Prepare The Kabuki Stage

This is being billed as a "make or break" day for the Iraq occupation, but it's really not. Gen. Petraeus has already made up his mind; give it another Friedman Unit. I have no confidence that the Democrats will manage to make anything else the 30-second soundbite on the news tonight. The President will give a speech to the nation with a passel of lies in it, claiming that there's major security progress when there isn't. It won't matter that the Iraqi people think the surge has failed (70% think the surge has damaged security in their area), as long as the President and his willing supporters in Congress do. And the Democrats will flail around like they've always done on this issue, giving the President the funding he wants and getting something toothless in return, like the removal of 5 troops 6 years from now or something.

Marty Kaplan nails it today.

President Bush's prime time stay-the-course speech has already been written. Public opinion has already concluded that the Petraeus report will sugarcoat the statistics, that the Crocker report will move the goalposts, and that "victory" in Iraq will be no less absurd an American mission at the end of the week than at the beginning. Magical September will make Republicans no less likely to wag their lapdog tails at the White House, or to rattle their cut-and-run sabers at the Democrats, than will Magical March, the probable next location of the turning-point mirage. Democrats, for their part, will seize on the possible January withdrawal of one brigade of the surge as a bipartisan triumph, and their fear of being branded anti-troop and pro-terrorist by a bunch of chickenhawk demagogues will lead them to hail a non-binding non-deadline nonconditional footnote to the next defense appropriation as though they had drawn some heroic line in the sand.

This doesn't mean there will be any lack of yammering this week. The media will cover it with all the fanfare and ersatz sobriety that they afford to other pseudo-events, like State of the Union addresses. We will be told over and over how Very Serious these reports are, just as we were told how Terribly Important the report of the Iraq Study Group was. Experts and editorialists will announce how very crucial The Next Six Months -- the blogosphere's beloved Friedman Unit -- will be, despite the abundant, Googleable carcasses of previous and equally useless Next Six Months punditry stretching back to Mission Accomplished. There may even be some chatter about the virtues of our system of separation of powers, as though these hearings actually constitute Congressional oversight, as though they were not simply a stage show whose outcome is as foregone as any performance of kabuki.

Bernard Trainor just admitted that this is political theater. The President wants to keep his veto-proof minority, and the Democrats want to use the issue in 2008. That's it.

A couple graphs and a video to edify you before the bullshit is spread.