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What Congress Needs To Ask Petraeus and CrockerIf we're staying in Iraq, we need to know why.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Sept. 6, 2007, at 6:20 PM ET
Gen. David Petraeus Click image to expand.

The globe will resume spinning on its axis when Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker deliver their long-awaited report on conditions in Iraq. (You may have noticed that the Bush administration has put off all decisions, about everything, pending this fateful event.)

Two things are worth noting in advance. First, according to Petraeus' spokesman, there will be no report per se. The word is being taken as a verb, not a noun; that is, the general and the ambassador will report to Congress, testifying before the House on Monday, the Senate on Tuesday, and, as a follow-up, the National Press Club on Wednesday.

Second, if Petraeus and Crocker decide to go beyond the predictable bromides (x is improving, y is slightly worsening, z is pretty much the same), they would do well to let us in on the status not only of Iraq but also of American strategy.

The surge will be over in April 2008, when the U.S. Army and Marines run out of deployable troops, and therefore at least a quarter of the 20 brigades now in Iraq will inevitably be withdrawn and not replaced. This is by now common knowledge. At the same time, nearly all politicians, including most Democrats, have come out against a total withdrawal and have recognized that we will have some military presence in Iraq for a long time to come.

So, the questions that Congress should make sure Petraeus and Crocker answer are these: After the surge, what? What is the new strategy? What are the core missions of U.S. forces? Where should they go, and what should they do there? What can they accomplish, with a fair chance of success, at reduced levels? And what is the meaning of success?

In recent weeks, Gen. Petraeus has frequently said that he is making "tactical progress." He will no doubt recite the phrase a few more times next week. It's important to be clear on what the phrase means and what it doesn't mean.

It means that military progress is being made in the fight against al-Qaida in Mesopotamia and related jihadist movements, especially in Anbar province but also in such other erstwhile strongholds as Baqubah, Ramadi, and a few neighborhoods around Baghdad.

This is salutary and significant. But it has nothing to do with the surge. And it has at best little effect on the political goals of the war—to create order, protect the civilian population, and help bring about a stable, self-sustaining, self-defending, at least somewhat democratic government of Iraq.

Gen. Petraeus has noted (as would any good officer who's read Clausewitz) that military victory is hollow without the accomplishment of the war's political objectives. He has also said that some political objectives are a subset of others—that, for instance, the main reason for protecting the people of Baghdad is to create a secure environment, some "breathing space" that might allow Iraq's political factions to reconcile and form a unified government.

If there is little chance that these factions can reconcile, then the military operations are futile. And, in the scheme of the fissures now racking Iraq, the defeat of AQM—while worthwhile in its own right—amounts to a bit of a sideshow.

However, the operations in Anbar, Baqubah, and Ramadi do have another virtue, in the context of next week's testimony: They are activities in which U.S. military power can play a dominant, even a determinant, role. Gen. Petraeus will probably emphasize these operations not just because they've been successful (as few operations in Iraq have been), but also because they are something that he, as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, can control or at least directly affect.

Crocker is in a tougher spot: He has to outline the prospects for Iraq's political success. Baghdad's ramshackle central government seems to offer little hope in this regard. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is too beholden to Shiite parties that unalterably oppose sharing power with Sunnis, and this fact further radicalizes the Sunnis. Meanwhile, several Iraqi army units—and nearly all the police forces—are rife with corruption and driven more by sectarian than by national loyalties.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Gen. David Petraeus by Sarah Arar/AFP/Getty Images. Photograph of Gen. Petraeus on Slate's home page by Lawrence Jackson/AP Photo.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Overall, Kaplan's article does a good job of analyzing the situation in Iraq, but I found his closing comment irritating: "If we're going to stay in Iraq for months and years to come - at a cost of hundreds of billions of additional dollars and hundreds, if not thousands, of additional lives - we at least ought to know why."

Like much American commentary about Iraq, this estimate of the number of lives being lost obviously only considers the lives of U.S. soldiers. By far the majority of lives being lost in Iraq are Iraqi lives, and they are dying at the rate of "hundreds, if not thousands," every month.

What this sort of commentary conveys is the unconscious assumption that only American lives are worth counting - something that the rest of the world would certainly dispute.

--Sheldon Rampton

(To reply, click here.)

Al-Queda knows that every dead jihadist is a new hero, inspiring others to take up the cause. We're fighting a hydra; lop off a head and two more appear. Not only does decimation fail to bring a decisive political victory (the only kind that matters to history), it actually accelerates the radicalization of the Arab world.

If we want to avoid the "hero" phenomenon, we won't "decimate" Al-Queda, we'll prosecute them and toss them in prison. There is no great heroism or honor in rotting in jail, not compared to ascending on the wings of angels to a just reward in Paradise.

Treating the "war on terror" as a "war" is, frankly, ignorant. War is, by definition, armed conflict between two or more states. Islamic terrorists don't have a state, not since we took down the Taliban in Afghanistan. Whatever motives the Administration had for invading Iraq, fighting a war on terror there was a fiction. The terrorists only gained a foothold in Iraq after we invited ourselves in as foreign invaders.

--UrgeIt

(To reply, click here.)

When Petraeus states, as he no doubt will, that we need to exercise strategic patience in Iraq and wait this thing out for another two years, we would all do well to remember that his mission and report is confined to the borders of the country that he is in charge of - Iraq.

Petraeus is not charged with shepherding the course of US middle-east policy, or global strategy. Thus, issues such as Iran's rise to power in the wake of the war, Al Qaida's growing presence in Pakistan, or the political issues of Israel\Palestine\Lebanon are not part of whether he is doing his job or not. Thus, the issue of progress in Iraq will induce tunnel-vision unless we stand back and look at our presence in that country within the framework of the entire region.

No general could possibly ever recommend drawing down troops if they did not have to. So long as our army can walk, their generals will not consider the mission uncompletable. So regardless of whether it is a good idea to continue fighting, we will.

All the calls for withdrawal\redeployment hinge on the notion that Iraq is one part (or perhaps a distraction from) our global operation against terrorism. My view is that it has occupied far too much of our effort without producing anything but more terrorists, and that we need to shift our forces elsewhere to be effective against terrorism. Most arguments in favor of staying focus on Iraq as a monolithic, isolated struggle in which we need not consider the external consequences of our fighting there. If this were true, then of course there would be no reason to leave or redeploy.

However, this is Petraeus' job. Iraq, Surge, Iraq. He can only report on the progress thereof. The real person who should be reporting to congress for questioning are the joint chiefs, who are charged with looking at the big picture.

--jwschmidt

(To reply, click here.)

(9/13)

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