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Administration Shaving Yardstick for Iraq Gains    [

    Iraq Falls Short of Key US Guidelines: Report
    Agence France-Presse

    Sunday 08 July 2007

    Iraq fails to meet key US political and security benchmarks in an upcoming report to Congress that seems certain to increase calls from lawmakers and the restive public to withdraw US troops, a US newspaper reported said Sunday.

    The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals and timelines set for it by President George W. Bush when he announced a major shift in US Iraq policy last January, the daily reported.

    The US Congress earlier this year passed a law containing 18 goals as part of a war-funding measure, setting a September deadline for a thorough assessment of the situation on the ground and calling for a July interim report.

    The president deployed additional troops to buy time for Iraqi political reconciliation, but the Post said that the report, due next week, concludes that US combat deaths have escalated, violence has spread beyond Baghdad and sectarianism has further polarized Iraq.

    "The security progress we're making in Iraq is real," a senior intelligence official in Baghdad told the newspaper, "but it's only in part of the country and there's not enough political progress to get us over the line in September."

    Nevertheless, the newspaper reported that the top coalition commander, General David Petraeus, and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker will emphasize the positive when they provide their assessment to Congress in September.

    The US administration's interim report says that Sunni tribal leaders in Al-Anbar province are turning against Al-Qaeda; that sectarian killings were down in June; and that Iraqi political leaders last month agreed on a unified response to the bombing of a major religious shrine.

    Still, officials told the Post that those achievements pale in comparison to the numerous setbacks in America's efforts to make Iraq stand on its own and provide for its own security.

    Speaking on CNN, Iraq's National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie took issue with the negative forecast, which he decried as "totally untrue."

    Meanwhile, an editorial in the influential New York Times called for US troops to leave Iraq, saying that Bush's plan to stabilize the country through military means is a lost cause.

    "It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush's plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost," the daily opined.

    US Senator Chuck Hagel, one of the earliest critics of the Iraq war from within Bush's Republican party, expressed the country's growing desperation about the course of events.

    "We have a mess now," Hagel told NBC.

    "If we do not see this administration take some initiatives to make some changes - significant strategic policy changes over the next 90 days - then it will be forced on him," Hagel said.

    Senator Richard Lugar, whose defection last month led to a hemorrhaging of Republican support for Bush on Iraq, renewed his call for US troops to get out.

    "I would think the majority of our forces could redeploy by the midpoint of next year ... rather than going door-to-door in the present surge," he told CNN.

    Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, another vocal critic, said: "I think the dam is about to burst."

    "Republican senators who have been holding up a reasonable change in policy on this war are going home and getting hammered by their constituents, and they're beginning to change," he told CBS.

    "If not this July, by September there will be real change forced upon the president by a bipartisan Senate," Schumer predicted.

    The revelations about the report's findings come as Congress prepares to resume debate on Iraq as it takes up funding this week.

    Some stalwart Bush supporters in the US legislature said it might be possible to simply scale back expectations, rather than pulling out of Iraq altogether.

    "We need to go back and reevaluate ... establishing Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq," said Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, speaking on Fox News.

    "We need to have this national debate about 'Do we believe that radical jihadists are a threat to US security in the long term?' And I'm not sure that we've come to a consensus on that," Hoekstra said.

 

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    Administration Shaving Yardstick for Iraq Gains
    By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks
    The Washington Post

    Sunday 08 July 2007

Goals unmet; smaller strides to be promoted.

    The Iraqi government is unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals or timelines President Bush set for it in January when he announced a major shift in U.S. policy, according to senior administration officials closely involved in the matter. As they prepare an interim report due next week, officials are marshaling alternative evidence of progress to persuade Congress to continue supporting the war.

    In a preview of the assessment it must deliver to Congress in September, the administration will report that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province are turning against the group al-Qaeda in Iraq in growing numbers; that sectarian killings were down in June; and that Iraqi political leaders managed last month to agree on a unified response to the bombing of a major religious shrine, officials said.

    Those achievements are markedly different from the benchmarks Bush set when he announced his decision to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq. More troops, Bush said, would enable the Iraqis to proceed with provincial elections this year and pass a raft of power-sharing legislation. In addition, he said, the government of President Nouri al-Maliki planned to "take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November."

