Going down fighting -- or not

By Libby

Thanks to Jurassic Pork, from behind the paywall Paul Krugman has a good column today. Excerpts:

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops, if he feels like it.

...And six or seven months from now it will be the same thing all over again. Mr. Bush will stage another photo op at Camp Cupcake, the Marine nickname for the giant air base he never left on his recent visit to Iraq. The administration will move the goal posts again, and the military will come up with new ways to cook the books and claim success.

Fred Kaplan at Slate has "some of the questions Congress should ask them next week. If we're going to stay in Iraq for months and years to come—at a cost of hundreds of billions of additional dollars and hundreds, if not thousands, of additional lives—we at least ought to know why."

While Kevin Drum pulls out the money quote.

Biddle also said (again, expressing his personal view) that the strategy in Iraq would require the presence of roughly 100,000 American troops for 20 years — and that, even so, it would be a "long-shot gamble."

So there you have it intrepids. The political class doesn't really want to end this war. Saint Petraeus will tell us there's progress. The Democrats are already plotting are how to roll over and play dead with the least political damage and ten Friedman Units and hundreds of thousands of more deaths from now we'll still be hearing how we're just six months away from "victory." Just shoot me now and put me out of my misery.