A sober view of progress in Iraq

What happened

The U.S. has made “significant” progress in stabilizing Iraq over the past six months, but the security gains are too fragile to permit major troop reductions for the foreseeable future, the top U.S. general in Iraq told Congress this week. In testimony to the Senate’s Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Gen. David Petraeus said the “surge” of 20,000 troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy had largely succeeded in defeating terrorists affiliated with the group calling itself al Qaida in Iraq. But he said that a new threat was being posed by heavily armed, well-trained fighters in “special groups” backed by Iran. Petraeus refused to offer a timetable for further withdrawals after July, when troop strength is scheduled to return to its pre-surge level of 140,000. “We haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “The progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible.”

While Petraeus testified, U.S. and Iraqi forces battled militias loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in eastern Baghdad and Basra. In a message on his website, al-Sadr threatened to call off his Mahdi Army’s seven-month cease-fire, which has contributed to the decline in violence. Reports emerged that as many as 1,000 members of Iraq’s army and police force, including top officers, deserted during the Iraqi government’s assault on Basra two weeks ago.

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What the editorials said

Iraq has changed, but the debate in Washington hasn’t, said The Washington Post. Despite an “undeniable” drop in violence and “significant” progress toward political reconciliation, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democrats maintain that the war is unwinnable. John McCain and many other Republicans, meanwhile, cling to unrealistic hopes of a clear-cut and imminent “victory.” The reality is that success will be slow and incremental, requiring a commitment of years. Considering the carnage that would inevitably follow a precipitous U.S. withdrawal, that commitment is the only responsible option.

Petraeus said nothing new, said the Los Angeles Times. He “avoided offering any benchmarks” that would permit a U.S. withdrawal. Instead, he asked for an “indefinite” commitment of U.S. troops, warning of increased Iranian influence in Iraq and the region. But while the administration gropes for a strategy to counter that influence, Iran’s leaders are content to watch “the Great Satan” flounder, as “their proxies bleed him white.”

What the columnists said

The administration succeeded in “buying time” with Petraeus’ testimony, said H.D.S. Greenway in The Boston Globe. But for what? There’s no political reconciliation between the Sunnis and Shiites in sight, and the measures we have taken to reduce violence—supporting both the Iraqi security forces and the Sunni “Awakening” councils—could backfire on us. The U.S. is now “in the extraordinary position of arming both sides in the incipient civil war.”

Yes, violence is down is Iraq, said Mark Benjamin in Salon.com. But why? Not even Petraeus credited the surge. Instead, he talked “about cutting deals.” Various Sunni and Shiite groups “have agreed to shoot at each other and U.S. troops less often—at least for now.” If those deals fall apart, U.S. troops will be “caught in the crossfire.”

Such deals are how Iraq will achieve political reconciliation, said David Brooks in The New York Times. Iraq’s elites are too weak and fractious to impose a “top-down” resolution. Instead, “order is achieved through fluid balance-of-power agreements between local groups” with strong “incentives to keep the peace.” Sunnis know they’d lose a civil war against Shiite forces, while Shiite leaders recognize that “their own prestige and power drops the more they fight.” But war critics refuse to grasp that “there has been political progress. It just doesn’t look the way we expected it to.”

What next?

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who also gave Senate testimony this week, said the U.S. and Iraq are negotiating a permanent agreement that will set the framework for a continued U.S. presence in Iraq. He said the treaty would ensure that the next U.S. president “arrives in office with a stable foundation on which to base policy positions.” But Democrats dispute Crocker’s insistence that the agreement does not need congressional approval. Vowing a fight, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden said, “You need the permission of the Congress if you’re going to bind the next president of the United States in anything you agree to.”