Don’t Hold Your Breath for Petraeus
Sparxafire!
I hope none of you in the vast statecraft informerhood has been clenching for Gen. Petraeus’ mid-September status report about the war in Iraq. At first, it seemed intriguing… a deadline of sorts! A benchmark, if you will, that will dictate some change in policy! Something’s gonna happen!
But after some thought, we all realized that all it did was give them more time, still more… more, more, and yet more time for our soldiers to be killed. Then, it became clear what Petraeus is going to say in his report, “Yup, doing better on the ground, but without political progress, we have to hold our positions until the newly-returned-from-vacation Iraqi government has a chance to consider some politically progressive krap.”
By the way, as a parent of any soldier killed in Iraq during everybody’s (U.S. Congress / Iraqi Parliament) vacation, there is no sympathy deep enough to offer to you.
In short, the conclusion of Petraeus’ report will be some version of, “we need more time.”
Oh. And today, we learn Petraeus’ report to Congress will actually be a report to the White House, where it will be analyzed and executive-ly summarized in an executive privilege kind of way for eventual consumption by Congress and the citizenry. And how long will the rewrite take? Until Halloween perhaps?
So any statecraft informers are eagerly anticipating this report, naively expecting something to happen as a result of it, I say to you, eliminate your expectations. Not gonna happen. Better for you to cinch up now than be somehow blind-sided with disappointment in the middle of September.
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