Selling the Iraq Mission Down the River

General David Petraeus is the conservatives' Viagra when it comes to the war in Iraq.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq has succeeded where his predecessors failed in fashioning a counterinsurgency-based Surge strategy that dramatically lowered American and civilian casualties in the latter months of 2007 while giving the Baghdad government breathing room to work through the difficult process of reconciling various ethnic factions and becoming what would truly be a national government.

Trouble is, the often heroic efforts of the men and women under Petraeus have been betrayed by the commander in chief in Washington, something that those conservative fail to grasp when they crow about dramatically reduced death tolls and smile at the bulge between their legs.

The latest round of conservative high fives is the result of an interview with Petraeus in Foreign Affairs in which he enunciates, in his own circumspect way, why the military component of the Surge has largely succeeded while stopping well short of stating the obvious:

The other component – that reconciliation thing – is pretty much dead in the water because President Bush no longer even makes a pretense of the Iraqi government attaining the benchmarks that it has consistently failed to meet and has given Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government coup insurance by promising a long-term U.S. troop presence in return for first dibs at Iraq’s vast untapped oil wealth.

The best Petraeus can manage in the interview regarding the Iraqis is that:

"They will be the first to tell you they want to make more progress and make it more rapidly than they have done to this point. There have been accomplishments, especially in recent weeks. They approved a pension law that extends pension rights to tens of thousands Iraqis who were left out, cast off. They agreed to the Security Council resolution extension, which gives us our mandate. They have debated accountability and justice, which is the de-Baathification reform legislation. The budget for 2008 should come up for a vote very soon after they return from Eid and the hajj. So, the progress has been halting, but there are a number of encouraging signs on the horizon."

How about that pension law! A real watershed event, eh?

This is what the Brits call "small beer." Because the reality is that while conservatives are getting their rocks off, the White House has sold Petraeus and his troops down the river.