Other than the usual knuckledragging Republican mouthbreathers, Petraeus didn't convince many other people that the so-called "surge" is producing positive results.

The Philadelphia Inquirer:
"President Bush was a strong and poignant leader in the days just after 9/11. But since then, he has used the attack to pursue objectives that had little or nothing to do with that Tuesday six years ago.... Six years after 9/11, it is a shame that Bush's misguided invasion of Iraq is upstaging the discussion the nation ought to have and the actions the nation's leaders ought to be taking."

Sacramento Bee:
"Petraeus and Crocker made it clear they see no need to recalibrate U.S. strategy in Iraq. So the choice remains: continue our current open-ended, ill-defined "stay the course" commitment in Iraq, with troop levels of 130,000 -- or begin a responsible, gradual withdrawal in concert with a serious diplomatic offensive."

Los Angeles Times:
"America's 'war on terror,' which enters its sixth year today, now seems destined to redefine our nation for a generation or more to come.... No matter how much he insists otherwise, President Bush lacks that fundamental belief in American freedom. As a result, his war has not only subverted U.S. military interests but has undermined the liberties that make this a nation worthy of emulation.That is the tragic and true cost of these past six years."

If General Petraeus cannot fully agree that the effort in Iraq makes the United States safer, then we have not fufilled any of our objectives for engaging in this war. Ignoring real humanitarian problems in the world where 1.2 billion people on earth live on less that 1$ a day, the issue of poverty is completely ignored.

This illustrates my point perfectly - the surge must end, not because of conditions on the ground but because George Bush has overextended our miliary to the point of breaking. Don't beleive me, check out today's testimony:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAq08Xu0D_Y

Frankly, the GOP, the party that is supposed to support our military, is on the verge of destroying it.

Next time you want to vote for someone who you think is "strong on defense" please remember the actions of the Republican party.

I can't beleive I am saying this: Clinton was a better war time President than Bush.

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/?source=whitelist

We call this winning? A year from now we will have as many troops in Iraq as we had before the "surge". We will be facing the same questions a year from now after spending soldiers lives and billions of dollars. How can Americans accept this continued failure. Petraeus projects us being in Iraq for years in the future. There is no end in sight. We will reach a fifth year in Iraq this spring, going for ten.

For the few still tempted to back (or vote for) the GOP, please answer these questions:

What does the Iraq War have to do with today's date, now, then or in-between?

Why does Bin Ladin still have access to every media outlet in the whole world?

How are we supposed to sustain a 10-year presence in Iraq, fight Iran, and still have some sort of military security here at home?

One possibility is every Republican voter should offer up their children first. Maybe that one requirement would bring a sense of reality back to that party, it has flown over the cuckoo's nest. As for failure to win the war, that sits on the head of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. They lost it, go complain about it to them.

The Bush Administration's hiding behind General Petreeous and the Iraq Ambassador is chutzpah. They're the president's apointees. what do you expect them to say? Democrat leadetrship is non-existing. They (Democrats) get what they deserve. Politicians have proven that their interests (not the people's) have priority.
What has happened to objectivity? This Nation has acheved new lows in world wide P.R.

How can the Democrats be entrusted with the nation's security when they can't even keep a few nutcase protesters out of the hearing room?

And to hear Joe "the Plagiarist" Biden et al drone on with 10 minute speeches disguised as questions.... None of them are fit to shine General Petraeus's shoes.

Q: Will winning in Iraq make us safer.
A:(Petraeus) I'm not sure.

Go ahead, Mr. President. Ask me for another $200Billion for this strategy. I dare you.

I live only 3 blocks from the post office, so changing from GOP to IND or DEM will only take me about 15 minutes.

First we take two illusory steps forward, in order to contemplate taking another illusory step back.

Surge. Draw down. Look around. Why, we've still got 130,000 US occupation troops on the ground in Iraq, paired with another 100,000 mercenaries, just exactly where we were stuck right after the November 2006 votes were counted! The war drags on, except many of the ordinary citizens who voted to end the US military occupation of Iraq are now just as furious at the Democrats as they are at Bush and the GOP.

This whole transparent charade over having a surge, and funding a surge, and now pondering the report on the surge has served no purpose other than to help the White House run out the clock another 18 months closer to election day 2008.

