Will the Press Again Serve as 'Surge Protectors'?

Petraeus and the 'Long Pole'
Petraeus and the 'Long Pole'
By Greg Mitchell
S & P
September 10, 2007

Back in May, General Petraeus told the AP annual meeting that the surge should be judged, first of all, by political progress and reconciliation in Iraq. Now he's changed his tune, and no wonder.

On May 8, General David Petraeus appeared, via satellite from Baghdad, at The Associated Press's annual meeting in New York. Much like the episode today, at the outset of his testimony on the "surge" on Capitol Hill, there was a communication breakdown at the start: No sound. Perhaps like some others in the crowd at the AP gathering, I saw the symbolism in this.

But then the technology kicked in and Petraeus, dressed in camouflage fatigues, offered what was essentially a preview of his testimony of progress today. It was clear, even then, there was no way David Petraeus was going to give General Petraeus a bad mark. Then he took questions for a few minutes from a pair of AP reporters who had covered the war and met him previously.

But there was one key difference: Today he measured everything in terms of some kind of military or security progress. Back in May, he declared that political progress and reconciliation was the "long pole" in this tent.

This priority is inconvenient now, since everyone, including his partner on the Hill today, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, admits that political progress and reconciliation in Iraq is non-existent. Crocker was desperate to find some advance on that he was reduced to citing a communique from leaders promising to work on it.

Well, as Tom Ricks and Karen DeYoung sum it up so well in Tuesday's Washington Post: "If Gen. David H. Petraeus has his way, tens of thousands of U.S. troops will be in Iraq for years to come."

Here, from the military's transcript, is the key portion of Petraeus's remarks to the AP in May.

So we are really still in the fairly early stages. We don't have, you know, all the concrete walls and population control measures and markets hardened. It -- I mean, this stuff takes quite a while. And that's why I, you know, began right up off the bat back when I had the confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying that it would be late summer, early fall. And as you know, what we've settled on is some time in early -- probably first or second week of September, Ambassador Crocker and I will link arms and come back and provide an assessment.

I have said that, you know, if I really don't think that it can work, for a variety of reasons, and they could be, you know -- it could be a number of different reasons. But you've heard me say what is necessary. And I think you have some sense of the long poles in the tent, which really are those actions that will build on what it is that we are trying to do.

Again, our action is necessary, not sufficient. The sufficient piece is the genuine demonstration of a willingness by all parties to reconcile with one another, to truly embrace what is enshrined in the Iraqi constitution -- one Iraq, minority rights, no safe haven for terrorists and a government that is representative of and responsive to all Iraqis, and "all" is underlined.

I mean, that's, I think, where we're all sort of focusing like a laser beam. That is what Ambassador Crocker is increasingly over time -- and as you know, he's just been on the ground now about a month or so. We have a very good partnership. And that's where we're focusing. And again, that is the long pole in the tent.

The Petraeus Report: This Is What We Waited For?
The Petraeus Report: This Is What We Waited For?
by Paul Rieckhoff
Posted September 11, 2007

Paul Rieckhoff is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Executive Director and Founder of IAVA (Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America), the country's first and largest Iraq Veterans group. IAVA is a non-partisan, non-profit organization headquartered in New York City.

Rieckhoff is a nationally recognized authority on the war in Iraq and issues affecting troops, military families and veterans. His critically-acclaimed memoir, Chasing Ghosts was recently publilshed by Penguin.

Rieckhoff created IAVA in June 2004 along with a few dedicated Veterans, a handful of volunteers, and some serious credit-card debt. In less than one year, the organization had attracted thousands of Iraq War Veterans and more than 65,000 grassroots supporters across America.

"And lo, Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand." (Exodus 32:15)

After all the hoopla from the administration, you'd think General Petraeus' testimony would be delivered on stone tablets, too. But General Petraeus isn't Moses -- and he's not the commander in chief either. Many in the media and in Washington have turned to our military leaders to make sweeping policy decisions and undo four years of arrogance and error in Iraq. Instead, thankfully, our military continues to implement the decisions of their civilian leadership. That is, after all, what the generals should do in democratic nations.

Yesterday, General Petraeus gave a moderate and forthright accounting of the uneven military progress in Baghdad, based heavily on the Pentagon's very questionable data on Iraqi civilian deaths and sectarian violence. In contrast, Ambassador Crocker, delivering the less-anticipated but much more crucial report on political reconciliation, relied on individual anecdotes and far-fetched analogies. The combined testimony suggests that our limited military success has been undercut by the failure to achieve national political reconciliation, the president's stated goal for the surge. We've known all this for weeks, if not months. Remind me what we were all waiting for?

