Left News and Views

Steve Benen, a freelance writer/researcher and creator of The Carpetbagger Report, wrote in a recent post, Bush’s hyperbolic rhetoric about a “nuclear holocaust” in the Middle East is reminiscent of his pre-war claims that “we couldn’t wait for actual proof to justify an invasion, because the ’smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud.’”

Fox Noise is joining in, so if you weren’t scared when Fox began beating the drums of an invasion into Iraq, perhaps you should be now. As the saying goes, once fooled, shame on you. Twice fooled, shame on me.

When I read the reports on the General David Petraeus dog and pony show last week, one of my first questions was when did they make Petraeus secretary of defense. After all, it is the commander in chief – George Bush – and the secretary of the defense who make policy and then it is up to the generals to carry out that policy.

Joe Klein focused on this problem in this week’s issue of Time magazine:

California Senator Barbara Boxer almost asked a good question at the Petraeus-Crocker festivities on Capitol Hill this week. She was reminiscing, as most of her colleagues did, about time spent on the ground in Iraq with General David Petraeus, but it was not a recent visit. It was back in 2005, when Petraeus was in charge of training the new Iraqi army. An aide pulled out a blown-up photograph of the Senator and the general. “You were so upbeat, General,” Boxer said. “You said, ‘You’re about to see some terrific troops.’” There were 100,000 of them “ready to go … You were as optimistic as anyone I’ve seen on the planet … and I believed you!” The stage was set for Boxer to point out that the Petraeus effort to train the Iraqi army had failed and to ask, “So why should we believe your optimism now?” But she wandered off into an antiwar diatribe and never got around to asking it.

The unasked question was so profound that Petraeus, a proud man, chose to answer it anyway. “I believe that my optimism back when I showed those very fine Iraqi forces to Senator Boxer was justified,” he said. The good work was undone, though, in 2006, when Shi’ite militias “hijacked” whole units of the Iraqi military. But, he insisted, we are back on the right track now. Petraeus may well be right – or maybe not. The nature of military leadership is congenital optimism; officers are trained to complete the mission, to refuse to countenance the possibility of failure. That focus is essential when you go to war, but it lacks perspective. That’s why civilian leaders – the Commander in Chief – are there to set the mission, to change or abort it when necessary. The trouble is, George W. Bush’s credibility on Iraq is nonexistent. And so he has placed David Petraeus, an excellent soldier, in a position way above his pay grade. He has made Petraeus not just the arbiter of Iraq strategy but also, by default, the man who sets U.S. policy for the entire so-called war on terrorism.

Beyond the fact that Bush now lacks credibility on practically any issue dealing with national defense – I keep thinking of the vain emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale – he also may be the only civilian leader left who believes the U.S. was right in its decision to invade Iraq.

New York Times columnist David Brooks yesterday discussed a conversation he had with Robert Gates after the defense secretary gave a speech on Monday.

“I don’t think you invade Iraq to bring liberty. You do it to eliminate an unstable regime and because sanctions are breaking down and you get liberty as a byproduct,” he said during the interview. Brooks asked him whether invading Iraq was a good idea, knowing what we know now. After a moment’s hesitation, Gates said, “I don’t know.”

The co-author of the Iraq Study Report said Gate’s views on the Iraq conflict are in “stark contrast” to the president’s.

“You couldn’t get a greater contrast,” said Lee Hamilton, co-author of the Iraq Study Report.

That may well be why Bush has dubbed Petraeus the acting secretary of defense.

In his Time magazine column, Klein concludes: “There was an important follow-up that Boxer didn’t ask either: Without a strong, credible central government, for whom exactly is the re-retrained Iraqi army fighting? How can any Iraqi be loyal to a government that doesn’t exist? And, finally, now that the Sunnis have decisively rejected the extremists, why should any American trooper sacrifice even a pinkie in this sectarian catastrophe?”

I am shocked to learn that Alan Greenspan – you know that left-wing fanatic who used to be the Fed chairman – is letting his hatred of Bush cloud his reasoning, so much so that he would be crazy enough to imply that Bush went to war for oil.

In his new memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, Greenspan – a life-long Republican who was privy to many Bush administration policy discussions – charges that the Bush administration was driven to overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in a large part by a lust for Iraq’s oil. “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows – the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he wrote in reported excerpts of the book.

