We have been waiting for General David Petraeus to deliver the news from Iraq. For months President Bush told us to be patient, withhold judgment and hear what the professionals in the field recommended.

What we heard on Monday and Tuesday (9-11! Coincidence?) was pretty smooth, mostly true and almost completely unresponsive to our primary concerns. We learned that militarily the surge is working. We can always achieve victory in military battles over militants, revolutionaries and insurgents. This is relatively meaningless militarily. Remember we won every battle in Vietnam, but lost the war.

General Patraeus gave us the new version of the infamous Vietnam “body count” report. Now we deal in the reverse body count—the number of Iraqis not killed by other Iraqis. The good news from the general is that they are killing fewer of each other. The bad news is that we are dying at a greater rate.

The bottom line is that our blood may have bought time for Maliki to reconcile the various factions. Nouri al Maliki has no interest in reconciling with the Sunni. His interest is in killing them. From a cruelly ruling 20% minority of Iraq, the non-Kurdish Sunni have fallen to a despised and displaced minority of around 10% of the population. They do not make up a critical mass that is of interest to al Maliki and the now ruling Shiites who are bent on revenge.

General Petraeus rightly reports that in Al Anbar we are now finding that the Sunni are willing to be our friends. The Iraqi Sunni understand that they can no longer win in a military struggle with the Shiites. They are now our eternal allies in the hope that we will prevent our other eternal allies, the Shiites, from slaughtering them. We are two groups who need friends—or what passes for friends in that neighborhood.

Meanwhile back in Baghdad, the civil war, whose existence we debated only a year ago, is over, and the Sunni have been crushed. Now that the enemy of my enemy is no longer a major threat, my transitory friend is once more my traditional enemy. Now the Arab Shiites and the Persian, ethnic Iranian, Shiites, are turning on each other.

The bad news is that we are in the middle of three civil wars and an insurgency. We are, as is our tradition, arming the three major combatants—though we are really trying not to arm the insurgents. However, some of our erstwhile friends are passing arms to the worst of the bad guys.

The worst news for the American people is not the half-truths of Petraeus but the quarter truths of the various presidential candidates—of both parties. They debate with nuanced obfuscation how to withdraw, draw down and redeploy. They all know that progressive or conservative, we will have more than 50,000 troops in Iraq for the next fifteen years. We will maintain a large military footprint north of Baghdad, south of the Kurdish regions to block Iran. Indeed, as President Bush truthfully said, our model is Korea. We will not allow Iran to sweep across Iraq and will maintain a large enough presence to discourage them. Whether or not we pro-actively go after Iran, as many (including me) fear, I do not know. Still, as Bush is fond of saying, "Nothing is off the table."

We do not want be in Iraq in order to own all the oil—the left is wrong in that assertion. We do want to be there to block the possibility of Iranian hegemony. In this, we have support from the major Sunni states: Saudi Arabia, Quwait, Jordan and Egypt—all of which fear Iran—both religiously and ethnically—more than they hate or fear us. That is the only good news in this mess of mendacity and half-truths in Mesopotamia—the cradle of civilization and possibly its graveyard.