Even the big news -- the planned decrease in troop strength -- was nothing new. Hitting pre-surge levels by mid-2008 isn't just a strategic goal. It's a practical necessity. Top military brass admitted more than a month ago that the surge cannot persist after April 2008 without extending tours to 18 months or instituting a draft. Simply put, we're out of troops.

Which brings us to the real issue, one that falls outside the scope of General Petraeus's report. Because of the Iraq War, our military is stretched to the breaking point. Troops are now serving the longest overseas deployments since World War Two, and almost half a million troops have served more than one tour. Four-fifths of Army Guard and Reserve units not currently deployed have the lowest possible readiness rating, and 88 percent of those National Guard units are considered very poorly equipped. Bottom line: the war in Iraq is leaving us unprepared at home. That means we're at higher risk during natural disasters, as all 50 governors nationwide have warned. Moreover, as the recent arrests in Germany show, Iraq is not some kind of terrorist flypaper. We are still at risk outside Iraq, and particularly here at home.

For months, the lead-up to the Petraeus report has sucked up all the air in any public discussion of national security. In the last few days, the debate has gotten completely out of hand, culminating in repugnant personal attacks on General Petraeus before he even delivered his report.

Those with a partisan axe to grind will find plenty of material in the Petraeus-Crocker testimonies. But it's long past time to put aside the rhetoric, and to stop waiting for answers from on high. Any responsible person following the situation in Iraq knows how few options we have left. It's time to look at them honestly, and with the future readiness of our military in mind.

What Crocker and Petraeus Didn't Say
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.
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Youssef reported from Washington, Fadel, from Baghdad. Warren P. Strobel in Washington contributed.

"Swear Him In"
"Swear Him In"
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 10 September 2007

That's all I said in the unusual silence on Monday afternoon as first aid was being administered to Gen. David Petraeus's microphone before he spoke before the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees.

It had dawned on me when House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Missouri) invited Gen. Petraeus to make his presentation, Skelton forgot to ask him to take the customary oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I had no idea my suggestion would be enough to get me thrown out of he hearing.

I had experienced a flashback to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in early 2006, when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) reminded chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) that Specter had forgotten to swear in the witness, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; and how Specter insisted that would not be necessary.

Now that may, or may not, be an invidious comparison. But Petraeus and Gonzales work for the same boss, who has a rather unusual relationship with the truth. How many of his senior staff could readily be convicted, as was the hapless-and-now-commuted Scooter Libby, of perjury?

So, I didn't think twice about it. I really thought Skelton perhaps forgot, and the ten-minute interlude of silence while they fixed the microphone was a good chance to raise this seemingly innocent question.

The more so since the ranking Republican representatives had been protesting too much. Practicing the obverse of "killing the messenger," they had been canonizing the messenger with protective fire. Ranking Armed Services Committee member Duncan Hunter (R-California) began what amounted to a SWAT-team attack on the credibility of those who dared question the truthfulness of the sainted Petraeus, and issued a special press release decrying a full-page ad in today's New York Times equating Petraeus with "Betray-us."

Hunter served notice on any potential doubters, insisting Petraeus's "capability, integrity, intelligence ... are without question." And Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, rang changes on the same theme, unwittingly choosing another infelicitous almost-homonym for the charges against Petraeus - "outrageous."

Indeed, Hunter's prepared statement, which he circulated before the hearing, amounted to little more than a full-scale "duty-honor-country" panegyric for the general. On the chance we did not hear him the first time, Hunter kept repeating how "independent" Petraeus is, how candid and full of integrity, and compared him to famous generals who testified to Congress in the past - Eisenhower, Macarthur and Schwarzkopf. Hunter was smart enough to avoid any mention of Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, who fell tragically short on those traits. (See "Is Petraeus Today's Westmoreland?")

If memory serves, the aforementioned generals and Westmoreland were required to testify under oath. And this was one of the more embarrassing sticking points when CBS aired a program showing Westmoreland had deliberately dissembled on the strength of Communist forces and US "progress" in the war. When Westmoreland sued CBS for libel, several of his subordinates came clean, and Westmoreland quickly dropped the suit. The analogy with Westmoreland - justifying a White House death wish to persist in an unwinnable war - is the apt one here.

