Financial Times Editorial Comment: Petraeus cannot salvage a debacle

Financial Times Editorial Comment: Petraeus cannot salvage a debacle
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: September 9 2007 19:21 | Last updated: September 9 2007 19:21


Spare a thought this week for General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq to whom the job of judging the success of a policy so bungled as to be irretrievable has been subcontracted by the bunglers-in-chief in the Bush administration.

His report on the “surge” of US troops is likely to be non-committal, and overshadowed by 9/11 anniversary stagecraft designed to eclipse any suggestion of failure in a surge of patriotism as Americans recall the atrocity visited upon them by the al-Qaeda attacks six years ago.

Yet it is high time for a hard-nosed summary of the Iraq debacle.

US forces – and British forces that last week inched closer to the exit – are trapped in a multi-sided ethnosectarian conflict in which they are regarded as a sort of hyper-militia. The long-term strategy to build up an Iraqi army and police force has produced little more than rebadged Shia and Kurdish militia, pursuing their own sectarian ends. The US decision to arm and support Sunni insurgents to fight al-Qaeda pulls against Washington’s alliance with the Shia majority parties in the government of Nouri al-Maliki.

With no hint of irony, US generals are calling their new friends in the Sunni tribes “Kit Carson scouts” – recalling eponymous levies of renegade Viet Cong as though that policy had proved a roaring success.

Casualty figures in the roughly six months of the surge are being manipulated. Iraqis are still dying in their thousands and up to 80,000 a month are being uprooted; where deaths are down it could be – chillingly – because ethnic cleansing has been completed. The political reconciliation the surge was supposed to create space for has not happened.

That is slightly different to saying US political benchmarks – requiring Iraqis to reverse the worst American blunders, such as de-Ba’athification that became an anti-Sunni purge – have not been met.

In sum, it is hard to see how the US strategy, reliant ultimately on its troops, can establish stability. Too many factions in Iraq believe they can use the Americans to achieve their own goals. While that remains the case, they have no incentive to compromise with each other.

Nor should Gen Petraeus be confused with Superman. He was lionised for a “hearts and minds” campaign in north Iraq in 2003-04. Yet as soon as he left local security forces either defected or were defeated. It was when he was trainer-in-chief of Iraqi forces, moreover, that 190,000 Pentagon weapons went missing.

This long-awaited report will create space for a modest drawdown of US troops by next spring. It will not provide reason to believe the US has a coherent strategy in Iraq.