The Teal Deer of Iraq.

I admire and somewhat envy David Petraeus. I really do: He's getting to do something on a large scale and with enormous resources that few people get to do-- Fix Things.

No, I'm serious. He gets to go somewhere profoundly broken (let's leave aside, for the moment as immaterial, the question of who broke it) and make a concerted effort to make it less broken.

Now, this is very distinct from fighting a war, although what he has are soldiers (and National Guardsmen, another element of distinction), and there is some fighting. This is, in effect, what the establishment called Vietnam: a police action. But I digress.

The point is, here is a man who has the ability to ignore the questions of shouldn't and should, ignore the controversies, bend his head, and do-- not /precisely/ what he has been told to do ('win the war' is at this point an abstract that has no meaning; there is no victory against insurgents. You can't kill an idea, and a faith that encourages martyrdom gains strength everytime you do it physical damage, something that implies that the Military Heads should learn more strategy from Japanese video games), but rather, what is the best thing to do in the context of his given mission. I am hardly trying to draw a comparison between him and the 'Just Following Orders' school of Godwin. No, he's turning this whole thing into a humanitarian mission, and basing his reports on the assumption that the Primary Objective is to make Iraq a successful state. In his behavior, (because I am not going to escape a Third Reich comparison, but in this instance, it isn't wholly negative I swear), he is more a Gaulieter, of the school that wished to look after their respective regions like, well, like Murat or Bernadotte did the areas over which they were given Kingship. And you can have respect for that, know where he's coming from, if you think of it that way.

That said.

He /is/ coming to the table with the assumption that... well a) that we ultimately care about whether or not Iraq is a thriving, successful state and b) assuming that yes, on some level we care, that Iraq's success trumps any number of other possible priorities at this time. Given this, of course he will say that we need to keep troops there. It's in order to preserve stability.

And there are those that say he's right, to allude to the point I ignored earlier, if for no other reason than the fact that we broke it, and so ought to fix it. Although some others will argue that it was broken in the first place.

However, there's a wide and possibly growing segment who disagree with the General on the basic assumption-- they simply have decided that stability in Iraq is not a priority. Sorry, Dave. Your mission doesn't matter.

Barak Obama, I think, was saying this clearly when he made the statements about how he was certain that the military establishment would carry out the missions he gave them. He, I gather, understood where Petraeus was coming from-- he was giving the best report he knew, in light of his set goals as he understood them. Great. As far as Obama's concerned, he'd probably do just as well (and his methods have been rather ingenious and creative, or else not unlike the US Army's in The Last Samurai)if he were sent to Zimbabwe, (to mention an international travesty in which the US definitely won't intervene), or Darfur, or Lhasa. And there are those who might be of the opinion that those would be worthier missions, myself included.

Because on the other end of the responsibility spectrum, the real war is, and always should have been, in Afghanistan. And we've got to pay for that one already. While not having to suffer from the usual problems of fighting a war on two fronts-- i.e., exposure to being sliced apart, although we've definitely got some troops being stretched thin, we're really being hit in the cost department, that way. And at the moment, for numerous reasons, the American people can't afford a war. The gas prices hiked with the invasion of Iraq, and the Oil companies want to keep them right where they are, because it seems that a prerequisite of being an Oil baron is short-sightedness (except in the arena of strict market futures), and narrow field of vision. Tl;dr: they want to make money NOW and don't give a toss about the future in general. But that's another, and painfully obvious rant, and perhaps, if I were in a doomed industry, I might decide that hastening its demise by jacking up prices to the point where consumption will necessarily shift to other forms of energy, to make as much as possible while I still can would be a great idea. After all, maybe one day, oil will be like coal now, the fallback position for developing nations who have to use dirty energy because they can't do anything else. And I would bleed those economies happily. Perhaps.

But I was talking about David Petraeus. And sympathizing. Sir: I feel your pain, I really do.

And yes, I have something of an idea as to what one might do to /actually/ stabilize the middle east as a whole. But Jimmy Carter's gone and tried to do a lot of it, so... yeah.