Petraeus Hypocrisy?

I saw a good bit of the Senatorial grilling of General Petraues and Ryan Crocker, and a fair bit from the House. The General (as he will be referred to, because I'm not too confident typing his last name) responded to bipartisan grilling about when we can extract our troops. His refrain, for two days, was that it will depend on the "conditions". He could never define these conditions, yet he introduced some great new terms like battlefield geometry and politco-milatry calculus.

In the end, we're still left with the same ol' open ended military commitment that could last for John McCain's 100 years. There was no shortage of catastrophizing what would happen if more than the surge troops were withdrawn (apparently conditions for this have been met.) But one thing stuck out. What if things get worse? The General said that he could not foresee adding anymore troops. This sound like a serious flaw in his "conditions based" logic.

What if the battlefield geometry and politico-military calculus called for another surge? In his testimony, he said adding more troops wasn't going to happen. So what of his lofty "condition based" theorizing? Smells like political bullshit to me. If I'm boiling some pasta and it's boiling over the pan, I turn the heat down; If it's not boiling, I turn the heat up. To me, this is "condition-based decision making". But Petraeus is apparently OK with undercooked pasta.

Not that I want more troops, I'm just trying to illustrate his logical flaw. Any day, it might be happening how, the Mahdi army could call off the cease fire and restoke the civil war against the Badr Brigades and the Sunnis. Any day the Sunni militia could get a better offer than the $10/day we're paying them to keep quiet. This seems a very tenuous peace and our General Officer seems to have his lips firmly attached to a Republican butthole.