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The New York Times | Empty Calories •
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What Crocker and Petraeus Didn't Say
By Nancy A. Youssef and Leila Fadel
McClatchy Newspapers
Monday 10 September 2007
Washington - The Bush administration's top two officials in Iraq answered questions
from Congress for more than six hours on Monday, but their testimony may have
been as important for what they didn't say as for what they did.
A chart displayed by Army Gen. David Petraeus that purported to show the decline
in sectarian violence in Baghdad between December and August made no effort
to show that the ethnic character of many of the neighborhoods had changed in
that same period from majority Sunni Muslim or mixed to majority Shiite Muslim.
Neither Petraeus nor U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about the fact that
since the troop surge began the pace by which Iraqis were abandoning their homes
in search of safety had increased. They didn't mention that 86 percent of Iraqis
who've fled their homes said they'd been targeted because of their sect, according
to the International Organization for Migration.
While Petraeus stressed that civilian casualties were down over the last five
weeks, he drew no connection between that statement and a chart he displayed
that showed that the number of attacks rose during at least one of those weeks.
Petraeus also didn't highlight the fact that his charts showed that "ethno-sectarian"
deaths in August, down from July, were still higher than in June, and he didn't
explain why the greatest drop in such deaths, which peaked in December, occurred
between January and February, before the surge began.
And while both officials said that the Iraqi security forces were improving,
neither talked about how those forces had been infiltrated by militias, though
Petraeus acknowledged that during 2006 some Iraqi security forces had participated
in the ethnic violence.
Both officials said they believed that Iraq was on the path to potential success.
Petraeus said that "the military objectives of the surge are, in large
measure, being met." Crocker was similarly optimistic: "In my judgment,
the cumulative trajectory of political, economic and diplomatic developments
in Iraq is upwards, although the slope of that line is not steep."
They both pleaded for more time, even as Petraeus said that the U.S. should
begin pulling troops out, with the goal of being back to the pre-surge level
of 130,000 troops by next July. Further reductions would be considered next
spring, as conditions allow, he said.
Both men celebrated their plan's success in encouraging residents in once-restive
Anbar province to work with U.S. troops against al Qaida in Iraq.
Petraeus conceded that that success didn't extend to Ninevah province, where
progress "has been much more up and down." But he didn't say that
many believe that al Qaida numbers increased there only after the surge began.
Ninevah is where some of the largest bombings of the year occurred, including
the attack on the Yazidis, which killed more than 300.
He also offered a tepid endorsement of the Iraqi security forces, at times
saying that they were increasingly capable of defending Iraq, while conceding
that they needed to show more progress.
"Iraqi security forces have also continued to grow and shoulder more of
the load, albeit slowly and amid continuing concerns about the sectarian tendencies
of some elements in their ranks," Petraeus said. "In general, however,
Iraqi elements have been standing and fighting and sustaining tough losses,
and they have taken the lead in operations in many areas."
He said 445,000 people were on the security forces' payroll, but didn't discuss
that many officials believe that thousands of those don't actually exist, but
are phantoms whose salaries actually go into ministry officials' pockets.
Both Iraqis and U.S. officials concede that militias have infiltrated the security
forces and that political leaders continue to interfere with their operations
to serve their sects' interests.
Petraeus presented a series of maps to show how sectarian violence had dropped
in Baghdad from December 2006 to August 2007. But all of the maps showed the
same color-coding for Sunni, Shiite and mixed neighborhoods, even though the
ethnicity of many neighborhoods have shifted dramatically over the previous
year. U.S. military officials say that Baghdad was once 65 percent Sunni and
is now 75 percent Shiite.
Questions from the 107 members of Congress who sat in on the hearing rarely
produced more detail.
Still, the two men, considered by many to be among the most capable U.S. public
servants to have served in Iraq, didn't attempt to hide their reservations.
Both said they couldn't guarantee success.
