Do you really think success in Iraq has anything to do with countering Iran? And you have an honors degree in political science? Great god in the morning, Charles, we are failing in Iraq at such a rate and at such a cost (both humanitarian and economic) that all Iran needs do is sit back and watch from the fifty-yard line.

But it was a nice try, a good and loyal little neocon effort to shift responsibility for achievement of success in Iraq away from this failed presidency to an Iranian stalking-horse.

. . . But after the Petraeus-Crocker testimony, the reality of the relative success of our new counterinsurgency strategy -- and the renewed possibility of ultimate success in Iraq -- became no longer deniable.

Just so I have this straight, is this the same General Petraeus who inspired the now famous Move-On.org ad using a play on his name that so terrified Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh that the Congress found its recently lost ability to function and congressionally deplored the ad? Is this General Petraeus you single out as the agent of success in deploying Bush’s surge the same guy that his commander, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided as a sycophant?

That was during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, not an auspicious beginning for an ongoing relationship with your commander. Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that." It’s interesting to me, as just one of those ordinary guys who actually served in our military, that Fallon has not been ordered by his commander—the president—to retract either characterization.

My guess, Charles? Fallon would retire rather than carry out the order and his reputation so eclipses what is left of George Bush’s that Bush can ill afford the chance. But there is another attribution to Fallon, of even more interest;

Fallon also privately vowed that there would be no war against Iran on his watch, implying that he would quit rather than accept such a policy.

Then Charles, you sail into the uncharted waters of fantasy-strategies, ruminating on al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgency, as if they were the only, or even main insurgencies we (and Iraqis) face;

. . . She (Hillary Clinton) says that it (her policy as president) would depend on the situation at the time, for example, whether our alliance with the Sunni tribes will have succeeded in defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Al Qaeda in Iraq has been accepted as responsible for about 5% of the insurgent activity. Moqtada al Sadr is a gunman extraordinaire and he is Shiite, biding his time, unwilling to expend any effort against us. The warlords we are arming, ostensibly to kick ass against al Qaeda in the south are instead merely building up their strength and sorting things out among themselves (at our expense for weaponry) in anticipation of the real business of civil war and getting their power back.

We are abject failures at strategy, a disaster diplomatically, but we are masters of the fine art of arming the various haters and opportunists of the world. You wrote, in 2004;

"It (the Iraq war) may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world--oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism.”

That’s an extremely interesting take on preemptive war. You are undoubtedly correct about the monster behind 9-11 and the fact that it is neither Iraq nor Osama (you failed to absolve Saddam from 9-11).

But your observation begs the obvious; how do we alleviate the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world by killing off the oppressed? How does it possibly serve us to have murdered (or caused to be murdered) a million Iraqi citizens?

How do we repair and reshape 'social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world-- oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy' by failing to come to grips with those very regimes?

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