Petraeus holds the company line. We will leave... erm... when it's time to leave...

The false optimism of John McCain was revealed yesterday, even as Petraeus was asking that the troops remain at pre-surge levels for an undetermined amount of time.

McCain stated:

"Today it is possible to talk with real hope and optimism about the future of Iraq and the outcome of our efforts there," he said in his opening remarks to the Senate armed services committee.

Petraeus acknowledged that the kind of progress Bush has been looking for had not been achieved:

"We haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible."

Even Petraeus refuses to talk of Iraq in the wildly optimistic terms which McCain now routinely employs.

Barack Obama pointed out that there is no specific definition of success and that, any which exists, would point to a US presence of decades.

Questioning Petraeus during a Senate foreign affairs committee hearing, Obama set out a scenario in which he envisaged conditions would be right for a pullout. He told Petraeus it would take at least 20 to 30 years to create an Iraq with a highly efficient government, free of sectarianism, and with all trace of al-Qaida eliminated, and in which Iran had zero influence.

And, even saying it would take 20 to 30 years to achieve all that is being optimistic when one looks at how little has been achieved over the past year.

However, I don't believe that Bush even intends - or, indeed, ever intended - to carry out anything as broad as Obama outlines. The whole point of the surge was so that Bush can hand this mess over to the next administration and claim that he didn't lose the war.

We will then suffer decades of silly right wingers saying that success could have been achieved if those cowardly Democrats had only had the guts to stay the course. That's what the surge is really about. And that is what young Americans and many Iraqis are dying for. So that Bush can slink away from what he has done without accepting the complete and utter disaster he has unleashed.

The surge was Bush's response to the Iraq Study Group report, which argued that:

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. There is no path that can guarantee success, but the prospects can be improved. In this report, we make a number of recommendations for actions to be taken in Iraq, the United States, and the region. Our most important recommendations call for new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region, and a change in the primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly.

Bush saw in that document's clever phrasing, the fact that he was being asked to admit defeat and refused to do so, which is when he came up with the surge. Not to achieve victory, which I honestly believe that even he knows is no longer possible, but to stave off the day when defeat is acknowledged, and to pass that defeat on to the next administration.

Petraeus's statement, that troops must remain in Iraq indefinitely, merely maintains that objective.

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Tags: Petraeus, Bush, McCain, Obama, Clinton, troop withdrawal, surge, Iraq, Iraq war