Does Petraeus Have the Answers?

Michael Duffy writes in Time: "It's all a bit of a charade. The president has had little or no intention of changing course since he adopted the surge strategy in January.

"Certainly not this soon. The surge's architects had always imagined the U.S. offensive would take 18 months to work -- and maybe more. Bush officials bought themselves a lot of time (and margin) last winter by saying the surge might only last a few months and involve only 20,000 troops. But that was a snow job; it took five months just to get the troops into position, and a force of some 30,000 troops is involved now.

"Congress was skeptical from the start and demanded a progress report after nine months. But the Bush Administration never intended to treat this checkpoint as a moment of decision; it has regarded it from the start merely as a speed bump."

The New York Times editorial board writes: "Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus's strategy -- as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell -- another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier's duty -- play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war. . . .

"Waving off the independent reports, he plans to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco. Military progress without political progress is meaningless, and Mr. Bush no more has a plan for unifying Iraq now than when he started the war. The United States needs a prudent exit strategy that will withdraw American forces and try to stop Iraq's chaos from spreading."

Frank Rich writes in his New York Times opinion column (subscription required) that the relevant anniversary this week is not so much 9/11 but "Sept. 8, 2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for the administration's latest scam.

"That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice -- were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. 'We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,' said Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a sales pitch concocted by a White House speechwriter.

"What followed was an epic propaganda onslaught of distorted intelligence, fake news, credulous and erroneous reporting by bona fide journalists, presidential playacting and Congressional fecklessness."

The Philadelphia Daily News editorial board writes that it is "clear that President Bush has no intention of bringing troops home from Iraq while he's president.

"In fact, it's worse: he wants to make sure the next president can't either. . . .

"In a new book by Robert Draper, the president told the author that when it comes to Iraq, 'I'm playing for October-November.' . . .

"Elsewhere in this new book, the president muses about 'replenishing the ol' coffers' by charging huge fees for speaking engagements when he's out of office, and getting 'bored' and then hopping in his truck and going back to the ranch.