Washington at War

Any discussion of the Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker must begin with this stipulation: it was an exercise in PR, not policy-making. Whatever the two witnesses had to offer, they were there to represent the President, and the President's position is clear. War yesterday, war today, war forever.

The hearings did provide a window into Washington's thinking about the Iraq War and the stunning degree to which our political class is trapped in concentric circles of imperial myopia. In the outer ring sit Democrats (and the occasional Republican), who expressed a searing frustration at finding themselves in a surreal, Groundhog Day-like eternal recurrence: things are better but not better enough, stabilizing but not yet stable, so we must stay. And while they took some shots at the "successful surge" story line, they showed themselves to be prisoners of their own making, unable or unwilling to move outside the terms of the debate set by the Administration.

Why, they asked, won't the people we're occupying do what we want? They aimed some of their most heated rhetoric at Iraqis who refuse to "take responsibility" for the future of their country. Criticism of the Maliki government is legitimate and warranted. But these criticisms slid all too easily from the government to the Iraqis themselves, creating a bizarre and unjust framing of the war's victims as its beneficiaries. "We've done a lot for the Iraqis in terms of just the numbers themselves," said Barbara Boxer. "And we are losing our sons and daughters every single day for the Iraqis to be free."

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