Democrats cast doubts on Petraeus/Echoes of Westmoreland and Vietnam/Volunteers collect Baghdad's nameless dead

Democrats cast doubts on Petraeus
By Andrew Ward and Ed Luce in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: September 9 2007 19:10 | Last updated: September 9 2007 22:54


In September 2004 General David Petraeus – then a senior US commander in Iraq – wrote in the Washington Post that he was optimistic American forces were beginning to turn the corner in what was then an 18-month-old war.

“I see tangible progress,” Gen Petraeus wrote. “Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. The institutions that oversee them are being re-established from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward.”

Three years and many disastrous episodes later, Gen Petraeus – now overall commander of US troops in Iraq – will on Monday present Congress with his much-awaited progress report on the “new way forward in Iraq” that President George W. Bush unveiled in January.

Bush administration officials are urging the Democratic-controlled Congress to take the general’s testimony on Monday and that of Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Iraq, at “face value”.

Mr Bush, who on Sunday returned a day early from the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Sydney to prepare for Monday’s hearing, urged Capitol Hill to “to sit back and listen to these two well-respected professionals before jumping to any conclusions”.

Mr Bush added that his resolve to succeed in Iraq was “as strong as it’s ever been”. But a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are casting pre-emptive doubts on the independence of Gen Petraeus’s judgment.

On Monday, MoveOn.Org – the Democratic anti-war group – has taken out a full page advertisement in the New York Times which says: “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?”

Less abrasively, Democratic senators are citing the general’s 2004 Washington Post piece that appeared just weeks before the presidential election and was written at a stage when fewer than 1,000 US troops had died in Iraq compared to almost 3,800 today.

They also point to an ABC poll this weekend which says 53 per cent of Americans believe Gen Petraeus will try to portray the situation in Iraq as better than it really is.

Just over 60 per cent of the public continue to label the war a mistake – a number unchanged from before the surge.

Whether Mr Bush’s 30,000-troop increase, which has taken the US military presence in Iraq to a peak of around 170,000 since it was completed in mid-June, will continue to attract sufficient backing from his Republican allies on Capitol Hill depends very much on how lawmakers respond on Monday to the testimony of Gen Petraeus.

“He has made a number of statements over the years that have not proved to be factual,” said Harry Reid, the Democratic majority Senate leader. Mr Reid predicted the assessments of Gen Petraeus and Mr Crocker would “pass through the White House spin machine, where facts are often ignored or twisted and intelligence is cherry picked”.

The outlines of the general’s testimony, which will be followed later this week by Mr Bush’s own progress report, have been apparent for weeks. The Princeton-educated general, who wrote the US army’s manual on counter-insurgency last year, is expected to point to strong security gains in Baghdad and its surrounding provinces.

But he is also expected to concede that the surge has so far largely failed to fulfil its principal rationale of stimulating political reconciliation between Iraqi Sunni and Shia groups.

Following his testimony, which takes place on Monday and on Wednesday, the political debate in Washington is likely to shift to the Democrats, some of whom want to revive efforts to mandate a timeline for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, while others are contemplating less provocative legislation designed to attract the support of moderate Republicans.

There is speculation that Gen Petraeus may float the possibility of a modest cut in troop numbers early next year, warning that an immediate reduction would imperil the fragile security gains achieved by the surge. However, one senior military official said that no decision on cuts have yet been taken. Mr Bush said last week that it may become possible to start bringing troops home if security continued to improve. But he made clear the decision would be based on conditions in Iraq rather than politics on Capitol Hill.

Neither is likely to placate Democratic lawmakers. “The president’s escalation was supposed to give the Iraqi government and the ethnic groups the room they needed to make political progress,” says Rahm Emmanuel, a senior Democratic lawmaker. “That progress simply has not happened.”



Echoes of Westmoreland and Vietnam
By Demetri Sevastopuloin Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: September 10 2007 03:00 | Last updated: September 10 2007 03:00


There is a sense of déjà vu surrounding today's Congressional testimony by General David Petraeus. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson recalled his top general in Vietnam to defend the war against criticism from Congress.

Back in Washington, General William Westmoreland said the military had reached a point where "the end begins to come into view". There would be "light at the end of the tunnel", but "mopping up the enemy" might take two more years.

Forty years on, General Petraeus will deliver a similar message. Writing to troops ahead of his testimony, Gen Petraeus said the coalition had "achieved tactical momentum and wrested the initiative from our enemies in a number of areas of Iraq". But he concluded the US was "a long way from the goal line, but we do have the ball and we are driving down the field". The general is ex-pected to say the US should not abandon the ball and walk off the pitch at this point.

Most experts agree that the surge has helped improve security in Baghdad as US forces have spent more time integrated into neighbourhoods instead of patrolling in armoured vehicles. Anbar province has also seen less violence as tribal sheikhs switched from fighting US forces to siding with the Americans against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Some experts question, however, whether the improvement in Anbar was due more to serendipity than the surge.

"The use of forward deployed US troops . . . has not stopped sectarian cleansing in Baghdad or elsewhere, but it has reduced the more brutal forms of violence," Anthony Cordesman from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said recently.

