Really, I want to write about something other than David Petraeus today

But Spencer Ackerman at TPM reminded me that Eliot Engel of New York actually challenged Petraeus to explain that impossibly sunny 2004 op-ed he wrote, at the height of the Bush re-election campaign, saying how unequivocally great the Iraqi security forces were doing.



I'm glad somebody mentioned that op-ed, and for Petraeus to suggest that it was completely accurate, and only the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra in early 2006 derailed the progress of his wonderful Iraqi security forces, is just insane. The longtime wingnut mantra on this war is that things were going just perfectly in early February 2006 until that bombing. This is months after the "last throes" comment, months after Cindy Sheehan's summer, months after John Murtha called for withdrawal because of how bad it was getting. Furthermore, it conveniently tosses down the memory hole a year and a half of brutal sectarian violence, a lot of it CARRIED OUT by those Iraqi security forces, particularly the police, who under Petraeus' leadership became a Shiite militia. The facts do not support such revisionist history. And Petraeus buying into it just reveals him as a deluded apologist.