Prometheus 6

"For months and even years, we've heard this is a president who won't listen to alternative options, who won't listen to the idea of bringing troops home, who's so stubborn he won't do anything else," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. "It's a little bit surprising that Democrats wouldn't want to take yes for an answer."

Excuse me, but what did Bush say yes to? NOT keeping troops in the line of fire longer than they were assigned to stay.  

Peter Rodman, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who recently left a senior job at the Pentagon, said he was particularly surprised at how Democratic presidential candidates reacted to Bush because they have a vested interest should they win the White House. "The next president is going to inherit this," Rodman said. "The better condition Iraq is in, the better the situation will be" for the next president. "If I were Hillary or Obama, I would be rooting for the surge."

I'm actually not sure how to respond to this level of mendacity. 

Accord on Iraq War Slips Further Away
By Peter Baker and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 16, 2007; A01

When Army Gen. David H. Petraeus last week proposed withdrawing more than 20,000 U.S. troops from Iraq, some congressional Democrats nodded their heads and saw it as a positive, if insufficient, step forward. Some wanted to take credit. After all, they reasoned, the drawdown, the benchmarks report, even Petraeus's Capitol Hill testimony came about only because of Democratic pressure.

Within hours, that idea was shot down. When House Democratic leaders convened in the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) at 5:30 p.m. Monday, strategists concluded they were already getting credit for what was happening but that voters wanted much more. So Pelosi, according to aides at the meeting, insisted that Democrats coordinate their message and dictated what that message would be: The general's plan meant 10 more years of war, or even "endless war."

Either way, what seems increasingly clear is that Washington will remain locked in an endless war over Iraq -- at least until President Bush leaves office in 16 months. Following long-awaited congressional hearings, progress reports and presidential speeches, the prospect of a grand bipartisan resolution to the extended conflict in Iraq that some hoped September would bring appears more elusive than ever.

"The headline for the last week is that the war is pretty much going to be on a stay-the-course path and clearly is going to be passed on to the next president, and there isn't going to be an awful lot done in the Congress to change that," said Leon E. Panetta, a former Clinton White House chief of staff who served on the Iraq Study Group that tried to forge a bipartisan agreement last year.