Crocker, a fluent Arabic speaker and a lifelong student of the area, questioned
the U.S. criteria for measuring success and said that the Iraqi government might
never meet most of the 18 benchmarks laid out by Congress in a May law. Petraeus,
who wrote the Army's counterinsurgency manual, acknowledged that violence remained
at unacceptable levels.
Independent observers said the numbers that Crocker and Petraeus provided showed
the violence has dropped to about where it was in May 2006, a few months after
a February 2006 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in the mostly Sunni city
of Samarra, which the military uses to mark the rise in sectarian violence.
"At best, what you've got is the status quo from May or June of 2006,"
said Kirk Johnson, who served for 13 months as the chief statistician for Crocker
and who said he supports the current strategy in Iraq.
Rand Beers, a former White House counterterrorism aide who resigned to protest
the invasion of Iraq, noted there was another troop surge, in Baghdad, in summer
2006.
"We've had two surges, and in a way, things are back to the level before
the first surge," Beers said in a conference call with reporters.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert Gard said that it was understandable that Petraeus
emphasized the positive.
"He's a human being and he's a military human being that wants to accomplish
the mission," Gard said.
--------
Youssef reported from Washington, Fadel, from Baghdad. Warren P. Strobel
in Washington contributed.
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Empty Calories
The New York Times | Editorial
Tuesday 11 September 2007
For months, President Bush has been promising an honest accounting of the situation
in Iraq, a fresh look at the war strategy and a new plan for how to extricate
the United States from the death spiral of the Iraqi civil war. The nation got
none of that yesterday from the Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus,
the top military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. It got more
excuses for delaying serious decisions for many more months, keeping the war
going into 2008 and probably well beyond.
It was just another of the broken promises and false claims of success that
we've heard from Mr. Bush for years, from shock and awe, to bouquets of roses,
to mission accomplished and, most recently, to a major escalation that was supposed
to buy Iraqi leaders time to unify their nation. We hope Congress is not fooled
by the silver stars, charts and rhetoric of yesterday's hearing. Even if the
so-called surge had created breathing room, Iraq's sectarian leaders show neither
the ability nor the intent to take advantage of it.
The headline out of General Petraeus's testimony was a prediction that the
United States should be able to reduce its forces from 160,000 to 130,000 by
next summer. That sounds like a big number, but it would only bring American
troops to the level that were in Iraq when Mr. Bush announced his "surge"
last January. And it's the rough equivalent of dropping an object and taking
credit for gravity. The military does not have the troops to sustain these high
levels without further weakening the overstretched Army and denying soldiers
their 15 months of home leave before going back to war.
The general claimed a significant and steady decline in killings and deaths
in the past three months, but even he admitted that the number of attacks is
still too high. Recent independent studies are much more skeptical about the
decrease in violence. The main success General Petraeus cited was in the previously
all-but-lost Anbar Province where local sheiks, having decided that they hate
Al Qaeda more than they hate the United States, have joined forces with American
troops to combat insurgents. That development - which may be ephemeral
- was not a goal of the surge and surprised American officials. To claim
it as a success of the troop buildup is, to be generous, disingenuous.
The chief objective of the surge was to reduce violence enough that political
leaders in Iraq could learn to work together, build a viable government and
take decisions to improve Iraqi society, including sharing oil resources. Congress
set benchmarks that Mr. Bush accepted. But after independent investigators last
week said that Baghdad had failed to meet most of those markers, Mr. Crocker
dismissed them. The biggest achievement he had to trumpet was a communiqué
in which Iraqi leaders promised to talk more.
General Petraeus admitted success in Iraq would be neither quick nor easy.
Mr. Crocker claimed that success is attainable, but made no guarantee. With
that much wiggle room in the prognosis, one would think American leaders would
start looking at serious alternative strategies - like the early, prudent
withdrawal of troops that we favor. The American people deserve more than what
the general and the diplomat offered them yesterday.
For that matter, they deserve more than what was offered by Representative
Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. When protesters
interrupted the hearing, Mr. Skelton ordered them removed from the room, which
is understandable. But then he said that they would be prosecuted. That seemed
like an unnecessarily authoritarian response to people who just wanted to be
heard.
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