http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4119
by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4020
On April 8, Army General http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4171 and Ambassador Ryan Crocker returned to Capitol Hill to tell the Senate that security in Iraq has improved and that the government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was on the right track towards political reconciliation. Their testimony was broadly similar to the one last September, when they claimed that the surge was yielding positive results; and just like seven months ago, President George W. Bush plans to follow their statements with an upbeat address of his own, to be broadcast on Thursday night. The domestic political landscape has changed, however, and the situation on the ground is less encouraging.
General Petraeus opened his testimony before the Armed Service Committee by announcing that troop numbers should return to “pre-surge” levels this summer. The military should assess conditions before making further decisions, however, for which a 45-day “period of consolidation and evaluation” was needed. Either way no set withdrawal timetable was possible: Petraeus admitted he could not say how many US troops would be in Iraq at the end of the year. Describing progress as “significant but uneven” he asserted that the Iraqi military is “slowly increasing its capabilities,” and that recent military operations in Basra demonstrated that Iraqi forces could do things today that would have been impossible a year ago.The verdict on “the recent military operations in Basra” is more ambiguous than the General would have us believe, however. Senior U.S. officers privately admit that the performance of Iraqi forces in last week’s clashes with the Mahdi Army militia (Jaish al-Mahdi, JAM) of Moqtada al-Sadr ranged from indifferent to distinctly poor. Far from proving that Maliki’s government and the Iraqi military are capable of independent, decisive action, those operations showed that, after almost five years of U.S.-supervised recruitment and training, Iraqi command and control structure is not capable of cohesive planning. A large percentage of Iraqi soldiers, and the majority of the country’s National Police, are unwilling to fight Shiite militias, with a significant minority ready to desert their units or even change sides. The most “positive spin I can put on it,” according to a senior U.S. official, is that “the Iraqi Army didn’t cut and run.”
Opening the hearings and anticipating the General’s statement, committee chairman Carl Levin warned that an “open-ended pause from July” would be an “invitation to continuing dependency.” Some of his fellow Democrats see the recent fighting in Basra as evidence that the surge was failing. “We need a strategy that will clearly shift the burden to the Iraqis, that’ll begin to take the pressure off our forces, begin to allow us to respond to other challenges in the region and worldwide,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee. It remains beyond Democrats’ reach, however, to wrestle control of the war from the White House. Anti-war legislation that passes the House cannot get the 60 votes in the Senate that are needed to overcome procedural hurdles.
Leading presidential contenders, Sens. John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, sit on the two committees hearing today’s and tomorrow’s testimony. They are using the occasion to restate their position, from McCain’s “we will never surrender” and “success is within reach” to Clinton’s claim the troop buildup had failed in its stated purpose to give the Iraqi government space and time to achieve political reconciliation. McCain’s statement at the hearing could come to haunt him next November. “Success, the establishment of peaceful, democratic state, the defeat of terrorism—this success is within reach,” he said. “Congress must not choose to lose in Iraq. We must choose to succeed.”
Speaking on NBC’s Today show, Obama said that “the most important issue is still the one that was asked in September, which is how has this war made us safer and at what point do we know that there is success so we can start bringing our troops home.”
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