Thursday, April 10, 2008

The Petraeus Testimony II

Obama has tough questions for the General and Ambassador Crocker.

Meanwhile, Fred Kaplan has a nice summary of the testimony from these two men.

If things in Iraq get worse, we can't cut back, lest things get worse still; if things get better, we can't cut back, lest we risk reversing all our gains.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

it seems that i will never be short on things that irritate me to no end.
most irksome these days is the fanciful notion that senator obama is going to (or would, if given the chance) 'bring the troops home'.
i see very little of this in his plans.
i see a huge number of troops remaining behind to maintain the green zone and maintain our embassy (can you say behemoth?). but, whats worse, is the idea that he wants to insert contractors in the place of the troops we pull out.
of course, that last bit gets into your next post, captain, about torture.
given the choice, id keep the troops in iraq. if the options were:
1. troops
2. contractors
id choose troops every time. at least our troops still have a semblance of restrictions and regulations. if we were to decrease the number of troops only to increase the number of contractors i can only see a massive increase in human rights catastrophes.

Captain Noble said...

I think both parties are using rhetoric because of the election. I seriously doubt either Obama or McCain are going to take any drastic measures. Both will end up with with a more moderate plan dictated by the reality of the matter and not what election rhetoric dictates.

As for contractors, I completely agree that using contractors is not an ideal solution or even a moderately good one. If this war was as necessary as Bush said it was and we needed more troops, then he should have called for a draft. I would have been upset with that because I never agreed with the war in the first place, but it would have been a more honest and just move than using mercenaries.

Anonymous said...

yeah, but then it wouldnt have made our congresscritters a cool 196 mil throug their investments in companies contracting with the pentagon.