Alex Massie Alex Massie

Waiting

What’s the point of waiting for General David Petraeus’s report from Iraq on how the newish US policy is faring? Most of the right will welcome whatever good news can be gleaned from it while most of the left will denounce any such news as propaganda and deny that anything good or even half-way positive could ever happen in Iraq.

In other words, most people in Washington seem intelligent enough to draw their conclusions from the report before its even been written. So why bother releasing it?

[So what would you do, eh? I haven’t a clue – which is one reason why I tend to avoid writing about Iraq. Another is that having been got so much of it wrong in the past it would be the height of arrogance to flip 180 degrees and write and opine and talk with equal certainty on what our policy should be now that most of my original analysis has been rendered obsolete by events. What should we do? I dunno. If this sounds maddeningly Micawberish then so be it.]

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