"I stand by it"

Spencer at TPMmuckraker finds a gem in today's report. In September 2004, Gen. David Petraeus wrote in a WaPo op-ed of the security forces he was in charge of training:

Helping organize, train and equip nearly a quarter-million of Iraq's security forces is a daunting task.... Now, however, 18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress....

The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously in the face of an enemy that has shown a willingness to do anything to disrupt the establishment of the new Iraq.

Here's Rep. Eliot Engel getting Gen. Petraeus to address that op-ed.

"I stand by it," says Petraeus, which is consistent on his part, if nothing else. Even Michael O'Hanlon has to distance himself from this one:

Some of Petraeus’s critics will argue, as they already have, that he wrote an oped in the fall of 2004 that was too optimistic about the training of Iraqi Security Forces then — and too closely timed to the American elections that November. To them, that suggests he was and is acting as an agent of White House spin. That oped may in retrospect have been somewhat too optimistic. . . .

Ya think? If Gen. Petraeus is unwilling to admit, three years later, that he was wrong, how could we possibly trust his report today to be accurate.