Kind of makes one wonder how wide-ranging the secret discussions between Vice President Cheney and top executives of big oil companies in 2001 were. This is the meeting that Cheney and the oil execs claimed never happened until The Washington Post obtained documents showing that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with Cheney and his aides who were developing a national energy policy.

As with practically every aspect of the Bush administration, these meetings were held in secret and the White House refused to release a list of participants. The document obtained by the Post was based on records kept by the Secret Service of people admitted to the White House complex.

Of course, we still don’t know what exactly took place at those meetings. What we do know is that subsequent to those meetings we left Afghanistan – where there is no oil – and unilaterally invaded Iraq – where there is plenty. Hailburton got rich, big oil has been posting unconscionable profits and the rest is history.

When it comes to the history of wars in the United States – going all the way back to the Civil War – some of the biggest supporters in any conflict are those who make the greatest profits from the battles … whether we win or lose.

The current war in Iraq I no different. We all know how Vice President Cheney’s buddies at Haliburton have been filling their coffers from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers and how big oil has been raping American consumers while cheering on the policy of President Bush to stay the course – despite the deaths of nearly 4,000 American men and women.

In a column in yesterday’s New York Times, Paul Krugman demonstrates on how, while Bush is running around the country talking about the success of his surge, one of his closest friends and advisers – and probably others as well – are enriching themselves by betting on ultimate failure. (Just keep it going, George, until all our deals pay off.)

As a case in point, Krugman points to Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, who is not only a close Bush ally but also a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body that can drive foreign policy in this administration.

Now, you have to keep your eye on the peanut. Back in January, announcing his plan to send more troops to Iraq, Bush declared that “America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced,” one of which was a promise that “to give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” (I know, I laughed at that one too.)

On Thursday night, while Bush was spouting more outright lies to the American people, our leader of the oil men of the world said that the Iraqi government was very near to completing the oil revenue sharing legislation. Either that was another lie, or our intelligence is even worse that it was before the war because on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

As Krugman reports, “What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.”

Remember Mr. Hunt. Krugman writes, “Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the ‘axis of evil.’”

The conclusion from Klugman:

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

After all, if the administration had any real hope of retrieving the situation in Iraq, officials would be making an all-out effort to get the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to start delivering on some of those benchmarks, perhaps using the threat that Congress would cut off funds otherwise. Instead, the Bushies are making excuses, minimizing Iraqi failures, moving goal posts and, in general, giving the Maliki government no incentive to do anything differently.

And for that matter, if the administration had any real intention of turning public opinion around, as opposed to merely shoring up the base enough to keep Republican members of Congress on board, it would have sent Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, to as many news media outlets as possible — not granted an exclusive appearance to Fox News on Monday night.

All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.

Although this clip took place a year ago, it is even more true today. And it is interesting that JJoe Scarborough, a staunch conservative for whom I have the greatest respect, can’t bring himself to defend Bush’s competence. John Fund tried and failed.

As Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said during the testimony yesterday of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the general’s attempt to justify the surge required “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

While so many of his assertions could have been predicted long before he answered questions from members of two Senate committees yesterday, I don’t think anyone could have conceived his answer to Senator John W. Warner’s query as to whether the current strategy in Iraq is “making America safer.”

After trying to dodge the question, he finally answered when Warner asked a second time: “Sir, I don’t know, actually.”

That’s what I would want to hear from my commanding general if I were heading off to war. We really don’t know whether this will accomplish the primary goal of making America safer, but go ahead in there and put your life at risk because President Bush wants to keep this thing going regardless of the cost.

“Sir, I don’t know, actually.”

This should be the anthem for the host of clueless hawks who lied their way into a war that, as of today, has claimed the lives of 3,774 courageous American men and women. And now the tragic truth – the commanding general in Iraq doesn’t even know if their deaths or the deaths of those to come will make America any safer.

I think the comments of some of those 5 percent left who think Bush is doing a good job reflect the thinking of our commander in chief.

In response to my blog of Monday in which I used a famous quote from Bertrand Russell that “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt,” one of my frequent critics wrote: “Personally I would rather have the stupid cocksure person in charge. At least they aren’t afraid to do what they feel is right.”

What this guy is too dimwitted to realize is that he made my case.

But his next comment was so reprehensible that I will admit it is even below President Bush: “And please stop crying about the few thousand troops that have died. ONE the numbers are not bad despite what you may think and TWO you probably don’t even truly care about the troops.” [I corrected his spelling out of pity.]

