This weekend the talkies were an example of life imitating art; specifically Samuel Beckett, or as George Stephanopoulous put it on ABC’s This Week, “This week, waiting for Petraeus.”

Stephanopoulous provided some historical context, though probably not the kind the White House wants, when he noted: 

When General David Petraeus begins his week-long blitzkrieg of Washington tomorrow, it will be the most high-profile appearance of a war general on Capitol Hill since April 28, 1967. That’s when General William Westmoreland told a joint session of Congress that America was making progress in Vietnam.

GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND (From videotape.): Given the nature of the enemy, it seems to me that the strategy we are following at this time is the proper one, and that it is producing results. 

Although his guest, Sen. John McCain thinks George picked the wrong general:  

MCCAIN: Thank you, George. Could I just mention that General Westmoreland had the same strategy in Vietnam that Donald Rumsfeld and General Casey had. And we had a general named Creighton Abrams who came along and really did make dramatic progress on –

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you think General Petraeus is the Creighton Abrams of Vietnam?    

MCCAIN: Yes. Not the Westmoreland, yeah. And –

STEPHANOPOULOS: Thank you for the history lesson.

In evaluating the surge there is an old military saying that amateurs talk about strategy while professionals talk about logistics. In that regard Sen. McCain did make a worthwhile point with respect to sustaining U.S. military presence. 

STEPHANOPOULOS: The crunch time is going to come next spring.

MCCAIN: Yup. Sure.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We all know that it’s going to be hard to sustain troop levels after the spring. You’re going to have to extend tours. General Casey, the Army chief of staff, says he won’t consider that. Will you?

MCCAIN: Well, I’ll consider some adjustments, if they need to be made. But I want to tell you, in all due respect to anyone, I know what it’s like when we have a defeated Army. It’s tough when you have an overstressed Guard and Reserve. It’s tough when you have overstressed men and women serving in the military with incredible bravery and heroism. But when they’re defeated – In the 1970s, after we were defeated, we had riots on our aircraft carriers; we had rampant drug use; we had insubordination. We had a broken Army, and it took us a decade to recover from that. I don’t want to see a defeated Army.

Meanwhile, over on Meet the Press, Tim Russert had retired Marine Gen. James Jones, chairman of the Independent Commission on Iraqi Security Forces, which I blogged about earlier, on as a guest. I think this passage bears repeating.  

RUSSERT: But the debate we’re having in this country and in Congress now, as the president has said repeatedly — when the Iraqis stand up, the Americans stand down. Your best judgment is that it’s going to take at least three to four years for the Iraqi army to stand up and away that all the American troops can stand down?

JONES: Oh, I think that’s probably reasonable.

Some passion was added by Sen. Joe Biden:   

RUSSERT: Let me show you what you said in Iowa last week — “If we do not change course in Iraq soon, you’re going to see, two years from now, helicopters hovering over our embassy over the Green Zone in Baghdad with people hanging onto the ladders just like Vietnam, mark my words.”

BIDEN: Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, I believe that. Look, let me tell you, Tim, there is no possibility, no possibility of a central government governing Iraq in any near term. What I did see, the only place that anything has worked, is when you’ve had local control — local police in local neighborhoods, local security, the ability of the local population to have control over the fabric of their daily lives giving them breathing room so they can, in fact, have a central government that has two functions. One, deal with the borders; two, distribute revenue. Other than that, if you don’t move to a decentralized federal system, there is no possibility, in my view, of success.

Over on Face the Nation Sen. Kennedy did his Oliver Hardy imitation by blaming the Iraqis for the mess we’re in:

KENNEDY: Well, I was against the war, I continue to be against the war, and I’m going to do everything I possibly can to bring American troops home at the earliest possible time. Looking at tomorrow, we have to really see where we are today — 4,000 Americans that have been killed, 30,000 wounded, 100,000 Iraqis that have either been killed or wounded, 3 million Iraqis made homeless in that country, a half trillion dollars been expended going up to $1 trillion, an Army that is almost broken according to members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Osama bin Laden on the loose. Now, that is where we are. And where we are now also today is the fact that we have American leaders, general, colonels, fighting men and women that are out there in Iraq spilling their blood every single day. And whether their blood is going to continue to be spilled is going to depend upon the actions of the Iraqi politicians. This is the wrong policy. American servicemen and women in Iraq are being held hostage to Iraqi politicians. That has never been the circumstances. This is a cockamamie policy. We have a policy that is put on its head. Why we are putting our servicemen and women to be held hostage, effectively, to what Iraqi politicians are going to do, and they’re going to continue to lose lives over there, into the future is completely unacceptable.

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