WASHINGTON — In a reprise of their testimony in September, Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker plan to tell Congress today and Wednesday that security has improved in Iraq and that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has taken steps toward political reconciliation and economic stability.
But unlike in September, when that news was fresh and the administration said a corner had been turned, even some of the war’s strongest supporters in Congress have grown impatient and frustrated.
Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Crocker will face many lawmakers who had expected more by now and who are wondering whether any real change will occur before the clock runs out on the Bush administration.
“I think all of us realize we’re disappointed at where we are,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said at a hearing last week. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., asked, “How do we get out of this mess?”
While the cost in U.S. lives and money increases, another senior GOP senator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said, “We cannot . . . just say we’re coasting through and waiting for the next president.”
Among the questions these and other lawmakers said they plan to ask Petraeus and Crocker is why the United States is still paying for Iraqi domestic needs, including military training and garbage pickup, when the al-Maliki government has $30 billion in reserves — held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland — as well as $10 billion in a development fund, significant budgetary surpluses from previous years and a projected 7 percent economic-growth rate for 2008.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the panel’s ranking Republican, who projected that Iraqi oil income would reach $56.4 billion this year, asked the Government Accountability Office last month to investigate how much money the Iraqi government has.
“I think it’s a very significant issue that has not had sufficient exposure,” Levin said in an interview. “They’re perfectly content to watch us spend our money while they build up these huge cash reserves from oil windfalls. It’s a real stick in our eye, as far as I’m concerned.”
Lawmakers said they want to question Petraeus about the performance of Iraqi security forces in last week’s military engagement between government forces and the Mahdi Army militia of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Basra. The fighting, along with continued intra-Shiite fighting in Baghdad, has complicated efforts to portray Iraq as moving toward stability.
Although the administration has put a positive face on the offensive — describing it as evidence that al-Maliki’s government and the Iraqi military are capable of independent, decisive action — U.S. military and administration officials privately draw a more mixed picture. They judge Iraqi forces, despite five years of U.S. training, as ill prepared for the mission, which lacked cohesive planning and ultimately ended in a draw, at best, with the Sadrists. U.S. air power was called in to back flailing government forces three days into the operation.
A senior U.S. officer in Iraq described al-Maliki’s action as “both bold and impulsive/hasty.” While some Iraqi troops “fought well,” he wrote in an e-mail, others were “largely ineffective.” The most “positive spin I can put on it,” he said, is that “the Iraqi army didn’t cut and run.”
Petraeus is expected to cite Iranian assistance to Mahdi Army forces as another reason to carefully consider any further troop withdrawals. But U.S. intelligence officials have noted that Iran also has provided training and weapons to all Shiite militias, including those allied with al-Maliki.
“One reality of Basra,” said one intelligence official, “is that you have Iranian-influenced organizations fighting each other. On multiple levels, Iran has its hooks” in all of them.
While Crocker is expected to point to Iraq’s passage of militia amnesty and a reversal of de-Baathification laws, along with legislation to authorize provincial elections in October, the al-Maliki government remains gridlocked on electoral procedures that must be agreed upon as well as on new oil legislation.
Warner said he wants to ask Petraeus for a better answer to the question the senator posed in September: Is the administration’s strategy in Iraq “making America safer”?
Petraeus, Warner recalled, replied, “I don’t know.”
This time, Warner said, he wants “a full and complete answer which will justify the sacrifice and courage that our troops have shown since his last appearance.”
