Bush's war

H/t to Shaun at Upper Left for this NYTimes oped: Hiding Behind the General. It is rather amazing that we have heard Bush talk about General Petraus for the last year, and sometimes we forget that he pushed out Generals who disagreed with his surge all the while talking about listening to the "Generals on the ground." But this week, we are supposed to hear a report--one that we already know is politicized and controversial, and the Times suggests is just a smokescreen.

"Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus’s strategy — as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell — another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier’s duty — play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war.

....

Nothing has changed about Mr. Bush’s intentions. Waving off the independent reports, he plans to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco. Military progress without political progress is meaningless, and Mr. Bush no more has a plan for unifying Iraq now than when he started the war. The United States needs a prudent exit strategy that will withdraw American forces and try to stop Iraq’s chaos from spreading."