Hello and welcome to another edition of Best of Left Podcast.

Today we have clips from the Daily Show, Rachel Maddow, Mike Maloy, the National Security

Network, Keith Holberman, Randy Rhodes, Sam Cedar, and the Young Turks.

There's not a single narrative about Iraq, there's not a single security story.

You can't even talk about Iraq, really, because the fact is that people can't move around.

Things are different from place to place, things are different depending on who you are and where you are and when you are.

And with all those things, it's total chaos.

When you look back over the history of what's happened with Iraq and going into Iraq,

and things that Vice President Cheney said at various points in time,

and you contrast that to what people at the CIA were saying at various periods of time,

you can see huge dichotomies there.

General Petraeus is going to come next week and he's likely to say there's been a 75% drop in sectarian violence.

Here's the reality. The reality is that sectarian violence is a nice little trick that they have used to essentially try to take a very small subsection of actual violence.

Well, then David Petraeus's report is not David Petraeus's report.

It's going to be written by the White House, it's going to be edited by the White House.

I think it's a political document, and I don't think you can see it in any other way,

and I think that the key to understanding why it's a political document is this debate that we're having now about statistics.

If you get shot from in front, in the head, that's considered a crime or murder.

If you get shot from in the back of the head, that's considered sectarian violence.

So they're using all these things to essentially play with the numbers.

We actually have no idea how many Iraqis have been killed.

What I look at is not just whether or not deaths or violence or attacks are reduced in the small area in which US forces are concentrated.

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