Is Iraq making political strides?
General Petraeus will cite progress to Congress this week - but it's mostly military.
from the September 10, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
At the outset of the surge, 18 benchmarks, including some for the Iraqi government to meet, were suggested by the White House and endorsed by Congress for weighing progress. Now, as multiple reports explicitly or implicitly deliver failing grades – in particular for benchmarks directly related to national reconciliation – it's clear that the Iraqi government hasn't met expectations. The question now becomes whether it is even possible to translate US military advances into political progress by the Iraqi government.
"The real issue hanging out there is the question of the role of the central government in relation to the rest of the country," says Ken Pollack, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The central government is hopelessly deadlocked at the moment, and while there are local areas of progress, in every case they are being undermined by the conflicts going on in Baghdad in the central government."
The central government's "negative impact" has led Iraqis and an exasperated Bush administration to weigh the merits of encouraging a replacement to Mr. Maliki, and to efforts by the US and some Iraqis to decentralize power in Iraq and reduce Baghdad's role.
Turning up the pressure a notch on Baghdad to move forward on national reconciliation is the idea behind the proposal by some US lawmakers for a small drawdown of US troops before the end of this year. Major benchmarks in this area include passage of legislation to equitably distribute Iraq's oil revenue, so-called "de-Baathification" measures to allow a return of mostly Sunni former Baathists to government employment, provincial elections, and constitutional reform.
Sen. John Warner (R) of Virginia, a key proponent of the small drawdown approach, believes such a move would convey to Baghdad that US patience is wearing thin.
Wrong signal, some senators say
But other senators, mainly Republicans who back the surge, say that approach is risky because it signals to principle US foes in Iraq – the Sunni insurgency, sectarian militias, and Al Qaeda in Iraq – that the US is switching to a withdrawal footing.
"I disagree with Senator Warner because the audience for statements made in Washington is not just Maliki's government," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina told the Monitor last week. "Any effort by Congress [to force a drawdown] will be misinterpreted not as a pressure device on the Maliki government, but as a lack of will."
Senator Graham says a recent visit to Iraq demonstrated to him that local-government and grass-roots efforts at intersectarian cooperation are growing – and can spread from the local level if the "improved environment" resulting from the surge is not cut short.
"I'm predicting that this attitude of making gestures toward each other is going to lead to national reconciliation," Graham said at a speech at Washington's American Enterprise Institute (AEI) last week. The result, he says, is that in "the next weeks, not months, there will be major breakthroughs in the benchmarks regarding political reconciliation."
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