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Brushing Aside Critics, Bush Moves to Sell Iraq Strategy

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and STEVEN LEE MYERS

President Bush will cast his plan for a gradual, limited withdrawal as a way to bring a divided America together -- even as he resists demands to move much faster.

Will tell Nation Anyone who Disagrees is "Seduced by Allure of Defeat."

Peter D. Feaver accuses Moveon.org of a "McCarthy-Army-Welch moment" for accusing General David Petraeus of being politically motivated:

The advertisement alleges, without evidence, that Petraeus is not going to give his honest, professional assessment of the situation in Iraq but instead will be "cooking the books" to curry favor with the Bush White House.

Right. No evidence whatsoever.

Just because the general has a history of making specious positive assessments of Iraq, as recalled by Paul Krugman:

...Gen. Petraeus has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters.

I've written before about the op-ed article Gen. Petraeus published six weeks before the 2004 election, claiming "tangible progress" in Iraq. Specifically, he declared that "Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt," that "Iraqi leaders are stepping forward" and that "there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security." A year later, he declared that "there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi security forces."

And just because not one independent assessment - not one - has found progress in Iraq, either politically or in terms of stopping the violence (apart from the depressing abatement of violence in areas that have been ethnically "cleansed" to the point that there's no one left for the killers to kill) doesn't, in Feaver's view, constitute evidence of Petraeus's being politically motivated.

Nor does the fact that he gave his report to Congress on September 10th.

It's all just a coincidence. The guy making the progress report for a White House that has spent six years linking the war in Iraq to 9/11, just happens to give his report on that war to Congress on 9/10.

And we have a bridge for sale over the Charles River.

Hilariously, though, Feaver goes out of his way to condemn the MoveOn piece as:

...so vicious, so public, and so deliberate, the attack on Petraeus cannot be ignored by either side in the Iraq debate. Supporters of the war are duty-bound, like Joseph Welch, to rise and ask of war opponents, "Have you left no sense of decency?"

Feaver actually uses the word "vicious" twice in the piece, in case you didn't get the talking point: it was a "vicious" attack.

We'll await his insistence that supporters of GOP candidates and the war are duty-bound to rise and ask war supporters, members of the Bush Administration, and all their lackeys in the press, "Have you no sense of decency" for the unprecedented onslaught of vicious personal attacks and accusations of lack of patriotism or even treason made against anyone who opposed the war in Iraq -- even though most of the facts cited by war opponents turned out to be true while those cited by supporters turned out to be false.

As recently as last week, President Bush accused anyone in favor of withdrawing from Iraq -- and that would be 62% of Americans -- as "being seduced by the allure of defeat."

Excuse us? Who is he saying is "seduced by the allure of defeat"? 62% of Americans?

What f***ing allure does defeat have for anyone, let alone 62% of the people he's supposed to be working for?

We're waiting for the first war supporter to rise up and condemn that vicious and divisive rhetoric.

Maybe Peter D. Feaver will be the first?

Red Sox pitching coach John Farrell thinks he knows why Daisuke Matsuzaka is struggling:

"When he's in a big inning, he has a tendency to rely on his fastball and generate as much power as possible and, with that, he's sacrificing location.

"He's somewhat gone away from his offspeed pitch and hitters have had a chance to look in hard and not have to guard too much against anything soft."

We beg to differ. What's going on with Dice-K has nothing to do with his pitching; it has to do with the umpiring.

As we've said before, it's clear to anyone watching Dice-K pitch-by-pitch that the umps are giving him the business. Or, to be more specific, they're not giving him the corners. This is how he's getting into 2-0 and 3-0 jams -- because he's not getting any called strikes on the corners. So he has to come right over the plate, and hitters are laying in wait to tee off on him.

Think back -- or better: go back and look -- and see how many at-bats during which he's gotten into holes with hitters have had one or more very close call with a pitch on the corners. The answer is almost every time.

The truth is that if more of these calls had gone his way instead of against him, he'd be 15-9.