew Saddam didn't have WMD-the decision to invade and occupy Iraq was about his poll ratings,imperial hallucinations, oil and war profiteering. The only time this utter failure hasn't lied in the last 61 years was when he told Robert Draper he intended to cash in when out of office, because Clinton and his own dad made millions after leaving office, so why shouldn't he.

David Petraeus has been dead wrong in any single assessment and prediction he made about the situation in Iraq for the last 4 years. All one has to do is read his past predictions and assessments and then match them up with what really took place. Based on this principle, his batting average is zero. Combine it with the fact that the white house seems to have actually drafted his "assessment" and his job is basically that of a TV anchor reading the news, and any reasonable person should give his comments the kind of credibility one gives to a deceleration by the director of the Flat Earth Society.

It was actually Israel's chief Sephardi rabbi.

The average temperature in Iraq between June and September is well over a 100°F, often about a 120°F in the shade. This intense heat will obviously limit insurgency activities. It's too hot to handle explosives and often too hot to handle weapons. The US is counting only certain methods of violence as insurgency activity, for example, people shot in the back of the head are considered to be insurgency casualties and are added to the tally, but not those shot in the forehead. Even in the Anbar province, which is really the only claim to success, the Sunnies are busy fighting al qaeda because they are well aware of how religiously fanatic they are. They will very likely resume fighting the US forces once they get rid of al qaeda. Couple that with the fact that more Iraqis than ever are fleeing Iraq, and you can avoid facing the reality of Iraq, which is totally hopeless.

Rabid fascists like you are too lost and hopeless to communicate with, but I'll make one exception, in order to unburden your very tiny brain. Joe Conason didn't serve in Vietnam, but he never wanted or attempted to send US troops to fight and die in criminal wars. Bush, Cheney and the rest of their necon cabal have started an illegal and unnecessary war in which nearly 4,000 US troops were killed, tens of thousands maimed, not to speak of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, while they themselves religiously avoided military service. It's Bush and his cronies wo are responsible for the failure, no one else, and the only way to support the troops is to d what Conason suggests-get them out of that hellhole.

"Terrorists don't want us to engage and kill them; they want us to give in to their demands as a price for the safety of the civilian population; see the war that Algerian terrorists waged against French civilians for an example of this working successfully."

What civilian population? Those were French colonists, part of a French colonial administration ruling the indigenous people with an iron fist. The French used draconian measures to suppress the national aspirations of the Algerian people, including torture and executions(rings a bell?). How typical it is for Americans to label an indigenous population rebelling against their colonial rulers as "terrorists" and "insurgents". OBL gave us a taste of our own medicine. The US has been intervening in the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia and most other middle eastern countries for many years, deciding which regime stays in power and which should fall(Iran in 1954 as only one example). There's always a price to pay for imperial conduct, and 9/11 was it.

For many of us with some gray in our hair, we've seen it all before-and, ironically enough, exactly 40 years ago. What Gen. David Petraeus has set in motion, or at least condoned, is the massaging of data to justify what his boss, President Bush, wants to do in Iraq; namely, to keep enough troops "in the fight" in order to stave off definitive defeat before he and Vice President Dick Cheney leave office in January 2009. That's what the "surge" is all about, and Petraeus is smart enough to know that only too well.

Like his apparent role model, Colin Powell, he can bear four stars on his shoulder, but he must also bear on his conscience thousands of dead and wounded troops as a result of his eagerness to play in the Bush/Cheney charade. A more precise counterpart to Gen. Petraeus is the late Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of our forces in Vietnam. The argument over whether or not the "surge" is working brings back un-fond memories of the deliberate smoke-and-mirrors approach Westmoreland forced on intelligence analysts in Saigon and Washington-including deliberate falsification of the numbers on enemy strength.