Whitehouse to write Patraeus report

[Perndog]

I'm with Reechround on this one.

[mburbank]

Falling apart in what way, exactly? Not to stray too far from the point. I'm only anti-human in that I think as a perfectly natural species we have perfectly naturally grossly over succeeded in the short term creating fairly grim prospects for the long term continuation of civilization as we know it.

But we'll be way too busy fighting pointless brush wars and worrying obsessively about a few million potentially dead in potential terrorist strikes to do much of anything about the vanishing of the resource and conditions we need to stay alive until we're killing each other over drinking water, food and arable land instead of oil and 'beliefs'.

But thank GOD the surge is going well enough that next year we can reduce troops to pre-siege numbers. If, you know, things go well, and it turns out the Surge was a good idea. If the surge turns out NOT to have worked, it will be too dangerous to bring anybody home, so we'll have to continue it. If it was wrong to do it at all, we have to keep doing it. If it was right, then we can stop. So we can buy time, which was the point, until it turned out that securing Anbar was the point. Because everybody agrees that military solution isn't possible, unless nothing but military action is the only thing you can even pretend is going anything but really horrible. In which case...

Know what? I think I know who's warming up the planet. God.