Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Neither speaker talked about how militias had
infiltrated Iraqi forces.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration’s top two officials in Iraq answered questions from Congress for more than six hours 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.
Though 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 though 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.
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.