The war has already cost the lives of 3,760 US troops, and wounded 28,000 more. Iraq Body Count, a group that monitors Iraqi deaths, estimates that 70,000 Iraqis have been killed. It says there has been a "modest improvement" in security compared with the bloody second half of 2006, but that the first half of 2007 was the "most deadly first six months for civilians" of any year since the invasion.

According to data from the independent Iraq Coalition Casualty Count there has been progress since the surge came into full effect in June with average daily fatalities falling from 4.23 in May to 2.84 by July.

The same group calculated that 2,074 Iraqis were killed in August, down from 2,966 a year before. So far in September, 174 Iraqis have died, against 3,543 last September, the bloodiest month since the invasion.

Gen Petraeus concedes "tangible political progress" expected from the surge has "not worked out as we had hoped". But he is expected to argue that Iraqi leaders should be given more time.

Unlike Gen Westmoreland, who was lambasted for calling Congressional critics "unpatriotic", Gen Petraeus is more attuned to the need to appease Congress, if only to buy time. Media reports last week suggested he told President George W. Bush he could make a token withdrawal of one brigade - about 4,000 troops - to assuage concerns, although one senior military officer cautioned that no such decisions had been taken.

There are about 170,000 US troops in Iraq. Gen Petraeus last week echoed the views of senior officers in Washington when he suggested the surge would start winding down from April, when the 15-month tours of the five "surge" brigades started to end.

As the surge ends, however, the focus will shift to whether Mr Bush will keep forces at the pre-surge level of about 135,000, or whether he will consider further reductions, accomplished by not replacing some of the other 15 combat brigades.





Volunteers collect Baghdad's nameless dead
Copyright by CNN
Editor's note: This is part of a series of reports CNN.com is featuring from an Anderson Cooper special this week, "Live from Iraq," which airs at 10 p.m. ET.
September 10, 2007



BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Sheik Jamal al-Sudani leads a group of volunteers with one of the most solemn tasks in Iraq: Collecting and burying the hundreds of unclaimed dead every month and giving them a proper burial.

"I only think about one thing: That one day, I will face the same fate as these people have faced, and will there be someone to take care of me and bury me, too?" the sheik told CNN.

The discovery of slain bodies in bustling, war-torn Baghdad is a daily fact of life, as ever-present as the lively markets, the solemn mosques, the blinding sunrise and the soft sunset.

Many of the bodies of the slain men, women, and children -- found on the streets, in the sewers and in the ruins of bombings -- have never been claimed because some are so mangled and charred, they're unidentifiable.

As a result, many people have no idea whether their loved ones were killed or took flight to other cities. Others are afraid because they are Sunni and won't cross sectarian lines to claim the bodies at the Health Ministry morgue, controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr's hard-line Shiite followers.

And so religious volunteers, like al-Sudani, who regard a respectful burial of these victims of war as a crucial calling, have come forth to give the dead a proper resting place.

"I look to them as human beings, with it my duty to bury them so their sanctity will not be violated again after the violation of their killing," the sheik said.

This is the state of life -- and death -- in Baghdad: the cauldron of the Sunni-Shiite sectarian civil warfare that has escalated since the bombing of the Askariya Mosque in Samarra in February 2006.

It is a reality in the back of the minds of officials such as Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in the country -- both of whom will brief the U.S. Congress this week on the state of progress in Iraq. See the Iraq benchmarks »

The unidentified bodies have been showing up in significant numbers in morgues ever since the Askariya bombing, thought to have been carried out by Sunni militants.

Most of the dead are believed to be victims of sectarian animosity, slain after they were kidnapped or assassinated in so-called extra-judicial killings or in massive bombings.

Such grim volunteer work isn't entirely new to the region. Under former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the sheik said, they often buried more than three dozen unidentified corpses a month.

After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, that number rose to around 250 a month, he said. Following last year's Askariya bombing, the volunteers buried as many as 2,000 per month. The numbers now are back in the low hundreds, the sheik said.

These volunteers -- also Shiites with access to the Health Ministry -- are compelled by conscience and faith and take it upon themselves to bury the dead in holy anonymity.

Despite their sectarian affiliation, these volunteers are moderate in spirit, intent on burying Sunnis and Christians, as well as members of their own sect.

"When I enter the morgue, I don't see these human beings as Christian, Shiite or Sunni because I see them in death, embracing each other," said al-Sudani, a cleric from a small charity in Baghdad's Sadr City.

It is arduous work for these Shiite volunteers, who do what they can to repel the touch and odor of death.

The sheik and his comrades haul bodies more than 150 miles from Baghdad to Najaf in refrigerated trucks, and the graves are dug by hand.

The bodies are numbered and photographed, and the information is put into a database. Then they are prepared for burial, washed in sand and wrapped in shrouds in the traditional Muslim fashion.

The bodies are laid side-by-side, two to a grave.

The process overcomes the sheik, who is struck by the depressing otherworldliness of the tragedy.

"Now you see Iraqis' houses, meant to be a family's safest place, have become like graves for their families, because any minute, any second, they're ready to die by explosion, airstrikes or car bombs."

The sheik emphasized the gravity of today's horrors, compared with other eras. He and his volunteers don't need military or congressional reports to tell them of progress in Iraq -- for they bear witness.

"Now it's as if the streets are flowing with blood.