General Petraeus is testifying on the hill today and the Prospect is on top of it. Check out Dana's liveblogging right here on TAPPED, and go read Matt Yglesias's piece about how the surge has succeeded... in making Iraq the next president's problem:
To evaluate the surge, you have to consider its goals. Peter Feaver, who spent years working on the National Security Council on Iraq issues as a specialist on domestic public opinion, has explained in Commentary the administration's desire "to develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush's successor." Or as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden less charitably put it there's no plan at all other than "to muddle through and hand the problem off to his successor."
Given the Bush administration's goals -- primarily to rescue their legacy from its current disastrous shape -- policy and partisan politics are closely linked. Consider where we stood eighteen months ago, just after the 2006 midterm elections. Republican members of Congress were running scared after substantial electoral defeats driven by public disgruntlement with Iraq. This set the stage for the Democrats' preferred political strategy, in which they would join together with moderate (and vulnerable) Republicans to force the war to start winding-down without needing to do anything risky like deny a presidential request for a emergency war-related appropriations. This would have in turn been disastrous for the Bush legacy, he would have launched an unprovoked war with Iraq and then lost it.
Also, from the archives, Spencer Ackerman's prescient piece on Petraeus from January of 2007 and his interview with the general last year which explains how he focuses on details to the exclusion of the more important big picture.
--The Editors
