The Audition, Orwell Style

In the de facto audition for Commander-in-Chief at the Petraeus/Crocker hearings, the winners were...George Orwell and David Petraeus. No matter what you may think of the Iraq War, we should all be glad that Petraeus is on our side, not someone else's. Cogent, articulate, knowledgeable, and cool under fire, this guy makes me feel a lot safer because he's running the show.

Unfortunately, he's not looking for a job. The people that are, Sens. Clinton, McCain and Obama, received mixed reviews. But they each took an interesting tack in their questioning that revealed more about themselves than the situation in Iraq. Which was probably the point.

Oh, by the way, the situation in Iraq is status quo. And this where George Orwell won. We now know that things in Iraq are not bad enough to say "Enough, let's go", but not good enough to say, "We did it, let's go". No, we found out yesterday, in a real shocker, that we should take another 45 days to keep assessing the situation and if "conditions" warrant, then we'll see if we should consider considering a consideration to make sure that conditions warrant a new consideration. And some wars are more equal than others.

But back to the audition. John McCain seemed very Presidential in his questioning, until...well, we'll get to that. But he essentially conducted a de-brief of the General. He picked at certain failures, demanding explanations. Petraeus was deferential and amazingly knowledgeable of places and events in Iraq that no one has ever heard of. Of course, at the end, Mac wanted to make his point that al Qaeda was still a huge threat. So, and I can hear Ronald Reagan saying, "There you go again", he again stated that al Qaeda was comprised of radical 'Shiites' before he quickly corrected himself by saying 'or Sunnis' or whoever. No, Mac, al Qaeda is Sunni. Period. And if you can't get it straight, go home. Jeez.

Barack Obama started out well in his questioning, sounding very Presidential. He got a little bogged down toward the end, but he did make a solid point: until we get our expectations in line with a reasonable reality, we'll never be able to leave. Which threw a little sunlight on the scary motivations of the current administration's policy. Because of oil, the idea is to be there for thirty years or more. But at least Obama, in an uncritical way, pointed out the tactic that is being used to achieve that: create unreasonable definitons of success, then fail to meet them, neccessitating further effort to try to achieve them. 21st Century Orwell. Obama also instructed McCain on what a real slip of the tongue sounds like. He said "Iraqi government" when he meant to say "Iranian government". That's a slip of the tongue. And Ambassador Crocker answered the question as if Obama had said Iranian government.

In some ways, Hillary had the strongest showing, if only because she evinced the most damaging admission from Ambassador Crocker. Through her adept questioning, she established that The Administration will be trying to forge an agreement (already far along) to establish the legal right to have a 'permanent' force in Iraq. She asked Crocker if the Iraqi Parliament would vote on such an agreement. He said yes. She then got Crocker to admit that the Bush Administration had no intention of letting the US Congress also have such a vote. Checkmate. So the Iraqi's, who can't get their governance together at all, still have the good sense to let the people's representatives vote on such a huge agreement--and the US, the beacon of good governance for the rest of the world, will let this go the way of royal, I mean, 'executive' fiat. Nice job, Hillary.

So the bottom line is that all of the actors got a call-back for Commander-in-Chief. It's just ironic that the stage manager may strike everyone as the best person for the job.

And if you weren't concerned about what this conflict is doing to our country, in terms of money spent, troops stretched and Orwellian executive machinations, these hearings should have gotten your attention.

Who did the best in these hearings? Tell us what you think about this or anything else by clicking on 'comments' below bypassing the google sign-up and hitting the nickname or anonymous button.