As with Colin Powell, David Petreaus will feel what it's like to be a respected military man and do the the dubious bidding of the bush/cheney cabal. A good officer answers to the orders of rank, unfortunately for these gentlemen their ranking officers were non military men whose ideological and political agenda pushed our Military into a war based on lies that cannot be won.

Nothing based on a lie can be considered a positive...

War Crimes...drag these guys to the Hague...

W. Bush is trying to portray bringing American troops back to pre-surge levels as a reduction in troops. General Petraeus is trying not to acknowledge this fact, trying to stay technically honest, technically patriotic.

General Petraeus's retirement date is coming up. Do you remember how General Schwarzkopf and General Tommy Franks retired as soon as possible? General Pertraeus will do the same thing.

W. Bush's self-serving audacity is heart-stopping, heart-breaking, less-than-American. He too has a retirement date approaching. That is all he cares about.

How does President Bush's offer of a fifth Star to General Petraeus, play into the scheme of things?

This last, desperate barrage of pro-war propaganda is so thinly veiled, so frantic and so obvious that one has to wonder if it will register on the bullshit meters of ordinary men and women here in the US, or if it will be received as a great "Oh yeah! They're trying to kill us. I almost forgot." The masses are rather fickle and short of attention span, preferring the mob approach to most anything, but I do like to think we're still capable of learning from our experiences. We'll soon see how far we've come. Lately We the People have been looking almost intelligent, if not like committed patriots who would simply demand an immediate overthrow of the sitting administration. We're still too polite for that sort of thing, but I'm hoping we're at least weary enough to have realized we are being tyranized by an idiot and some cynical manipulators of "reality." If not, we get whatever we deserve. This is the Final Challenge to the intelligence of the American people. I pray this all is a gigantic waste of time, money and energy. If not, we're in very real danger of losing our precious freedom by handing it over to our Fuehrer and what happens after that won't be pretty, to say the least.

One can only hope Petraeus and Co. will go down the sad path Colin Powell chose. One can only hope.

bush isn't just an unpopular president, he's actually hated, reviled and despised by most of the world, what a shame the US allowed this pathological lying dog of a human being to get away with a coup d'état, form a dictatorship, start an ilegal war, waste the treasure and the money of hard working Americans, suspend the constitution, or those parts that didn't fit his tiny world view, some people say, to use bush's straw man tactic, that history will look on him kindly, and then he woke up and realised he was dreaming of what it would be like if he were a real man, war hero, democratically elected president, and someone with an iq of one more than a rabbit.

I think in a hundred years or so history will look back, as history has a habit of doing, and it will say, how on earth did one man destroy one of the greatest ever countries that has ever existed, if it doesn't then history is truly dead.

Other than that I have no strong feelings either way.

We took a modern authoritarian country and reduced it to pre-modern tribal rubble. That doesn't feel like much of a victory, especially not given the price this country has paid.

It's time we stopped this insanity. It's time we take back control of our governement and tell them we are finished and it's time to leave. I am so tired of watching the bar set and when it's not met its lowered and the propoaganda machine crank up and support this war. Up until 6 months ago I was against impeachment because of its devisive nature but the President is so far gone, we really need to impeach, now. This has got to stop.

I was struck by how pessimistic the optimists were. Petraeus was supposed to have an overly optimistic story. Even he couldn't pump it up and make it look rosy. He and Crocker were hand-picked by Bush, but I guess they must have forgotten to take their lsd so the unavoidable reality must have overwhelmed their spin.

The troop cuts Petraeus is proposing are going to happen because there simply aren't any more troops, nohow no way. So they're really saying that troop levels will stay at maximum for the forseeable future.

You had all the sophisticated operation in place to coordinate various strands of Petraeus [whose name itself eerily sounds like that of a ancient Roman General] coming to testify on the hill. First there is the symbolic date of 9/11. Then there are the leaks. Then we find out that the report is being written by extensive coordination with key white house staffers and finally the republican noise machine kicks in, not least with the likes of Ari Fleischer and his unhinged from reality Freedom's [hint look for the opposite] watch PR blitz.

but

there is a weary sense that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put humpty dumpty back together again. This was not 2001 or even 2003 redux. We've all travelled some way down the road since then, we've all [including in their heart of hearts] plenty of republicans how learned of the bottomless depth of this administration's depravity.

I get a sense that even if this buys Bush some time, plenty of individual politicians of both stripes seemed to act in tune with the idea that nothing is inevitable, if only you could seize fate by the horns, you could affect the outcome of the future rather than resign to it. Bush is pretending that the outcome could be victory, everyone else knows it's just a question of when rather than if the US must pull out of Iraq. Defeat has privately been acknowledged.

It's a measure of the cowardice of the US political classes that all debates are framed solely from the point of view of US interest [not real only perceived] and 'our troops' [oh yes, we must never impugn them] except in practice by denying them decent pay, equipment or after-care...that the US never apologises to the real victims of its wars of aggression and choice.

Since it would be political death for anyone to declare openly that the US owes Iraq and its people an apology, and that similarly declaring any sympathy with the Palestinian cause would also result in huge political approbium, you have there a measure of the sickness of the pervasive bullying and unreal atmosphere in US politics.

You can say and do what you like so long as you never have to be real or address the metastasizing cancer in the country's body politic.

I don't know about you, but I find that truly disgusting.

On a happier note, it looks like everybody is finally starting to see through all this staging, PR and flim-flam whose sole purpose is to dress up as good news the inevitable further and worse woe that is the US's only destiny.