Finally he asks, “And how is 15,000 [Iraqis killed] a month unimaginable? You just put a number on it that is perfectly imaginable to me. Look back on all the wars that is still not a bad number and most of those 15,000 are not being killed by us.”

This is what sane people in the U.S. are up against. This and a general who can’t answer the question whether all the killing will make America any safer.

Bertrand Russell, a Welsh philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, and advocate for social reform, wrote that “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Russell died in 1970, but his words ring truer than ever today.

Keep this quote in mind when President Bush appears on prime time later this week and urges Americans once again to stay the course in Iraq.

Never mind that 3,762 American men and women have already died there and nearly 28,000 have been wounded with little or no progress to show for their sacrifice.

Never mind that Iraqis have been and continue to die in unimaginable numbers – one study by the respected Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has estimated that 15,000 Iraqis a month have died as a result of violence unleashed by the American invasion and occupation of their country.

Never mind that study after study has shown that America is less safe since the invasion and that the whole debacle has created a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.

You can be sure that our troops and innocent Iraqis will continue to die in large numbers right into 2009 because President Bush is cocksure he is right and the vast majority of Americans are wrong.

This is indeed a case where stupidity is deadly.

Today, four U.S. Marines were killed in fighting in Anbar province, and three soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in northern Iraq. Anbar province, of course, is that “safe zone” that Gen. David Petraeus has been showing off as proof that his surge is working.

If he starts to believe his own propaganda and continues taking strolls through this area, he may be open for a rude and deadly awakening.

Additionally, according to the Associated Press, about 100 miles west of Anbar’s capital city of Ramadi, insurgents blew up two suspension bridges on roads leading to Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

A roadside bomb struck an Iraqi army patrol near Baqouba, killing one soldier and wounding two, while another roadside bomb killed one civilian and wounded four others southeast of Baghdad, police officials said.

Gunmen also opened fire on Sunni worshippers in a drive-by shooting following evening prayers late Thursday in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least three people and wounding four.

But, as columnist Paul Krugman puts it so well in today’s New York Times, “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.”

As Krugman and a number of other sources have reported, “no independent assessment has concluded that violence in Iraq is down. On the contrary, estimates based on morgue, hospital and police records suggest that the daily number of civilian deaths is almost twice its average pace from last year. And a recent assessment by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found no decline in the average number of daily attacks.”

But that’s okay with Petraeus. Using the kind of logic some of my critics here love to employ, “the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” [See my blog from yesterday.] So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.”

It’s no secret that Petraeus was picked by Bush to head up the so-called surge – after firing generals who disagreed with him – because he has a history of being in lock step with the administration when it has made its sunny but clearly wrong predictions of progress so many times in the past.

Six weeks before the 2004 election – at a time when Bush had to have some “good news” coming out of Iraq – Petraeus claimed “tangible progress” in Iraq. Specifically, he declared that “Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt,” that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward” and that “there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security.” A year later, he declared that “there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi security forces.”

In the final analysis, facts on the ground don’t really matter. Bush is going to do what he wants and the Democrats in Congress don’t have the votes – nor the guts, apparently – to stop him.

As Krugman points out, “any plan that depends on the White House recognizing reality is an idle fantasy. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, on Tuesday Mr. Bush told Australia’s deputy prime minister that ‘we’re kicking ass’ in Iraq. Enough said.”

Listening to all the glowing reports from Katie Couric in Iraq this week, I actually found myself hopeful that perhaps the surge could lead to a diminution in violence and allow the Iraqis to feel safer in conducting their daily activities.

Of course I had to keep in mind that Katie was being kept on a short leash by General David H. Petraeus, someone whom she is obviously gaga over. And, I also couldn’t forget how badly we were misled by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But, wouldn’t it be nice if they weren’t spinning the facts for once and the tide was turning. Of course, with the incompetence of the current administration, that would be – and it turns out actually is – too much to expect.

According to today’s Washington Post, the claims that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

In other words – and, of course, we shouldn’t be surprised – President Bush and his hand-picked yes men have been cherry picking the data to prepare another snow job.

The Bush administration doesn’t include people who were killed by criminals in its statistics on violence levels. According to the Post report, Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the National Intelligence Estimate were somewhat puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal. According to one senior intelligence official in Washington, “If a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.”

Sounds like the wizardry of body counts during the Viet Nam war, statistics that were also used to obfuscate the real facts on the ground.

