Democratic or Republican, the next President will not want to "lose Iraq."

What the hell do they think they have to sell next year?

Heyyyy! Take at look at this baby! A brand new DLC 2008 war!

Christ, you could comb your hair in that brand new super glossy paint job.

This one is guaranteed to get you fu*ked!

Three months into the job, General David Petraeus says it is difficult to predict how well the surge of troops in Baghdad will succeed before the full number of troops arrive and that he would not have a definitive answer about prospects for stability by September, when he is to report back to Congress.

"I think generally is is still early days. We are literally still just setting the footprint if you will to do what we intend to achieve but until we get all those forces in and have really worked with them for a while I think it's difficult to see what's going to happen," he told me in an interview Tuesday evening.

No report on prospects. Too early. Just setting down our footprints.>

Progress against AQ in Anbar is very dramatic and very real.

To simplify: divide Iraq into 4 theatres: Shia South, Sunni West (Anbar), Baghdad, Kurdish North. The North is and has been a huge success.

Baghdad has and is a huge problem, though some reports indicate very mild progress by a just-beginning surge ... though that in turn does not solve the fundamental political problem of bridging the sectarian divide.

The Shia South was quiet, but is now getting much more dicey, especially as the UK draws downa nd Iran asserts influence.

And the Sunni West (al Anbar) has turned into a success since late 2006 and early 2007, as the locals have decided to turn against al Qaeda, who had been beheading people and detonating truck bombs left and right.

This progress is real. With respect to what Klein is reporting on, Greenwald doesn't know what the Hell he's talking about.

And as he maligns Joe Klein's "secret sources," he does it out of ignorance. Here's a non-secret source: I spent January in Anbar and maintain many contacts there. The shift is indeed dramatic, and Al Qaeda in Iraq is indeed getting its ass kicked.

This is a distinct issue from the overall political problem with the central government in baghdad, but Greenwald picks apart the former to make a largely unrelated point about the latter.

And it's ignorant, just ignorant.

in my piece.
This is a comment best made at Greenwald's blog.

It is not germane to my post, imo.

Your piece approvingly links Greenwald's post, the entire basis of which is skewering Klein's credulity with military sources. And he is 100% wrong in this criticism, on this topic.

The fact that Greenwald uses this skewering of Klein's assessment of Al Qaeda as a more general post on the war's futility, and you continue his off-topic topic, is besides the fact that you are approvingly linking shallow and misinformed commentary to make your own point.

Essentially, you're approvingly linking a guy who doesn't know what the ** he's talking about. You are disseminating distorted information, whatever your overall assessment of the war.

As a counterpoint, I'm offering my perspective that Greenwald's analysis - and the analysis of this post by extension - are not well-versed enough to critique the overall situation in Iraq, much less the specificity of Klein's original article.

That's what it is: They believe the Republicans will accuse them of abandoning the troops and that "people" will believe it, so they have to give Bush what he wants.