The deeper, more fundamental purpose? To make certain large numbers of American troops will still be bogged down in harms' way for the campaign season, so (as happened in 2004) we will again be forced to pick who will make the best Warrior President Commander-in-Chief, based upon which campaign spots pander best to the nation's darkest primordial fears.

Such theatre, complete with a sports metaphor posing as an exercise in decision making in a democratic republic, would be laughable, were it not for the thousands of lives that will be lost, and the billions of dollars that will be squandered, in order push this sickening war game through its fourth quarter and on into overtime.

Bill from Sainaw

nisleib

That statement, "Clinton was a better war time president than Bush" is preposterous. If Clinton had been ANY kind of a president we might have avoided 9/11. Consider the fact that we suffered a first attack on the WTC, Kohbar towers, two embassy bombings (Kenya & Tanzania), USS Cole, and Saddam Hussein's general disregard for the UN cease-fire agreement. We were dragged into a UN-supported mess in Somalia, wasted time and resources in Kosovo, Bosnia, and bombed Yugoslavia...YUGOSLAVIA!!! For what? Since Bush dealt with Afghanistan and Iraq, there hasn't been a single major attack on US soil or interests. We are fighting and killing Al Qaeda...over there. We already won the war in Iraq, it will be up to the Iraqi people, with our help, to build a new Iraq.

stu kart

Who cares about world wide PR? I care about us, as in US, and our true allies like Israel, GBR, Poland, etc...

Please note the dates of these articles regarding troop reductions in Iraq;

http://ninthstate.net/2006/06/26/potential-troop-reductions-in-iraq/

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/politics/11military.html?ex=1270872000&en=39db7b781505eefc&ei=5088

http://www.voteswagon.com/2005/12/23/bush-and-rumsfeld-give-gift-to-american-soldiers-in-iraq/

Must feel great to be rooting for the U.S.
to lose. Then maybe we'll get Norman Hsu as secretary of the Treasury.

"Such theatre, complete with a sports metaphor posing as an exercise in decision making in a democratic republic, would be laughable, were it not for the thousands of lives that will be lost, and the billions of dollars that will be squandered, in order push this sickening war game through its fourth quarter and on into overtime."

Bill from Sainaw

Not so fast my friend!! Since you brought sports into it (appologies to Lee Corso). If you don't think this fight is real or worthwhile then you must have missed the last 30 years. It doesn't just begin or end with Al Qaeda and 9/11. Sarajevo, Munich, New York,etc..I could go on and on. Terrorism is a problem the whole world is going to have to face and deal with because the current form of radical islam is NOT going away anytime soon, and this includes state sponsored terrorism in the form of Iran and Syria as well as the former Iraq under Hussein. We may be fighting to save Iraq now, but tomorrow it could be Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, or even Israel. Drawdown? Ha. We will be tied up in the Middle East for YEARS to come. At least right here and now we are fighting there and not here on home soil. As far as casualties and cost? To put into perspective, we have sufferd fewer casualties in both the entire Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns then the USMC suffered in Iwo Jima. Monetary cost? It's a joke. This is one of the cheapest per-capita/GNP conflicts the US has ever been in.

Emerson,

You seem to be forgetting the attacks on the US Marines (241 dead) in Lebanon, and the Saddam/Iraq attack on the USS Stark in '88 during the Regan regime.

RR did nothing about either attack.
He cut n run, hey?

Kinzie,

We already won, remember? No WMDs, Saddam is gone, elections were held, mission accomplished. Time to leave running Iraq to the Iraqis.

I was startled by Hagel's presentation - his assertion that southern Iraq is in chaos.

I'm concerned that the picture of progress Petraeus painted isn't honest.

If we can't trust Petraeus to give us an honest account, Iraq is truly lost.

Petraeus should have given us an honest account. Not just what he believed to be honest, but beyond a "this is my view account."

I never supported the war, but I do not want the U.S. to leave until we can put Iraq back together. I don't see that happening and I don't know that there are any good options. We can't leave until we get it straightened out, but we can't get it straightened out if our generals are being less than 100 % forthright with what is happening in ALL sectors of Iraq.

