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| Future of Iraq: Democratic Presidential hopeful, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee member, Sen. Barack Obama, listens
to testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. Gerald Herbert/AP |
Iraq hearings look beyond Bush presidency
Presidential hopefuls offered their views at Senate hearings.
from the September 12, 2007 edition
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No doubt in part because they returned to a Washington already engrossed in the 2008 election, the Petraeus-Crocker team encountered a Congress wearing its deep divisions over Iraq on its sleeve.
At the opening of Monday's testimony, the Democratic chairmen of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees focused on the failure of the Iraqi government to take advantage of the surge to move toward national reconciliation. Rep. Ike Skelton (D) of Missouri, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said US troops had paved the way for Iraq to make a political "touchdown," but he concluded, "the Iraqis haven't even picked up the ball."
Ranking Republican members focused on Iraq's place in the war on terror, as well as on what they called Democratic attacks on Petraeus's credibility and suggestions that his testimony was not independent from the White House.
Representative Skelton countered the Republican broadsides by saying Petraeus was "almost certainly the right man for the job in Iraq, but he's the right person three years too late and 250,00 troops short."
With the Democrats well shy of the votes needed to override a presidential veto on a timetable for a troop withdrawal, yet still seeking to influence policy, some experts see this week's debate as doing little to settle the national debate over Iraq.
"What [Petraeus and Crocker] made the case for is more squabbling," says Wayne White, until recently an Iraq expert at the State Department and now an adjunct scholar with the Middle East Institute in Washington.
"There was enough there if you're not a skeptic to bolster the view that progress is being made," he says. "But if you are, you just might have come away with the feeling that we're being snookered."
Petraeus's data obscure a number of "ground truths," Mr. White says – about continuing violence and ethno-sectarian cleansing in Baghdad's mixed neighborhoods, and about the unaddressed threat of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia. As for national reconciliation, he says, some US action under the surge – working more closely with Sunni tribes, for example – is actually "a step backward" from the goal of national political unity, though it may serve other US interests.
In his House testimony, Crocker appeared to make the case that the surge strategy had pulled Iraq back from the precipice of collapse and full-blown civil war. He said Iraq in 2006 "came close to unraveling politically, economically, and in security terms." But 2007 "has brought improvement" that Crocker said was evident in political as well as in security terms. He also cited economic gains.
Such a sanguine assessment surprised some observers, who thought the two officials might indicate a broader opening to change in US strategy as a way to win support among critics of the current course.
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