"must answer the question: Why should we continue sending our young men and women to fight and die if the Iraqis don't make the tough decisions?"

Why should Petreus be answering the question? That is a question for Congress and the President not the military. Do you really think the military owes a justification for a war? The military’s job is to prosecute the wars that Congress and the President orders them to prosecute. Your question is not Petreus’s lane. Petreus owed Congress an accurate assessment of the current conditions in Iraq and the probability of success or failure in the future. Also, don’t you find it more than a bit hypocritical for a member of the current Congress, whose main concerns these days seem to be crooked land deals and pork spending projects and cruising for gay sex in airport bathrooms and with Congressional Pages to condemn Iraqi legislators, who daily risk their lives to do their job, for not making “tough decisions”? Good God that doesn’t even pass the giggle test. I will listen to a braying jackass in Congress tell me about Iraqis needing to make “tough decisions” when Congress does something about the impending Social Security and Medicare bankruptcy or actually makes a tough choice and stops stealing for a moment to balance the budget. Give me a break.

But you're correct, it's his job to execute, and Congress' and the President's job to decide whether or not to be there.

And both botched that decision back at the beginning.

Whether we should be there or not, whether the "surge" is working or not, whether the Administration lied to us {as in U.S.} to get us there in the forst place, does not matter. We are there, we cannot leave. To do so anytime soon would be a disaster for the Iraqi people and for us {as in U.S.}

Iraq is situated in the center of our Middle East oil supply. Oil is the "blood" for our economy. If we leave the terrorists have a "base" for their worldwide operations.

We are in a "mess" there. There is no good choice. But the worst choice by far is to leave before we get some control in thar region, which will probably take a long time.

None of the candidates who suggest we leave now make any mention of what will happen to us {as in U.S.} if we leave prematurely. If they do not see the obvious, they are far too stupid to be our President.

Bullshit, we "cannot leave." In fact we must leave eventually or make this the 51st state...and the way it looks now, we'll leave sooner rather than later.

Iraq, screwed over though they may have been, at least have a chance of making a go of it on their own, and we need to leave and let them get on with that. The UN may be able to help, and we should at least try to make them take some responsibility for a new IRaq. But bottom line, we can't "control the region," and our military presence there only aggravates the violence and helps the terrorists.

It isn't the candidates we need to worry about when it comes to stupidity, it's the CURRENT occupant of the White House.

Congress needs to get off their fat asses and do something to MAKE this President act. Maybe that'll atone for their failures.

Never too late to try, anyway...

In fact we must leave eventually or make this the 51st state

While I do agree with you that we shouldn't have gone in, and I think we should leave very soon, I think it's necessary to point out that this statement is just stupid rhetoric. You really do your intellect a disservice by posting this crap. If there were any sense or logic to it at all, we'd be talking about the 55th state...after Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Bosnia. Right? We never left those places either.

Now obviously those places aren't a thousandth as violent as Iraq. But they put the lie to your argument, which you shouldn't need to resort to since there's so many better reasons to oppose the war than concern that we're gonna literally colonize the place.

Why is little george sending Petreus to Congress to shill and lie for is stupid and ill conceived war? God knows that if he would have asked his opinion back in March 2003, there wouldn't have been an invasion/occupation and we would be bringing OBL's head home on a stick instead of our boys in a box.

little george got us in this mess, let him explain to the American people hos he is going to get us out, or let him hand in his resignation.

little george never stops finding ways to dishonor our brave soldiers.

You sound awful brave if that is the case.

Otherwise you just sound like another SUV driving selfish gas hog.