Did anyone happen to watch the Petraeus hearings?

[Sailor for Warner]

Thoughts?

[Turbineguy]

1. Bush has changed

Quartermasters on the Titanic.

[Sailor for Warner]

2. Ive met him once

I liked him personally, he is very very VERY smart. Also articulate, independent and one of the more respected americans in Iraq. I just wanted to get everyones thoughts on him.

[Turbineguy]

5. I expect him to be very smart

I don't wish him this job, nor do I wish him ill. My comment was actually more directed to Bush, which of course was not the question.

[Change has come]

3. was the hearing televised?

Mike Malloy played quite a few clips. I was impressed with the anger in Hillary's questions. She was lit.

[Sailor for Warner]

4. I rarely listen to what the politicians say in these things

I was more interested in what people thought of him.

[confludemocrat]

6. Mike said they were on CSPAN 3. That MM show is a must-listen for the news that

Petreas (or whatever his name is) stated that he considered the mercenaries there as essential to aiding the success of the escalation

[spanone]

7. I have to ask myself why he seems to be the only military commander who thinks the surge is good.

Are the others stupid?

[jmowreader]

8. If you were to get Petraeus drunk enough, he might tell you he thinks they are

Petraeus thinks--hell, he KNOWS--the war's being run wrong. He was 101st Airborne Division commander in Iraq. His OPLAN revolved around a lot of nation-to-nation interaction and civil affairs stuff that no one else was doing. In his sector (Mosul, I think), he had very low amounts of sectarian violence. His replacement was one of the "shoot anything that moves" guys who fucked up the rest of the country, and they brought Mosul's casualty rate right into line with everywhere else's.

Petraeus is going to go in under the assumption that there is absolutely nothing in Iraq that can't be fixed by running the whole war the way he ran his war in Mosul. I think he's right, but he needs half a million more troops and a functioning time machine to pull it off.

(Incidentallly, the time machine he needs is the one that takes him back far enough toupsell the benefits of his running the show to Colin Powell, not the one that takes him back to...oh, April 2001, when the proper exploitation of a hundred-dollar bill and a strip map of all the truck stops in the DC area would have solved the problem before it really began.)