This isn't about Republican and Democrat anymore. This isn't even about "America." This is about a country we attacked without provocation. We need to use however much blood and treasure it takes to get this country back on its feet.

cjones:

The question you pose contains a false premise. The false premise is the assumption that people vote for the GOP. As far as I know, no one has ever voted for the GOP. The GOP is never on a ballot, and never has been.

People vote for (hopefully) live, breathing candidates. [Most candidates claim they are, but I'm sure some of them have been fibbing.] Some of the candidates on the ballot occasionally belong to the GOP.

This is where your false premise becomes critical.

Not all members of the Republican Party (GOP) support the war in Iraq. In fact, some elected GOPers have better bragging rights of being against it sooner than Barak Obama. Six Republican members of Congress, including Ron Paul, voted against the Iraq War Resolution. [And that's better than Hillary can say for herself, too.] And there are a lot of non-politicians in the GOP who also do not support the war. Thus, a vote for a member of the GOP is not a vote for a monolithic organization that supports the war in Iraq. Far from it.

Yes, its true that GWB is President and a member of the GOP; but a lot of Republicans do not like him. An increasing number of Republicans actually find him entirely horrible, myself included. Consider the fact that GWB's approval ratings are down into the high 20s. His numbers would not be so low if a substantial number of Republicans did not also disapprove of his job performance. I mean, I hope you don’t believe that Republicans represent only 28% of the voting public - do you?

In the future, I will happily vote for someone with GOP membership. This is not because I like the war in Iraq. I have always thought it was foolish in the extreme to invade Iraq.

No, I will vote for someone in the GOP who will actually bring some sanity to government for once, and perhaps just a little bit of gosh darn common sense. Too much of that has been KIA, or at least gone MIA, among all the polarizing rhetoric that has dug a chasm between the two Americas that now exist: the sane and the inconceivable.

And, as long as we are on the subject of sacrificing children, we might as well talk about some other governmental warts that are bound to leave your children nothing but ashes and bowls of steam for dinner. Lets talk about greedy politicians who steal money from hard working citizens and give it to other people just so they can get re-elected. Let's talk about the fact that we now have a nine (9) trillion dollar government debt that we have been slowly racking up over the past forty (40) or so years as the result of politicking from both the Democrats and Republicans. And then lets talk about how much of that has been added because of the politics of "plunder" that drive both the welfare state and the practice of earmarks and pork. And then, after that, we can talk about how it came to be that no one is endowed with individual rights any more, except for a few with enough courage to stand up to the government.

The Iraq war will eventually go away somehow. All these other problems will not go away unless you and I do something to take back our country and make them go away. Unless we do, your children and grandchildren, as well as mine, will be toast.

Bill Street, well said. Nothing to add.

Go ahead, Mr. President. Ask me for another $200Billion for this strategy. I dare you.
I live only 3 blocks from the post office, so changing from GOP to IND or DEM will only take me about 15 minutes.

Posted by: david | September 11, 2007 6:43 PM

David,

Thank you for your post. Only proof you can be a Republican and not support this lunacy. I used to be a moderate Republican and voted for Bush in 2000, but his actions and policies regarding this war (Iraq, not Afghanistan) can not be supported

Wait until we get attacked again and we will not have any forces here at home to help us. Just look to Katrina for proof.

"Emerson,

You seem to be forgetting the attacks on the US Marines (241 dead) in Lebanon, and the Saddam/Iraq attack on the USS Stark in '88 during the Regan regime.

RR did nothing about either attack.
He cut n run, hey?

Posted by: C.Morris | September 11, 2007 9:43 PM"

Well. Emerson just doesn't seem po'd about these attacks.

Guess they are different somehow.

[quote]
How can the Democrats be entrusted with the nation's security when they can't even keep a few nutcase protesters out of the hearing room?

Posted by: Bruce | September 11, 2007 6:23 PM
[/quote]

Bruce throws up a straw man & prays that no one will call him on it. Too bad, he loses the bet:

"The Federal Protective Service (FPS) — within U.S. Immigration Customs
Enforcement (ICE) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — is responsible
for protecting federal government property, personnel, visitors, and customers, including
property leased by the General Services Administration (GSA)."

source: http://opencrs.com/rpts/RS22706_20070816.pdf

How is this a Democratic party problem, Bruce?