Some stagger and fall, after all, it's not easy...banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall

So the big news on the international front is that just like Pink Floyd, the US Army is busy building a wall. No, this time it's not a metaphor about shielding oneself off from the public eye, but rather walling off a Sunni neighborhood to "protect" them from Shiites by basically turning their neighborhood into a ghetto in the classical sense. Needless to say, the residents are vastly unhappy, since they now live in a walled-off enclave surrounded by enemies and cut off from friends. Funny that.

Not to say that the news we get from Iraq may be unduly optimistic, but that's basically what I'm suggesting. First, we have very quietly abandoned the latest rationale for our troops doing what they do: that as "they stand up, we'll stand down". Seems like they aren't standing up at all:

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.

But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.

In a reflection of the need for more U.S. troops, the Pentagon decided earlier this month to increase the length of U.S. Army tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months. The extension came amid speculation that the U.S. commander there, Army Gen. David Petraeus, will ask that the troop increase be maintained well into 2008.

About that increase in the length of military rotations. Bush tried to blame it on Congress not sending a bill...but a few reporters even picked up on the fact that the increase was announced BEFORE funding "ran out', by which I mean won't really run out at all:

This speculation was fueled by Wednesday’s White House press conference, where Dana Perino explained the strange timing by claiming that President Bush had been in the dark about this major policy shift until the morning it was announced:

Q So why did he tell the American Legion that people would be staying in Iraq longer because of the Democrats, when his own Pentagon, 24 hours later, was going to keep people there longer?

MS. PERINO: Well, one, I don’t know if the President knew about the — the meeting — remember, yesterday morning is when Secretary Gates came and talked to the President. […]

Q And so the President didn’t know about his own policy until Wednesday?

MS. PERINO: I’m not aware that the President knew that there was going to be — that Secretary Gates had come to any decisions.

We might be hearing more about our problems in Iraq, of course, but for the fact that the military is telling officers to keep their mouth shut and won't let them talk to Congress:

national Journal's Congress Daily:

Pentagon lawyers abruptly blocked mid-level active-duty military officers from speaking Thursday during a closed-door House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee briefing about their personal experiences working with Iraqi security forces.

The Pentagon's last-minute refusal to allow the officers' presentations surprised panel members and congressional aides, who are in the middle of an investigation into the effort to train and organize Iraqi forces.

Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Martin Meehan, D-Mass., called the Pentagon's move "outrageous" and left open the possibility of issuing subpoenas.

One correspondent suggests: "My guess: the training is not going well, there are some big gaps, and a bunch of horror stories that the Pentagon doesn't want aired. ... That said, this will backfire."

Right now, the"grown-ups" are debating on the Sunday morning news shows whether Harry Reid was wrong to suggest "The war has been lost" if we continue on our current course. He is right of course, and let me suggest that it only shows the vapidity of today's media that they are discussing this in relation to its effects on politics, rather than asking if he is indeed correct. After all, what are a few thousand deaths in relation to the opportunity to strategize and fundraise for the various political committee's right?