Was
Dave Petraeus really Bill Murray in Groundhog
Day?
This
past week saw General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker come back to Capital Hill
for many more hours of grilling and stalling – for what’s now irrefutably clear
is that “stay the course” really means not the mission in Iraq so much as the
course until January 20, 2009 when Bush can leave the baby of Iraq on the
doorstep of his successor.
Military
men understand what a “front” is. Last September and now again in April,
Petraeus served as a front man in Congress for a president who has run out of
credibility and is now running out of time to be vindicated in Iraq. But if
history is written the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, as Marx
concluded, the sequel this past week was farcical. For it’s
now clear that “surge,” which means a quick increase before a return to
normalcy, is really an “escalation” since there’s no intention of returning
back to lower troop numbers. So any media who now keeps using the word “surge”
are in effect an extension of the White House press office.
