The Red Queen's Last Day

Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run.

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying 'Faster! Faster!', but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had no breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. 'I wonder if all the things move along with us?' thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried 'Faster! Don't try to talk!'

Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she; would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried 'Faster! Faster! 'and dragged her along. 'Are we nearly there?' Alice managed to pant out at last.

'Nearly there!' the Queen repeated. 'Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster! And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice's ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.

'Now! Now!' cried the Queen. 'Faster! Faster!' And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, 'You may rest a little, now.'

Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'

'Of course it is,' said the Queen. 'What would you have it?'

'Well, in our country, said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.' 'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, see. It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'

'I'd rather not try, please!' said Alice. 'I'm quite content to stay here - only I am so hot and thirsty!' 'I know what you'd like!' the Queen said good naturedly, taking a little box out of her pocket. 'Have a biscuit!'

Alice thought it would not be civil to say 'No,' though it wasn't at all what she wanted. So she took it, and ate it as well as she could: and it was very dry: and she thought she had never been so nearly choked in all her life.

'While you're refreshing yourself,' said the Queen, 'I'll just take the measurements' And she took a ribbon out of her pocket, marked in inches, and began measuring the ground, and sticking little pegs in here and there.

'At the end of two yards,' she said, putting in a peg to mark the distance, I shall give you your directions have another biscuit?' 'No, thank you,' said Alice: 'one's guite enough!' 'Thirst quenched, I hope!' said the Queen.

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's last day at work was Wednesday. How could we just let him slip out the wings without some sort of send-off? Particularly when he presented a master class in rhetorical obfuscation, complete with an array of comical expressions that would do a Borscht belt comedian proud.

Here are some of the answers Mr. Snow gave at the press gaggle. All the floating answers are in response to variants of this question: Are we in an open-ended commitment in Iraq?

Begin!

MR. SNOW: ... Well, you answer the charge by pointing to General Petraeus's testimony. It's pretty clear that it is not a war without end. As a matter of fact, it is a war that actually has victory as its aim. And victory is defined as helping the Iraqis develop the capability of defending themselves and governing themselves.

[snip]

MR. SNOW: ... So I think in order to try to caricature it as a war without end is simply to ignore two days of testimony, including 11 hours yesterday in front of the United States Senate. It's just not true.

But on the other hand, to say that you don't know when a war is going to end doesn't mean that you don't think it's going to end.

[snip]

MR. SNOW: ... The whole -- what General Petraeus is saying is that you are able to move forces out as a result of success, not simply -- this is not an exercise to get to a number.

[snip]

MR. SNOW: ... Now, in terms of -- I think what you're trying to do is to develop a narrative that says, well, you know what he's really trying to do is he's trying to put lipstick on this thing because he was going to have to remove the troops anyway. Is that what you're -- is that the buried insinuation?

Q I didn't use the lipstick analogy, but you just did. So it seems --

MR. SNOW: No, but is that kind of the thesis here?

Q No, the question is that Army officials have already said publicly that, in fact, you're going to have retention issues, you have rotation issues and that by next spring/next summer you're going to have to start bringing some troops home or you're going to have -- if, God forbid, there's another situation in another part of the world you might not have enough troops. So how can you say the reason why you're potentially pulling out up to 30,000 troops is because you're having so much success on the ground when, in fact, it's because you have to pull them out anyway?

MR. SNOW: No, wrong. You don't have to pull them out. And General Petraeus has made it clear -- see, what you're doing is you're taking unrelated testimony and you're trying to draft it and you're saying, you guys will leave because you have to. Wrong. General Petraeus has made it clear that he -- by the way, this is not a guy who's simply going to try to fake it. His career, his reputation, his honor are on the line. And this is a man who makes decisions based on what he thinks is going to work. And therefore, he will continue to do so.

And in this particular case he is talking about potential drawdowns next year based on conditions on the ground, and they will continue to do so. I will let -- you know, you can take quotes from various generals about --

[snip]

MR. SNOW: ... Again, the strategy that General Petraeus is pursuing is one that is designed to produce results and to produce the kind of stability that the Iraqi people deserve. It is not one that is gauged at numbers.

[snip]

MR. SNOW: ... Number one, you don't know when the war is going to end because you don't know when the war is going to end -- you don't have a crystal ball. I mean, you could have asked Eisenhower when the war was going to end and he wouldn't have known. You could have asked generals and -- the fact is, you just --

[snip]

MR. SNOW: No. Look, benchmarks were something that Congress wanted to use as a metric --

Q You signed off on it.

