Congress unconvinced of ‘surge’ success

Congress unconvinced of ‘surge’ success
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: September 11 2007 19:08 | Last updated: September 12 2007 00:23


Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday grilled General David Petraeus, the US military commander in Iraq, over the “surge” in a sign that Congress is not convinced that the policy has been a success.

Gen Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, met intense scepticism from the Senate armed services and foreign relations committees when they provided a positive picture of a surge that was designed to give the Iraqi government “breathing space” to achieve political reconciliation.

“Are we any closer to a lasting political settlement in Iraq at the national level today than we were when the surge began eight months ago?

“And if we continue to surge for another six months, is there any evidence that the Sunnis, the Shia and the Kurds will stop killing each other and start governing together?” asked Joseph Biden, Democratic chairman of the ­Senate foreign relations committee.

“In my judgment ... the answer to both those questions is no ... without a settlement, the surge is at best a stopgap that delays, but will not prevent, chaos.

“Its net effect will be to put more American lives at risk, in my view, with very little prospect for success.”

President George W. Bush is this week expected to endorse Gen Petraeus’s recommendation to reduce US troop levels by 30,000 by next summer, but senior Democrats on Tuesday called for deeper cuts.

“Telling the Iraqis that the surge will end by the middle of next year and then we will make a decision as to whether to reduce our troop level from the basic pre-surge level of 130,000 does not change our course in Iraq,” said Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the armed services committee. “It presents an illusion of change to prevent a real change of course from occuring.”

Among the more influential senators, John McCain was one of the few supportive voices.

“We’re getting it right because we finally have in place a strategy that can succeed.”

Repeating the assessment they gave the House on Monday, Mr Crocker conceded that there had not been as much political progress as he had envisaged, while trying to persuade the sceptical lawmakers that the “seeds of reconciliation are being planted”.

Mr Crocker tried to deflect some of that criticism by arguing that the government had made some progress.

As an example, he pointed to the sharing of oil revenues in an equitable way, even though a key hydrocarbon law considered crucial to reconciliation has not been approved.

“Iraqis could achieve all the benchmarks and still not achieve national reconciliation,” Mr Crocker told the committee.

Reflecting growing Republican frustration over the war, Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the committee, said the White House needed a new strategy.

“At this stage of the conflict, with our military strained by Iraq deployments, our global advances being diminished by the weight of our burden in Iraq, it is not enough for the administration to counsel patience until the next milestone or the next report. We need to see a strategy for how our troops and other resources in Iraq might be employed to fundamentally change the equation,” he said.

Those concerns were reflected later by John Warner, the influential Republican on the armed services committee, who suggested growing impatience with the Iraqi government when he said he did “not think that the forward strategy that will be announced [by] the president in a matter of days can once again use the concept of top-down reconciliation as a building block for that strategy”.

Democratic critics were joined by some Republicans who suggested that Gen Petraeus and Mr Crocker were attempting to push the problem down the road to April, when the military commander wants, again, to report back to Congress.

“I think that we need something a little more than say, ‘Give us more time to come back again in the fall’,” said Norm Coleman, a Republican on the foreign relations committee.

Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican, said: “Are we going to continue to invest American blood and treasure at the same rate we are doing now, for what?

“The president said let’s buy time. Buy time? For what?

“Every report I’ve seen, and I assume both of you agree with this, there’s been, really, very little, if any, political progress that is the ultimate core issue, political reconciliation in Iraq.”