Army General Tries His Hand At Spinning, And Fails

According to the New York Times,

The top military commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, warned Thursday that an American troop pullback this fall would lead to an escalation in sectarian killings and worsening violence.

“My sense is that there would be an increase in sectarian violence, a resumption of sectarian violence, were the presence of our forces and Iraqi forces at that time to be reduced,” General Petraeus said at a Pentagon news conference.

It's hard to understand what General Petraeus is complaining about. An escalation in sectarian killings and worsening violence have been among the administration's main goals for Iraq ever since before the invasion.

Am I kidding? No, I am not. Otherwise they wouldn't have started the "sectarian" death squads.

So ... now that the death squads are raging, why don't we just withdraw, let the Iraqis finish killing each other, then go back in and pump out all the oil?

Why not? Because that's not the way it will work.

If we withdraw, the "sectarian" violence will come to an end, perhaps not all at once (although who can say?) or perhaps gradually, and then there will still be Iraqis left standing, and we will never get to go back in and pump out all the oil.

Maybe that's what he's afraid of.

Clearly he's afraid of something, or else he's very ill, but in any case he's clearly delirious, because he's been making no sense at all:

He said that sectarian killings had declined two-thirds from their level in January, in part because of construction of walls around some neighborhoods that had allowed security forces to maintain control of areas as they were cleared.

But he conceded that the overall violence had not subsided, and he warned that large-scale attacks using car bombs against markets and other locations filled with civilians could still occur and set off more Sunni and Shiite revenge killings.

Let's see now: If sectarian killings have declined two-thirds, but overall violence has not subsided, does that mean non-sectarian killings have taken up the slack? And how can we possibly tell the difference? Do Iraqis have their religion tattooed on the back of their necks? Are the bodies of murder victims marked to indicate whether their killings were sectarian or not? Or is this just another attempted bamboozlement of the American public?

I'm pretty sure what it is. How about you?