According to the Post, among the most worrisome trends cited by the NIE was escalating warfare between rival Shiite militias in southern Iraq that has consumed the port city of Basra and resulted last month in the assassination of two southern provincial governors. According to a spokesman for the Baghdad headquarters of the Multi-National Force-Iraq, those attacks are not included in the military’s statistics. “Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances,” the spokesman said, “we do not track this data to any significant degree.”

Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen – recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Queda – were also excluded from the U.S. military’s calculation of violence levels.

And, according to another report in the Post, Bush and company are living in a dream world if they expect the Iraqis to pick up the slack and be responsible for their own security. According to a report on the Iraqi security forces published today, which was prepared by a commission of retired senior U.S. military officers, the 25,000-member Iraqi national police force and the Interior Ministry, which controls it, is riddled with sectarianism and corruption. The ministry, it says, is “dysfunctional” and is “a ministry in name only.” The commission recommended that the national police force be disbanded.

Yeah, I would love to see the violence end – as much as I would love to see world peace. But most of all, I would love to see the death toll for American troops – now at 3,752 – end, something that actually can be accomplished. They have done their job – courageously and without complaint. We can’t let the gamesmanship of this administration cover the fact that it is time to bring them home.

Keith Olbermann delivered a special comment last night on Countdown that needs to be repeated – especially for the few brain-washed ideologues left who can’t see the little man behind the curtain. It is long, but well worth reading.

And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was. But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.

As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying, is lying and will be lying about Iraq.

He presumably did not know that there had already appeared those damning excerpts from Robert Draper’s book “Dead Certain.”

“I’m playing for October-November,” Mr. Bush said to Draper. That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan, which is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence.”

Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay… longer.”

And there it is. We’ve caught you. Your goal is not to bring some troops home, maybe, if we let you have your way now. Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal. You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.

Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely.

War today, war tomorrow, war forever!

And you are playing at it! Playing!

A man with any self respect, having inadvertently revealed such an evil secret, would have already resigned and fled the country! You have no remaining credibility about Iraq.

And yet, yesterday at Al-Asad, Mr. Bush kept playing, and this time, using the second of his two faces.

The president told reporters, “They (General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker) tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces.”

And so, Mr. Bush got his fraudulent headlines today. “Bush May Bring Some Troops Home.”

While the reality is, we know from what he told Draper, that the president’s true hope is that they will not come home; but that they will stay there, because he is keeping them there now, in hope that those from his political party fighting to succeed him will prolong this unendurable disaster into the next decade.

But, to a country dying of thirst, the president seemed to vaguely promise a drink from a full canteen — a promise predicated on the assumption that he is not lying.

Yet you are lying, Mr. Bush. Again. But now, we know why.

You gave away more of yourself than you knew in the Draper book. And you gave away more still, on the arduous trip back out of Iraq hours in the air, without so much as a single vacation.

“If you look at my comments over the past eight months,” you told reporters, “it’s gone from a security situation in the sense that we’re either going to get out and there will be chaos, or, more troops. Now, the situation has changed, where I’m able to speculate on the hypothetical.”

Mr. Bush, the only “hypothetical” here is that you are not now holding our troops hostage. You have no intention of withdrawing them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pretend you’re thinking about it, does it?

That is your genius as you see it, anyway. You can deduce what we want. We, the people, remember us? And then use it against us.

You can hold that canteen up and promise it to the parched nation. And the untold number of Americans whose lives have not been directly blighted by Iraq or who do not realize that their safety has been reduced and not increased by Iraq, they will get the bullet points: “Bush is thinking about bringing some troops home. Bush even went to Iraq.”

You can fool some of the people all of the time, can’t you, Mr. Bush? You are playing us!

And as for the most immediate victims of the president’s perfidy and shameless manipulation of those troops – yesterday sweating literally as he spoke at Al-Asad Air Base – tonight, again sweating figuratively in The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death, the president saved, for them, the most egregious “playing” in the entire trip.

“I want to tell you this about the decision, about my decision about troop levels. Those decisions will be based on a calm assessment by our military commanders on the conditions on the ground, not a nervous reaction by Washington politicians to poll results in the media.”

One must compliment Mr. Bush’s writer. That, perhaps, was the mostly perfectly-crafted phrase of his presidency. For depraved indifference to democracy, for the craven projection of political motives onto those trying to save lives and save a nation, for a dismissal of the value of the polls and the importance of the media, for a summary of all he does not hold dear about this nation or its people nothing could top that.

As if you listened to all the “calm assessments” of our military commanders rather than firing the ones who dared say the emporer has no clothes, and the president, no judgment.

