Well, that's a relief. For awhile, I thought we weren't going to win in Iraq!

...when they spin whatever happens in Iraq as a success?

So let me get this striaght: Gen Pet thinks it's a GOOD thing when the insurgents go from targeting each other to targeting us. Well, I never went to West Point, but I'd think that when a fractured opposition starts uniting in a single goal to kill US soldiers, that's a negative development. (But then again, I predicted we wouldn't find any WMD's, and we'd get stuck in a guerilla war in Iraq, so what do I know?)

If this statement doesn't make you question Petraeus's ability to provide an accurate, truthful, and unbiased assessment of the surge come September, what further convincing will you require?

I said it before: http://letters.salon.com/politics/war_room/2007/06/06/iraq/view/index.html; no matter what happens in Iraq, the Bush Administration will claim that their strategy is working. This is merely the first example. If violence goes up, they will claim it as a good sign ("The insurgents are desperate!") If violence goes down, they will claim it as a good sign ("Violence has decreased!") In this case, violence has stayed the same and they claimed that as a good sign.

Why people think anything is going to be different in September is beyond me. Bush is just running out the clock, and our armed forces and the poor Iraqis are paying the price.

Dead soldiers/sailers/Marines don't receive GI Bill benefits, or fill up beds at the local VA hospital, or any of those annoying, budget-busting services they demand when they get back.

Bush/Cheney have to make sure the military budget is spent on the no-bid Halliburton service contracts and mercenaries-- sorry, "contractors"-- and not on low-return assets like soldiers, don't they?

This is a CEO President, remember? Ultimately, he outsources everything he can and only answers to his "shareholders"-- his cronies and the campaign contributers who maintain his Crime Family régime.

And the slow-speed disintegration of the United States democracy plows on...!

I wonder what General Petraeus tells Bush. Does he use the same kind of doubletalk? Is that what Bush wants to hear?

Perhaps Bush really does think the surge is working if the only people he listens to still tell him what he wants to hear.

I would like to know how this man can look in the mirror in the morning and not want to cut a lot deeper when he shaves. How callous and miserable a person do you need to be to talk about the ongoing death and carnage that has occurred in Iraq because of us and use terms such as "aggregate level" , "metrics" and the eternally optimistic "trending back down again". How damning and telling that to read the transcripts you could mistake this for a discussion about Wall Street. Oh wait, perhaps that's not ENTIRELY inaccurate after all is it?

I am outraged at this mentality and it's made much worse because so few voices in this pathetic excuse for a country rise up screaming about it. So this is what America is huh? This is our sacred "Moral Authority right? By the way general don't think I didn't notice that you made your jackhole comments on a Sunday, how perfectly Christian of you...ass. And Gen. Patraeus, if you're by chance reading this, I'd like to offer you my services as a Personal Shaving Contractor. It will cost the taxpayers millions but I promise you you'll never get a closer cut...

Betray-us is speaking Bushie lingo. Where is the proof? Bombings are down? Says who? Bush's hand picked military mouth piece. Is any of it verifiable? The Iraqi government isn't releasing carnage numbers anymore, and due to said carnage, there are not enough reporters to dig into the misinformation to separate fact from myth. So, why would anyone believe what Betray-us is saying if we all know, for sure, Bush wants this spun from his propaganda department to look like it's succeeding. I mean, my God, we haven't been told the truth on anything related to this disaster to date. What makes anyone think Betrayus is going to level with us now?

Each time someone is fired or removed from the military there we only find out six months later , if that, why the person was dumped.

Am I the only one nervous about his "cautiously optimistic" assessments?

Cover Your Ass. It is quite possibly the single biggest precept of modern society. It does not matter if you are talking about the consistency of the icing on the crullers at the donut shop, the shortfall of pencils in the office supply closet, or death of thousands of U.S. Soldiers in an ill-advised worldwide debacle.

Petraus is doing nothing here that we as Americans do not do nearly every single day. No one boldly proclaims their eveyr screw up to the world. If we did, we would be openly denounced as incompetent and run out of our donut shop/office/command on a rail with a crowd of pitchfork wielding villagers screaming in our wake.

There is nothing wrong with CYA culture when it comes to the little things. Thin icing: the humidity must be messing with it. Shortage of Pencils: There's been a run on pencils. We'll order more.

That the good general and really this entire administration fail to realize is that they are working with much more precious assets here. The Idiot Child-Emperor has approached his entire presidency in the same way that he has his other endeavors. There is not difference to him between mismanaging a baseball team and mismanaging a war. He "knows" that he is "right". The world may just respond incorrectly to his actions. He has surrounded himself with the kind of ideologues who have studied the concept of global conflict and international power games for so long that they forget that the numbers on the page reflect kids on the lines.

An increased body count does not equal more dead young Americans. It represents a miscalculation. Someone forgot to carry the one in projecting the outcome of this sad spectacle. If your hypothesis is proven wrong by the data, alter what the data means or retroactively change your hypothesis.

These guys are just covering their asses. They've been taught these skills since grade school.

It's still not real to them. I say we make them dig each grave by hand. Let them explain themselves from the bottom of an 8 foot hole. Take away the balance sheet and make the numbers real. Somehow I still have hope that the tactics of a 3rd grader who lost their lunch money will start seem inappropriate, even to this group of sociopaths.