    Congress expanded on Bush's benchmarks, writing 18 goals into law as part of the war-funding measure it passed in the spring.

    In addition to the elections, legislation and security measures Bush outlined in January, Congress added demands that the Iraqi government complete a revision of its constitution and pass a law on de-Baathification and additional laws on militia disarmament, regional boundaries and other issues.

    Lawmakers asked for an interim report in July and set a Sept. 15 deadline for a comprehensive assessment by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador. Now, as U.S. combat deaths have escalated, violence has spread far beyond Baghdad, and sectarian political divides have deepened, the administration must persuade lawmakers to use more flexible, less ambitious standards.

    But anything short of progress on the original benchmarks is unlikely to appease the growing ranks of disaffected Republican lawmakers who are urging Bush to develop a new strategy. Although Republicans held the line this year against Democratic efforts to set a timeline for withdrawing troops, several influential GOP senators have broken with Bush in recent days, charging that his plan is failing and calling for troop redeployments starting as early as the spring.

    According to several senior officials who agreed to discuss the situation in Iraq only on the condition of anonymity, the political goals that seemed achievable earlier this year remain hostage to the security situation. If the extreme violence were to decline, Iraq's political paralysis might eventually subside. "If they are arguing, accusing, gridlocking," one official said, "none of that would mean the country is falling apart if it was against the backdrop of a stabilizing security situation."

    From a military perspective, however, the political stalemate is hampering security. "The security progress we're making is real," said a senior military intelligence official in Baghdad. "But it's only in part of the country, and there's not enough political progress to get us over the line in September."

    In their September report, sources said, Petraeus and Crocker intend to emphasize how security and politics are intertwined, and how progress in either will be incremental. In that context, the administration will offer new measures of progress to justify continuing the war effort.

    "There are things going on that we never could have foreseen," said one official, who noted that the original benchmarks set by Bush six months ago - and endorsed by the Maliki government - are not only unachievable in the short term but also irrelevant to changing the conditions in Iraq.

    As they work to put together the reports due to Congress next week and in September, these officials and others close to Iraq policy recognize that the administration is boxed in by measurements that were enshrined in U.S. law in May.

    "That is a problem," the official said. "These are congressionally mandated benchmarks now." They require Bush to certify movement in areas ranging from the passage of specific legislation by the Iraqi parliament to the numbers of Iraqi military units able to operate independently. If he cannot make a convincing case, the legislation requires the president to explain how he will change his strategy.

    Top administration officials are aware that the strategy's stated goal - using U.S. forces to create breathing space for Iraqi political reconciliation - will not be met by September, said one person fresh from a White House meeting. But though some, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have indicated flexibility toward other options, including early troop redeployments, Bush has made no decisions on a possible new course.

    "The heart of darkness is the president," the person said. "Nobody knows what he thinks, even the people who work for him."

    Mixed Security Results

    Military commanders say that their offensive is improving security in Baghdad. "Everything takes time, and everything takes longer than you think it's going to take," Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, which is fighting south of Baghdad, said Friday. He added: "There is indeed room for optimism. I see progress, but there needs to be more."

    Yet the month of May, which came before the Phantom Thunder offensive began, was the most violent in Iraq since November 2004, when U.S. and Iraqi forces fought a fierce battle to retake Fallujah. That intensity promises to continue through the summer. "I see these aggressive offensive operations . . . taking us through July, August and into September," Lynch said.

    Not even the most optimistic commanders contend that the offensive is allowing for political reconciliation. At best, Petraeus is likely to report in September, security will have improved in the capital, perhaps returning to the level of 2005, when the city was violent but not racked by low-level civil war.

    More significant is whether that slight improvement in security can be built upon. Regardless of what decisions are made in Washington and Baghdad, the U.S. military cannot sustain the current force levels beyond March 2008 because of force rotations. Long-term holding of cleared areas will fall to Iraqi soldiers and police officers.

    Because of corruption and mixed loyalties, a Pentagon official said about the Iraqi police, "half of them are part of the problem, not the solution." The portrait officials paint of the Iraqi military is somewhat brighter. "These guys have now been through some pretty hard combat," said a senior administration official. "They're in the fight, not running from it.

