Abizaid's Sunday Drive By

I just caught General Abizaid, head of Central Command, on Russert and Schieffer. I didn't hear anything that changed my opinion that these guys are "making it up as they go" and hoping for the best.

Abizaid's rhetoric sounded like the same waffling we've grown used to hearing from Pentagon sources. Yes, numbers of trained Iraqi forces look bad, but you can't really tell anything from the numbers.

Yes, there are more attacks, but they're not on military targets (as if attacks on civilian targets is a good thing.)

What concerns me most is Abizaid's statement to the effect that every commander he talks to on the ground "sounds confident."

That's not surprising. If a commander on the ground didn't sound confident, he wouldn't be in command. He'd be replaced by somebody who knows how to sound confident when he talks to Abizaid.

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…Something, something, "Iraqi Army soldiers are fighting and dying."

That kind of talk doesn't make me all warm and fuzzy. As General George Patton once admonished, nobody every won a war by dying for his country.

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Challenged by Tom Friedman on Face the Nation to explain what the strategy is to bring the Sunnis into the political process, Abizaid came back and said the real question is "what is the Sunnis' strategy?"

So it's the Sunnis' fault that Abizaid doesn't have a strategy.

Abizaid makes another delusional comparison between the Iraq situation and the American Revolution.

Syria needs to do more. The rest of the Arab world needs to do more.

Good God.

If bull manure could win wars, we'd be in great shape.

And if side stepping the truth made for good generalship, Abizaid would be another Alexander the Great.