Liveblogging Petraeus/Crocker Hearings Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

As a general rule, I find "live blogging" to be a bit of a silly practice but I'm going to do it anyway.   Here are some broad meta themes to watch out for.

1.  Violence:  Will General Petraeus use statistics to back up his conclusions on security.  What will be the source of the data?  How transparent will he be?  Will Congress push him hard on his measures of "sectarian violence" and what they do and do not include?

2.   National reconciliation:  Will Ambassador Crocker give an utterly negative assessment of the national government?  I don't know how he could do otherwise.  What might he use
to demonstrate progress if any at the national level?

3.  Anbar:  Will Ambassador Crocker argue that what's happened in Anbar represents progress and justifies sustaining the surge?  Will he state that it is as a direct result of the surge?

Comments

[Don Bacon]

Mission Accomplished: Petraeus has been 'Friedmanized'.

news report:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — The top American commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, has recommended that decisions on the contentious issue of reducing the main body of the American troops in Iraq be put off for six months, American officials said Sunday.
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The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006. A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months. Tom Friedman is a New York Times foreign affairs columnist. Many times he has used the six months time measure for progress in Iraq: (11/30/03), (6/3/04), (10/3/04), (11/28/04), (9/25/05), (9/28/05), (12/18/05), (12/20/05), (12/21/05), (1/23/06), (1/31/06), (3/2/06), (4/23/06) and (5/11/06).
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2884