America and Iraq

Still hopeful, broadly, about Iraq

David Petraeus testifies on Iraq

GENERAL David Petraeus, America’s most senior general in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, its ambassador to Baghdad, went before the Senate on Tuesday April 8th to review the state of affairs in Iraq. The last time the two men were called to offer such testimony, in September, they were generally optimistic. A surge of troops, begun early in 2007, had shown measurable progress in diminishing violence said General Petraeus previously. Mr Crocker had added that he believed that this would open the door to political reconciliation.

This time around General Petraeus managed to sound hopeful again: the decline in violence that he had reported in September had continued. He referred to a chart showing “ethno-sectarian” violence down to the levels of mid-2005, and overall civilian deaths at a level not seen since February 2006 when a sacred Shia mosque was bombed. He was careful to call the progress “fragile and reversible”. But he insisted that it was significant: proof that the surge is working.

He testified at a sensitive time. Fighting has erupted in Baghdad and in Basra, the two main cities, as renegade Shia groups do battle with American and Iraqi government forces. The militias are either affiliated with or recently split from the grouping of Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shia firebrand. Nuri al-Maliki, the (Shia) prime minister, says that his legitimate government must quash private militias, but it has failed to do so yet. His critics call his Shia-dominated security forces little more than an quasi-official part of the constellation of armed ethnic or sectarian militias. General Petraeus further complicated the picture by suggesting that Iran is encouraging violence by supplying arms and training. He called Iran the biggest threat to a viable democratic Iraq.

As before the war critics, especially Democratic politicians under pressure from voters, will not be satisfied by what they heard. They want to see an end to the war, or at least America’s exit from it. In this regard, Mr Crocker’s testimony was relevant, suggesting that there has been some political progress. The ambassador cited several laws passed in the past half-year. A de-Baathifcation law should make it easier for Sunnis, at least those who were not implicated in Saddam Hussein’s worst crimes, to work more easily. Another law has called for provincial elections to be held, although the election law itself has yet to be worked out.

Mr Crocker even suggested that the recent fighting provided evidence that Iraqis are coming together. Over the weekend Iraqi political leaders of every grouping but Mr Sadr’s signed a statement calling for an end to the fighting, the disbanding (or folding into official forces) of all militias, and for regional powers not to meddle in Iraq. (Each Iraqi group has one foreign nemesis in mind; for the Kurds, Turkey; for the Sunnis, Iran; and for the Shia, Saudi Arabia.)

But Democratic senators, joined by a couple of sceptical Republicans, gave the two men a grilling. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the armed-services committee, said that the Bush administration has failed to hold Iraq’s government to promises of political and economic progress. He called for a timetable for American troop withdrawals. Hillary Clinton, obviously mindful of her presidential campaign, pushed the point that America’s forces, bogged down in Iraq, had been rendered less able to respond to crises elsewhere. She also worried about the toll taken on ordinary troops. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and the most senior member of his party on the committee, reiterated his fierce support for the war, calling pleas for a pullout “abandoning Iraq to civil war, genocide and terror”. That would represent for America “a defeat that is terrible and long-lasting”. Barack Obama, the other contender in the race to be president, put questions to the two men when the Senate’s foreign-affairs committee met in the afternoon. He suggested there should be a timetable for withdrawal of American troops.

These three senators’ opinions matter more than most. General Petraeus called for a pause in the drawdown of the troops beginning in July. No big change after that can be expected from the Bush administration. Congress, at the same time, has shown its unwillingness to end the war by the main means available to it, cutting off funding. Thus the next big decision on Iraq is likely to be made only once one of the three senators has made the move down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House early next year.