    "But can they do it without us there? Almost certainly not," the official said.

    Even if U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies are able to hold Baghdad and the surrounding provinces, noted the intelligence official, there is a good chance that security will deteriorate elsewhere because there are not enough U.S. troops to spread around. As U.S. troop numbers decrease, he said, it is possible that by sometime next year "we control the middle, the Kurds control the north, and the Iranians control the south."

    A Hurdle to Progress

    Last month, Iraq's largest Sunni political grouping announced that its four cabinet ministers were boycotting the government and that it was withdrawing its 44 members from parliament. The immediate cause was the arrest of a Sunni minister on murder charges and a vote by the Shiite-dominated legislature to fire the Sunni Arab speaker.

    The withdrawal poses a serious problem for short-term U.S. goals. A new law to distribute oil revenue among Iraq's sectarian groups - seen by U.S. officials as the best hope for a legislative achievement before September - reached parliament last week after months of delay. Although the Shiite and Kurdish blocs could pass it, the absence of the Sunnis would make any victory meaningless.

    U.S. officials despair of any timely progress on the oil law. "I suppose they'll pass it when they damn well want to," one official said.

    Plans to hold provincial elections, envisioned to provide more power to Sunnis who boycotted a 2005 vote, have grown more complicated. As Anbar tribal chieftains have emerged to help fight al-Qaeda, they have also demanded more political power from traditional Sunni leaders. In southern Shiite areas, Maliki's Dawa organization continues to vie with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest bloc in the Shiite alliance that dominates Iraq's parliament, while both fear the rising power of forces controlled by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

    "In mixed areas such as Baghdad," a U.S. official said, "the Sunnis are worried that the Shiites will just clean up again even if [Sunnis] participate this time, because so many Sunnis" have fled sectarian violence in the capital.

    Late last year, amid strong doubts about Maliki's leadership capabilities, senior White House officials considered trying to engineer the Iraqi president's replacement. But most have now concluded that there are no viable alternatives and that any attempt to force a change would only worsen matters.

    Instead, U.S. officials in Baghdad are engaged in a complicated hand-holding exercise with Iraqi leaders, and are striving for small gains rather than major advancement. The main example of success they cite is agreement reached by the top Shiite, Sunni and Kurd officials in the government to appeal for calm after last month's bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra.

    Officials are encouraged by the growing numbers of local Sunni officials and tribal leaders in Anbar striving to wrest political and security control from al Qaeda in Iraq. Bush has also highlighted the importance of such local efforts. "This is where political reconciliation matters most," he said in a speech last month, "because it is where ordinary Iraqis are deciding whether to support new Iraq."

    But officials caution that this transformation is no substitute for a national Iraqi identity, with unified leadership in Baghdad. Maliki's Shiite-dominated government must continue to reach out to Anbar "and give these emerging tribal forces status, adopting them," a U.S. official said.

    "Trying to do the local initiative stuff and having that be the whole story does not advance the process," he said.

    Warnings on Withdrawal

    Facing increased public disapproval and eroding Republican support, Bush has stepped up his warnings that a sudden U.S. withdrawal would allow al-Qaeda or Iran - or both - to take over Iraq. What is more likely, several officials said, is a deeper split between competing Shiite groups supported in varying degrees by Iran, and greater involvement by neighboring Arab states in Sunni areas battling al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Kurdish region, officials said, would become further estranged from the rest of Iraq, and its tensions with Turkey would increase.

    "I can't say that al-Qaeda is going to take over, or that Iran is going to take over," an official said. "I don't think either are true. But I do think that a lot of very, very bad things would happen." If the administration decided to have troops retreat to bases inside Iraq and not intervene in sectarian warfare, he said, the U.S. military could find itself in a position that "would make the Dutch at Srebrenica look like heroes."

    For its part, the military has calculated that a veto-proof congressional majority is unlikely to demand a full, immediate withdrawal. But however long the troops remain, and in whatever number, the military intelligence official said, they see a clear mission ahead. "We're going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we'll back out as carefully as we can," the official said.

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    Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.