As if your entire presidency was not a “nervous reaction,” and you yourself, nothing but a Washington politician.

As if “”he media” does not largely divide into those parts your minions are playing, and those others who unthinkingly and uncritically serve as your echo chamber, at a time when the nation’s future may depend on the airing of dissent.

And as if those polls were not so overwhelming, and not so clearly reflective of the nation’s agony and the nation’s insistence.

But this president has ceased to listen. This president has decided that night is day, and death is life, and enraging the world against us is safety. And this laziest of presidents, actually interrupted his precious time off to fly to Iraq to play at a photo opportunity with soldiers, some of whom will on his orders be killed before the year maybe the month is out.

Just over 500 days remain in this presidency. Consider the dead who have piled up on the battlefield in these last 500 days.

Consider the singular fraudulence of this president’s trip to Iraq yesterday, and the singular fraudulence of the selling of the Petraeus Report in these last 500 days.

Consider how this president has torn away at the fabric of this nation in a manner of which terrorists can only dream in these last 500 days.

And consider again how this president has spoken to that biographer: that he is “playing for October-November.” The goal in Iraq is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence.” Consider how this revelation contradicts every other rationale he has offered in these last 500 days.

In the context of all that now, consider these next 500 days.

Mr. Bush, our presence in Iraq must end. Even if it means your resignation. Even if it means your impeachment. Even if it means a different Republican to serve out your term. Even if it means a Democratic Congress and those true patriots among the Republicans standing up and denying you another penny for Iraq, other than for the safety and the safe conduct home of our troops.

This country cannot run the risk of what you can still do to this country in the next 500 days.

Not while you are playing.

Is there a clearer case for impeachment?

It’s Labor Day, my wife has headed to Florida to help our daughter through a surgical procedure, and next week the surge propaganda will go into high gear. I was going to take this opportunity to talk about the history of this war of lies, but Paul Krugman said it best in a column today in the New York Times. It is worth quoting portions of his column before the spin doctors totally take over the airwaves:

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the United Nations Security Council, claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not, in fact, present any actual evidence, just pictures of buildings with big arrows pointing at them saying things like “Chemical Munitions Bunker.” But many people in the political and media establishments swooned: they admired Mr. Powell, and because he said it, they believed it.

Mr. Powell’s masters got the war they wanted, and it soon became apparent that none of his assertions had been true.

Until recently I assumed that the failure to find W.M.D., followed by years of false claims of progress in Iraq, would make a repeat of the snow job that sold the war impossible. But I was wrong. The administration, this time relying on Gen. David Petraeus to play the Colin Powell role, has had remarkable success creating the perception that the “surge” is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.

Thus Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution — the author of “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” — and his colleague Michael O’Hanlon, another longtime war booster, returned from a Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq and declared that the surge was working. They received enormous media coverage; most of that coverage accepted their ludicrous self-description as critics of the war who have been convinced by new evidence.

A third participant in the same tour, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reported that unlike his traveling companions, he saw little change in the Iraq situation and “did not see success for the strategy that President Bush announced in January.” But neither his dissent nor a courageous rebuttal of Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack by seven soldiers actually serving in Iraq, published in The New York Times, received much media attention.

Above all, we should remember that the whole point of the surge was to create space for political progress in Iraq. And neither that leaked G.A.O. report nor the recent National Intelligence Estimate found any political progress worth mentioning. There has been no hint of sectarian reconciliation, and the Iraqi government, according to yet another leaked U.S. government report, is completely riddled with corruption.

But, say the usual suspects, General Petraeus is a fine, upstanding officer who wouldn’t participate in a campaign of deception — apparently forgetting that they said the same thing about Mr. Powell.

First of all, General Petraeus is now identified with the surge; if it fails, he fails. He has every incentive to find a way to keep it going, in the hope that somehow he can pull off something he can call success.

And General Petraeus’s history also suggests that he is much more of a political, and indeed partisan, animal than his press would have you believe. In particular, six weeks before the 2004 presidential election, General Petraeus published an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which he claimed — wrongly, of course — that there had been “tangible progress” in Iraq, and that “momentum has gathered in recent months.”

Is it normal for serving military officers to publish articles just before an election that clearly help an incumbent’s campaign? I don’t think so.

So here we go again. It appears that many influential people in this country have learned nothing from the last five years. And those who cannot learn from history are, indeed, doomed to repeat it.