Stating the obvious

I don't normally pay much attention to George Will. Since he "coached" Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential debate against Carter, in my eyes, George Will has been a Republican hack and a conservative lapdog.

I grant, Will has been critical of some Bush administration policies, but now, George Will is stating the obvious:

Before Gen. David Petraeus's report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq's Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president's and Petraeus's standards of success.

Un huh! That's because, for those who were paying attention, "The Surge" was not in Anbar province. "The Surge" was to deal specifically with the security situation in Baghdad.

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Good question! There is also no satisfactory answer to the question: Why did the U.S. attack Iraq in the first place?

What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 -- the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction -- was fictitious. That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president's decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war -- the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

Excuse me. Lest we remind the pious Mr. Will that he was one of the drum-beaters for the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Next he'll be telling us he could see the whole thing coming all along and the US involvement in Iraq was bound to fail.

He's starting to sound like a phony Osama bin Laden video tape.

Is he a traitor yet?