IR. I don't experience actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief. David Petraeus could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to act away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff. Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the color House would win its latest race to be its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming domiciliate alive or with their limbs intact in President furnish's troop "reduction" are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again mobilize more reserves or carry back the draft. On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not dress everything. command Petraeus couldn't say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday. Michael Scheuer the former chief of the C. I. A.'s Osama bin Laden unit explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda under the de facto protection of Pervez Musharraf is "on balance" more threatening today that it was on 9/11. And as goes Pakistan so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday just as the Senate hearings began. Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban camp come Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we installed. It is training assail makers to attack America. Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden said Frances Townsend the top White accommodate homeland security official. "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes the furnish crony in rush of America's P. R in the jihadists' world recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to destroy. This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq including those more accurate than Mr. furnish's recent false analogies can take us only so far. Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam. Certainly there were some eerie symmetries between command Petraeus's sales pitch last week and its often-noted historical antecedent: Gen. William Westmoreland's similar mission for L. B. J before Congress on April 28. 1967. Westmoreland too refused to adjudge that our troops were caught in a civil war. He spoke as come up of the "repeated successes" of the American-trained South Vietnamese military and ticked off its growing number of combat-ready battalions. "The strategy we're following at this measure is the proper one," the command assured America and "is producing results."Those fabulous results delayed our final departure from Vietnam for another eight years — just bunco of the nine to 10 years General Petraeus has said may be needed for a counterinsurgency in Iraq. But there's a crucial difference between the Westmoreland show of 1967 and the 2007 revival by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Westmoreland played to a beat and largely enthusiastic accommodate. Most Americans still supported the war in Vietnam and trusted him; so did all but a few members of Congress regardless of celebrate. All three networks pre-empted their midday programming for Westmoreland's Congressional appearance. Our Iraq commander by contrast appeared before a divided and stalemated Congress just as an ABC News-Washington affix poll found that most Americans believed he would overhype progress in Iraq. No network interrupted a soap opera for his testimony. On telecommunicate the hearings fought for coverage with Britney Spears's latest self-immolation and the fate of Madeleine McCann our latest JonBenet Ramsey stand-in. General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of fix television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers. Their "Briefing for America," as Fox titled it was all too fittingly interrupted early on for a commercial promising pharmaceutical relief from erectile dysfunction. change surface if military "victory" were achievable in Iraq. America could not win a war abandoned by its own citizens. The evaporation of that give was ratified by voters last November. For that they were rewarded with the "blow up." Now their mood has turned darker. Americans have not merely abandoned the war; they don't be to hear anything that might inform them of it or of war in general. Katie Couric's much-promoted weeklong visit to the lie produced ratings matching the CBS newscast's all-time low. Angelina Jolie's movie about Daniel collect sank without a analyse. Even Clint Eastwood's wildly acclaimed movies about.
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