1 Boring Old Man

The Question Petraeus Can’t Answer

… But he had not really responded to the comments that Sen. Richard Lugar made at the start of the Foreign Relations Committee hearings with the general and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The Indiana Republican, one of the real wise men of foreign policy and an ally of the Bush administration, had distilled the committee’s previous week of testimony from experts on the Middle East into five "premises" that he said should guide discussions on future U.S. policy.

• First, the experts agreed that the surge ordered by President Bush last year and executed by Petraeus has improved conditions on the ground and created "breathing space" for increased economic activity and possible political accommodations.
• Second, further security improvements from American efforts are likely to be only marginal, not transformational, in their effects. Significant change awaits political arrangements among Iraqis themselves.
• Third, as Lugar said, "despite the improvements in security, the central government has not demonstrated that it can construct a top-down political accommodation for Iraq. The Iraqi government is afflicted by corruption and shows signs of sectarian bias. It still has not secured the confidence of most Iraqis or demonstrated much competence in performing the basic government functions, including managing Iraq’s oil wealth, overseeing reconstruction programs, delivering government assistance to the provinces or creating jobs."
• Fourth, though many Iraqis are tired of violence, the country’s sectarian and tribal groups remain heavily armed and are focused on increasing their own power. For that reason, "Iraq will be an unstable country for the foreseeable future. And if some type of political settlement can be reached, it will be inherently fragile."
• Fifth, the Iraq struggle has severely strained the U.S. military. Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, was quoted by Lugar as testifying that "lengthy and repeated deployments, with insufficient recovery time at home stations, have placed incredible stress on our soldiers and on their families, testing the resolve of the all-volunteer force like never before." Cody added, "I’ve never seen our lack of strength of strategic depth be where it is today."

"Today," he said, "the questions are whether and how improvements in security can be converted into political gains that can stabilize Iraq, despite the impending drawdown of United States troops. Simply appealing for more time to make progress is insufficient. Debate over how much progress we have made and whether we can make more is less illuminating than determining whether the administration has a definable political strategy that recognizes the time limitations that we face and seeks a realistic outcome designed to protect American vital interests."

Petraeus told Lugar, "We’ve got to continue. We have our teeth into the jugular, and we need to keep it there." … Petraeus’s suggestion is that we focus "less on an exit strategy from Iraq and more on an engagement strategy."

I think the answer to the challenge Lugar raises will have to come from the presidential candidates, not the general. It certainly won’t come from this president.

The thing that makes these hearings, in September 2007, and now, 6 months later, a major sham is something we all know. Bush has no intentions of leaving the Iraq War at all, never did, never will. The "Surge" was only a way to stay in Iraq. Bush has never presented [nor will he ever present] a scenario that has us leaving Iraq. We all know that, as do General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. Like the DoJ, they "serve the President," not "We the People." Bush wants us to not only stay in Iraq, he also wants us to extend our war into a war with Iran. That is now, and has always been, his Administration’s bottom line.

So my truck with Broder isn’t what he says. But he keeps the code of silence about the truth going by not saying what I just said. And, as much as I appreciate some of his columns, I think it is this code of silence is killing us. It’s left over from the early Bush years when the Press was so intimidated that they said nothing.