If Petraeus is so honest and full of integrity, what possible objection could he have to being sworn in? I had not the slightest hesitation being sworn in when testifying before the committee assembled by John Conyers (D-Michigan) on June 16, 2005. Should generals be immune? Or, did Petraeus's masters wish to give him a little more assurance he could play fast and loose with the truth without the consequences encountered by Scooter Libby?

With the microphone finally fixed, much became quickly clear. Petraeus tried to square a circle in his very first two paragraphs. In the first, he thanks the committees for the opportunity to "discuss the recommendations I recently provided to my chain of command for the way forward." Then he stretches credulity well beyond the breaking point - at least for me:

"At the outset, I would like to note that this is my testimony. Although I have briefed my assessment and recommendations to my chain of command, I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by, nor shared with, anyone in the Pentagon, the White House, or Congress."

Is not the commander in chief in Petraeus's chain of command?

As Harry Truman (D-Missouri) would have said, "Does he think we were born yesterday?"
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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in Washington, DC. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early sixties and then a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990. He had a front-seat for the charades orchestrated by Westmoreland in Vietnam.

This article was first published on Consortiumnews.com.

George F. Will: A War Still Seeking a Mission
A War Still Seeking a Mission
By George F. Will
Washington Post
Tuesday, September 11, 2007; Page A17

Before Gen. David Petraeus's report, and to give it a context of optimism, the president visited Iraq's Anbar province to underscore the success of the surge in making some hitherto anarchic areas less so. More significant, however, was that the president did not visit Baghdad. This underscored the fact that the surge has failed, as measured by the president's and Petraeus's standards of success.

Those who today stridently insist that the surge has succeeded also say they are especially supportive of the president, Petraeus and the military generally. But at the beginning of the surge, both Petraeus and the president defined success in a way that took the achievement of success out of America's hands.

The purpose of the surge, they said, is to buy time -- "breathing space," the president says -- for Iraqi political reconciliation. Because progress toward that has been negligible, there is no satisfactory answer to this question: What is the U.S. military mission in Iraq?

Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds. America's military leaders, who are professional realists, do not make this mistake.

The progress that Petraeus reports in improving security in portions of Iraq is real. It might, however, have two sinister aspects.

First, measuring sectarian violence is problematic: The Post reports that a body with a bullet hole in the front of the skull is considered a victim of criminality; a hole in the back of the skull is evidence of sectarian violence. But even if violence is declining, that might be partly because violent sectarian cleansing has separated Sunni and Shiite communities. This homogenization of hostile factions -- trained and armed by U.S. forces -- may bear poisonous fruit in a full-blown civil war.

Second, brutalities by al-Qaeda in Iraq have indeed provoked some Sunni leaders to collaborate with U.S. forces. But these alliances of convenience might be inconvenient when Shiites again become the Sunnis' principal enemy.

Congressional Democrats should accept Petraeus's report as a reason to declare a victory, one that might make this fact somewhat palatable: Substantial numbers of U.S. forces will be in Iraq when the next president is inaugurated. The Democrats' "victory" -- a chimera but a useful one -- is that Petraeus indicates there soon can be a small reduction of U.S. forces.

To declare this a substantial victory won by them requires Democrats to do two things. They must make a mountain out of a molehill (Petraeus suggests withdrawal of only a few thousand troops). And they must spuriously claim credit for the mountain. Actually, senior military officers have been saying that a large drawdown is inevitable, given the toll taken on the forces by the tempo of operations for more than four years.

But Democrats cannot advertise a small withdrawal as a victory without further infuriating their party's base, the source of energy and money. The base is incandescent because there are more troops in Iraq today than there were on Election Day 2006, when Democratic activists and donors thought, not without reason, that congressional Democrats acquired the power to end U.S. involvement in Iraq.

A democracy, wrote the diplomat and scholar George Kennan, "fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it -- to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end." Which is why "unconditional surrender" was a natural U.S. goal in World War II and why Americans were so uncomfortable with three "wars of choice" since then -- in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 -- the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction -- was fictitious. That is one reason this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president's decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war -- the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

After more than four years of war, two questions persist: Is there an Iraq? Are there Iraqis?

The mission was and always will be naive one-upsmanship over the father, George Bush I, I believe even over any revenge for the assassination plot by Sadaam, but including mis-directed revenge for 9/11. The Four Stooges were out on the Capitol lawn this morning, looking like four clueless pawns in the commemoration ceremony for 9/11. There was no King (except an undressed one), no Queen (he has resigned from the Senate) and the Knight in Shining Armor was sitting before our legislators, still rationalizing the Iraq war and it seemed more like a broadcast of Big Brother in "1984" explaining the war in the novel.