Toad, Meet Punchbowl

FP Passport offers a “quotable” from Ryan Crocker, ambassador to Iraq (link):

In the States, it's like we're in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we're done here, and the credits come up, and the lights come on, and we leave the theater and go on to something else. Whereas out here, you're just getting into the first reel of five reels, and as ugly as the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way, way worse.

Wait a minute, whoa! It happens I think the ambassador is pretty much right here—but isn’t this exactly the opposite of the party line? Give us a few months, give us until September, just give us a little time… everything the administration says about Iraq is designed to impose the soothing assurance that it’s only a matter of time, and not very much time, at that.

To his credit, Gen.David Petraeus has been saying from the start that he thinks it will be a long slog. But generals have a habit of speaking awkward untruths. Folks just ignore this kind of toad in the punchbowl and life goes on as before. Crocker, by contrast, is the ambassador—a man whose role, as they say, is to be “sent abroad to lie for his country.”

So this is a puzzle. Is Crocker just crashingly, smashingly out of line here? Or is the White House playing a more subtle game, allowing, perhaps encouraging, him to speak the truth in the background, while Tony Snow pours on the syrup in front of the mike?