Ed Kilgore makes a good point here — it’s really not clear why the details of General Petraeus’ presentation on the military state of play in Iraq matter at all. The question of the surge, and of the military presence more generally, is whether or not the presence is creating a situation where the presence will no longer be needed in order to avoid the Potentially Catastrophic Consequences of Withdrawal. As long as we have a situation where the day after we leave, the Catastrophic Consequences of Withdrawal will come to pass, then we may as well just leave tomorrow.

Obviously, though, the aspect of the situation in Iraq that makes the CCW frightening isn’t the quantity of last week’s car bombs, but rather the political conflict that led to the car-bombings. If violence declines simply because American troops are patrolling the country, then the troops need to patrol forever. If, by contrast, the decline in violence leads toward a resolution of the political conflict then it’s a different story.

So the question of the surge is fundamentally outside of Petraeus’ domain. And as hard as Ambassador Crocker tried to dodge the point (by for example, trying to relabel the total absence of central government control over the vast majority of the country as an experiment in federalism) the answer here is clearly no. We could, of course, just give it some more time. And then more time. And then yet more time. But by the same token, if we leave and some Catastrophic Consequences break out and then we give that more time, things will eventually calm down.

All of which is to say that there’s no such thing as “military progress” that we can tally up next to absence of political progress and say, “eh, the glass is half full.” The military exists to try to help accomplish political ends. If the military isn’t succeeding in achieving those political ends, then it’s not making progress, and our troops ought to be sent somewhere where they can do something useful.

I first heard rumor of this “General Betray Us” ad plan Friday night and it sounded dumb. And when I saw it this kornng it looked dumb. But not nearly as dumb as the House Republicans look endlessly harping on it at the hearing. This war is serious stuff — literally a matter of life and death — and here they are screwing around like children.

Meanwhile the basic point of the MoveOn ad — that it doesn’t make sense for the public or the congress to make policy on the basis of secret data that’s at odds with publicly available assssments as well as work by the GAO, CIA, and DIA — is eminently sensible. Petraeus’ slides are just random pictures with no sourcing, it’s ridiculous.

Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) was just saying that it’s unrealistic to expect Iraq to move swiftly to militia disarmament. After all, look at Northern Ireland where the IRA has just only very recently agreed to lay down arms.

This all seems reasonable to be, except that Smith seems to think this is a data point in favor of his side. It proves, you see, that the GAO scorecard is silly. And maybe so. But peering just a half an inch beneath the analogy is the idea that civil war in Iraq might continue for thirty or forty years before it would be reasonable to expect our policy to start showing results.

General Petraeus is making the point that, contrary to some press reports (including commentary on this blog), the US Army isn’t “arming” any Sunni insurgents in al-Anbar province or elsewhere. If he says so, I’ll take him at his word. Still, we are giving them money. And since you can use money to buy weapons — especially if the US military is smiling on your efforts to do so — I’m not sure I really see the difference here. Moreover, Petraeus and Crocker are both bragging about Anbar Sunnis joining the local police force and presumably we are arming the local police force and given that Shiite militias in Shiite areas find it easy to infiltrate the local police there, it seems like the new, Sunnified Iraqi local police in Sunni areas are just going to be Sunni insurgent groups, but this time with uniforms.