The Petraeus song and dance

NY Times editorial:

Mr. Bush, we fear, isn’t looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public, scare Democrats into dropping their demands for a sound exit strategy, and prolong the war until he leaves office. At times, General Petraeus gives the disturbing impression that he, too, is more focused on the political game in Washington than the unfolding disaster in Iraq. That serves neither American nor Iraqi interests.

Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus’s strategy — as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell — another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier’s duty — play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war.

General Petraeus has his own credibility problems. He overstepped in 2004 when he published an op-ed article in The Washington Post six weeks before the election. The general — then in charge of training and equipping Iraq’s security forces — rhapsodized about “tangible progress” and how the Iraqi forces were “developing steadily,” an assessment that may have swayed some voters but has long since proved to be untrue.

Petraeus has been a good partisan foot soldier for the GOP. We could argue that his assessments are suspect and his inevitable call for another Friedman Unit laughable.

But we don't even need to do that anymore. Petraeus and his Republican colleagues have already lost the battle for public opinion. Big majorities do not trust this report or the administration which wrote it. Big majorities want the US to start getting out now, irrespective to whether there has been "progress" in Iraq or not.

Everyone knows what to expect out of Petraeus' White House-authored testimony today. The big question in everyone's mind is whether Democrats will do anything about it or simply roll over and play dead.