All The King's Horses and All The King's Men...

On CNN Tuesday, this report from Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware (unintentionally?) exposes the hypocrisy of the surge... that we're actually undermining the Iraqi government it claimed to help and secretly cutting deals with insurgents-



Meanwhile, the Washington establishment has seemingly settled on two saviors to all our Iraq woes... Gen. David Petraeus and former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi (though it remains questionable for now whether all the recent Maliki/Allawi talk foreshadows a coup, or just politicians floating some crazy ideas out there).

Regarding the latter, one blogger flashed back to 2004 when "Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government." So he's the guy we want back if we want to go the Bill Maher-preferred route and just throw a dictatorial strongman in there and call the whole thing a wash.

In regards to the highly-respected Gen. Petraeus, it's been revealed-- on the eve of his the White House's report to Congress-- that he had the recent National Intelligence Estimate altered to his liking. The Washington Post reported that "Presented with a draft of the conclusions, Petraeus succeeded in having the security judgments softened to reflect improvements in recent months, the official said." Sounds like a man we can count on for an impartial, sober analysis.

Pres. Bush is hoping to milk an addition $50 billion out of Congress with this report, natch.

And, in what is also not good timing for him, an investigation (which focuses in one part on a senior American officer who worked under Petraeus) reveals that "federal agencies are investigating a widening network of criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other matériel to Iraqi and American forces... [in what] amounted to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict."

In conclusion, there is no white knight who can fix the President's mess. But we knew that.

[UPDATE: The latest column by neocon, and Iraq war architect, Charles Krauthammer pretty much confirms that they're ready to dump Maliki and call a do-over here.]