The Petraeus and Crocker Testimony-Update
Lance on Sep 11 2007 at 6:06 am | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Foreign affairs, Lance's Page, Military Matters, Notes on the war
Michael has the transcript of the testimony of General Petraeus below. Here are links to the prepared speeches of both men along with the slides that general Petraeus used (alert, these are all three pdf’s.) McQ has salient points on the questioning following their remarks, of which there was too little, and it was ill prepared. Basically the house members gave their own prepared remarks, as if they had no actual interest in what the two men had to say. It makes one think they were not being skeptical in their remarks about what he would say before hand, but rather just preemptively attacking him. Who would have thought that?
Update: Links are fixed. Sorry. Here are a couple of the graphs showing the (two week?) trends in violence from Gateway Pundit. Check out the link above for the full set:
Yes, indeed who would have. I was disappointed by that as well, because there are legit questions to ask. I would like to know which 2 intelligence agencies reviewed his report, and if either came from outside the DoD… among other, more qualitative ones.
There are legit questions. I would have liked to hear him have to account for things more fully. I think he could have and we could have learned some things. I think this confirms my point about the purpose of all the well poisoning. They were not expressing appropriate skepticism, but merely sowing doubt. Democracy will survive Josh, but I don’t have to like it. Now it definitely falls under the slimy tag.
I agree with you on that, Lance – the anti-war side has not conducted itself well this week.
Question about casualties. Did you see Spencer Ackerman’s analysis of the AP’s and Iraq Body Count’s numbers, and how they’re at a rather stark variance with what is in those slides?
Again, it is worth considering… since I remain in favor of proper skepticism and multiple sources.
I discount the AP figures. So that is one report. The IBC data however shows exactly the trend Petraeus is talking about and they don’t even include July and August when the surge had been in the works for a while. The damn thing had just started.
I don’t judge the surge on the raw numbers anyway, but the IBC numbers support Petraeus. This was a plan that envisioned through at least April. This is September. The early returns show some promise. We’ll know more later.
You just discount it. You seem to do that a lot. Umm. Why?
No time. Short answer, those who have spent far more time on this, such as IBC, all show very different numbers. Do you believe their numbers for 2006? Most months look ridiculously low. I’ll need a good reason to look at all the various reports and then this outlier and think it is anything but inaccurate. It certainly isn’t due to bias, the numbers are way too low based on what I have seen.
So, if you have some decent reason for me to conclude that 2006 was far less bloody than I believed I’ll reconsider a lot of things, though it probably wouldn’t change my mind about staying for now.
Please back that up. Like various other claims you have made in the last 24 hours about me, I don’t see any evidence of doing that a lot. Certainly not on Iraq. You are busy discounting all positive evidence. I haven’t discounted much evidence at all, positive or negative.