PETRAEUS IS IRRELEVANT

The Petraeus Crocker coming out party is quaint but entirely irrelevant. What difference does it make what they tell Congress? The Democratic majority is either too powerless or too scared to do anything about it. Nothing will change and we'll keep losing lives and pouring money into the quagmire until at the earliest 2009. And yes, when we leave things will completely meltdown over there.

The time to prevent the meltdown was pre-invasion. And no, not because the war was "wrong" or "based on lies" (though it was), but because the idiots in charge -Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, et al. actually were stupid enough to believe that things would magically fall into place if they could just knock off Saddam. This was despite and in the face of fervent and informed dissent from everyone across the spectrum from academics to military strategists.

The key to this whole operation was maintaining order and security AFTER Saddam was gone. That would have required at least half a million troops (not simply "the army you have" as Dumbsfeld arrogantly put it) and hundreds of billions of dollars.

That's why none of the cheerleaders can ever define what "victory" or "success" in Iraq means, because if they do then the next thing they have to admit that it's at the best too costly and at the worst impossible.

There was no way the Congress or the American people would have gone along with it had they been told the truth. It would have been laughable. The only way they would have gone along with such a scheme was if the threat was imminent, so the WMD lunacy was created and coupled with assurances (despite all evidence and history to the contrary) that we could do it on the cheap.

Now we're stuck because even if we were to go ahead and put half a million troops there and spend half a trillion, things have spun so far out of control that it will take decades to repair, and we can't stay there and still function as a country here -already things are starting to crumble, infrastructure, disaster preparedness, etc. In ten years at this pace we'll look like the USSR of the 1980's.

So we're forced with three shitty choices: 1) leave now and let things blow up, 2) leave when the Democratic President takes over in 2009 and let things blow up (and guess who'll take the blame) or 3) stay the course until we blow up.I know what the cheerleaders want and I know what the Bush administration wants. I choose option one, but who knows -maybe Petraeus is right and the pony is just around the corner!