The General's Moment

When David Petraeus finally got to speak--after nearly an hour of congressional bloviation and a catastrophic failure to get the microphones to work--he did not provide a terribly mixed report.

After stressing that he was speaking for himself--meaning not as a pawn of the White House spin machine--the general was remarkably optimistic, considering that a majority of the country thinks Iraq is an unmitigated mess.

With color-coded charts, he went into rat-a-tat-tat mode: The surge's objectives are largely being met. The number of deaths is down. Iraqi forces are shouldering more of the load. More tribes are rejecting al-Qaeda. And the headline-grabber: He wants American forces cut to pre-surge levels by next summer.

Yes, Petraeus conceded, the war was "complex, difficult and sometimes downright frustrating." But he didn't sound that frustrated, speaking of "battlefield geometry" and all that. And he stuck it to the antiwar side, saying a "premature drawdown" would "likely have devastating consequences."

If you're pro-administration, you seize on the upbeat progress report and the notion that some troops (since President Bush has vowed to embrace Petraeus's findings) could be coming home.

If you're anti-administration, you wonder how an 18-month surge of 30,000 troops that simply returns U.S. forces to previous levels can be regarded as anything other than buying time for a continued morass.

"The talk in Washington on Monday was all about troop reductions," says the L.A. Times, "yet it also brought into sharp focus President Bush's plans to end his term with a strong U.S. military presence in Iraq, and to leave tough decisions about ending the unpopular war to his successor. . . . The plans also would allow Bush to live up to his pledge to the defining mission of his presidency, and perhaps to improve his chances for a decent legacy. He can say he left office pursuing a strategy that was having at least some success in suppressing violence, a claim that some historians may view sympathetically."

The Boston Globe says the testimony was blunter than some expected:

"Army General David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker yesterday gave Americans something that many say they've been yearning for: a straight, sober, and nuanced presentation of the situation in Iraq.

"The two officials' air of sincerity and competence probably put to rest the notion, advanced by some liberal groups, that they would parrot the agenda of the Bush administration.

"But the upshot of their congressional testimony - the US military mission is achieving its aims but still has no clear end, and the long nation-building process will be, in Crocker's words, 'slow, uneven, punctuated by setbacks as well as achievements'- may still be a shock to those Americans who expected that the troop 'surge' would foster a quicker political solution."

I don't know: It still seemed strikingly upbeat to me in a glass-half-full way.