MR. SNOW: -- and we're going to produce a report. But the fact is that the situation is bigger and more complex, and you need to look at the whole picture.

[snip]

Q Tony, when the President addresses the nation in the way that he will tomorrow night, it often sets lots of expectations on the part of the public. Is there a concern that with so much discussion about potential for drawing down troops, if there is not the kind of progress on the ground that you foresee, that that will simply be an expectation unfulfilled?

MR. SNOW: No, we tend not to go into these with failure narratives in mind. No, what the President is going to do is he's going to outline what he thinks is the sensible way to proceed in Iraq, based on the facts on the ground and based on developments.

[snip]

MR. SNOW: You know what really strikes me is that there seems to be this attempt to go after General Petraeus in every possible way so that there can be an avoidance of the fact that his strategy is succeeding.

This new line of argument that -- where you're just going back to the same numbers, it was -- you've got to assume that when you have a surge and the number goes up, they are going to go down, and at some point you will reach the level you were at before. And they may continue to go down. I'm going to let the President make whatever announcements he has to make. ...

So I think what's going on is that there is an attempt to create a cause to get you to ask about numbers, rather than results. But the fact is, the numbers will reflect realities on the ground. The realities on the ground, at least according to General Petraeus, seem to be such that you can start drawing down numbers.

[snip]

MR. SNOW: ... I've got to tell you, this is an amazing canard in the sense that you have shifting realities at all times, and you respond to changing facts on the ground. The idea that you have an unchanging strategy -- only a crazy person would fail to adjust strategy on a regular basis based on the realities on the ground.

Similarly -- it's interesting, because Democrats have said, we want a change in mission -- and there does seem, at least on the part of what General Petraeus was talking about, a change in mission -- they immediately try to inoculate against that argument by saying it's not, but it is.

[snip]

Q A lot of people are dying.

MR. SNOW: Because there are bad guys that are out there, Helen, and they don't want to go away.

[snip]

Q Tony, back to Iraq. Regardless of what the President says tomorrow night, the funding debate is going to continue next week on the Hill. You spoke earlier about benchmarks and said, well, they really don't show the whole picture. Does he still accept that he needs a report on benchmarks, and really do something --

MR. SNOW: Yes, it's the law. Of course he's going to do it.

Q So next spring? In other words --

MR. SNOW: Well, we've got a benchmark report due Saturday.

Q Understood. Will they continue to follow that as the condition for getting the funding that --

MR. SNOW: Well, look, I think a condition for getting the funding is trying to figure out where the strategy is working. I think if you try to -- lash yourself to the benchmarks, you get -- as General Petraeus was pointing out, you could achieve every one of those benchmarks and not be succeeding. So I think what you need to do is take a broad view. They certainly provided valuable input, and that will continue to be a source for people to look at.

Q Are they relevant?

Q Tony, if --

MR. SNOW: I'm sorry, what?

Q Are they relevant then?

MR. SNOW: Not necessarily relevant -- look, number one, it's the law, we're going to abide by it; members of Congress will have to decide how relevant they are. Some of them are -- I mean, as you noted in the first report, some of them not particularly, but it's still -- any inputs you can get to get a fuller appreciation of what's actually going on is helpful.

[snip]

Q If the troop numbers are based on the reality on the ground, if basically they're based on need, isn't that really the definition of an open-ended commitment, because the reality may not get better, may not get much better. Isn't that really -- doesn't that define an open-ended commitment?

MR. SNOW: If you take a look at the trend lines we have seen, I'm afraid -- I'm happy to report that your hypothesis doesn't hold. What you have seen is a significant degradation not only in the strength, but also in the public view of al Qaeda in Iraq. It has lost what prestige it may have had, and it now has Iraqis openly going after it. So I would contend that what you're trying to do is to set up a scenario that itself flies in the face of the facts that have been accumulating in Iraq over the last six months.

Q If we looked at trend lines -- for the 2000 election we'd have a President Gore. (Laughter.) I mean, trend lines change, and so the fact is, you don't know exactly what the reality on the ground is going to be, and if you're basing the number of troops on that, then it's an open-ended commitment.

MR. SNOW: That is the most -- look, all right, I give up. I give up. --

I'm outta here.