BernieHund: The Political Watchdog

Today I have watched the House Committee ask questions of the two witnesses, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.  I am worn out if the general and the ambassador are not.

And, to what end?  That has been the question this entire week.  I have heard senators and representatives from both sides of the isle ask the same questions over and over and over and over again.  And, to the best of my comprehension there have been no answers.  We have been given a Bayer aspirin (I have nothing against Bayer aspirin) when the disease calls for a specific antibiotic.  In other words, the testimony of the two witnesses has shed absolutely no light on anything whatsoever, except that there is no diplomatic policy in Iraq.  I find it hard to accept two meetings a year among several countries in the region as diplomacy…. and that is about the sum total of what we have been told.

Obviously, General Petraeus is doing something with this surge.  Unfortunately, the “breath” the surge was supposed to provide is being held and I guess we are waiting to exhale.  It seems that while our military has made the ultimate sacrifice in all too many cases, the diplomatic mission is portrayed, without intention, as a total failure.

Repeatedly, the two witnesses have been asked what are the benchmarks.  How will we know when we have reached our goals?  What are our goals?  When will we know if we have won or lost?  When can all the service men and women come home?  And, amid the redundancy of questioning, no matter how the question has been posed, there is no answer.

My question is if we don’t know where we are going, how will we know when we get there?  It seems that no one knows where we are headed.  This is not so much a failure of military action as it is of diplomatic, or lack of diplomatic policy.  And, perhaps, it all goes back to the days of “shock and awe” when we were going to be greated with children lining the streets, flowers in hand.  Well, the administration had no plans beyond “shock and awe”.  That has left our military stranded in the desert with no maps for getting out. 

The failure of Iraq is not that of the military, but that of the administration.  To paraphrase one Congressman who spoke to General Petraeus…. we better be planning on coming home, because after the election and after January 20, 2009, this war is over.

Amen!