Petraeus report shows U.S. has little time left to stitch Iraq together
"Tell me how this ends." That is the question Gen. David Petraeus posed to journalist Rick Atkinson in March 2003 as U.S. troops were moving to topple Saddam Hussein. And it's still the right question after Petraeus' sober progress report to Congress on the U.S. troop surge in Iraq.
The problem is that there still isn't a good answer to the general's question of four years ago. In his testimony this week, Petraeus reported encouraging progress on a local level in Iraq, but he couldn't show much progress toward the national reconciliation that has been America's goal. Neither could Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who, when asked Monday what a future Iraq would look like, could answer only, "These things have to be worked through."
My sense was that Petraeus and Crocker made a decent case for continuing a while longer with America's trial-and-error effort to reconstruct the nation we shattered in 2003. Just as important, they also signaled the beginning of the end of this uncertain mission by recommending that a drawdown of American troops begin this year.
For an impatient, war-weary America, that is the right stance: Try to consolidate recent gains, even as we make clear that our time in Iraq is limited.
Certainly the Bush administration thinks it has turned a corner. Senior officials concede that the recent successes in Iraq aren't what they expected -- nobody anticipated the sharp reduction in violence in Anbar province, or the alliance with Sunni tribal leaders against al-Qaida. But that's what has happened, and senior officials now think the U.S. is on the way to defeating al-Qaida in Iraq.
The problem, senior officials acknowledge, is that Iraq isn't coming together as a nation. So they are trying a different approach -- more decentralized, more local. Officials recognize this will mean a weaker central government than the U.S. had previously sought.
When Petraeus was training the Iraqi army, he liked to talk about "pop-ups" -- the militia units that appear unexpectedly with charismatic commanders and more fighting zeal than the regular military. Unlike more rigid commanders, he was willing to go with the flow -- to conform his strategy to these pop-up realities on the ground, rather than try to make things fit his own big picture. That's one of his strengths. He's basically winging it in Iraq -- exploring what works and then going with it.
Petraeus and his team understand, too, that this war is about people -- and helping them one by one to break the cycle of intimidation. When I asked a key Petraeus adviser, to name a turning point in Anbar, he cited the day last February when al-Qaida deposited at a hospital in Ramadi an ice chest containing the severed heads of the children of several sheiks who had been cooperating with the U.S. Rather than submitting to this barbarous act, the enraged sheiks deepened their alliance with the U.S. military.
We need to be honest about what's happening now in Iraq: Local solutions are better than no solutions; tribal power is better than terrorist intimidation; pop-ups can be better than the pre-planned models. But Petraeus' ad-hoc, ground-up security framework is not the same thing as stabilizing the country. In the time remaining, he has to pull things together as best he can -- connect local successes to provincial and national institutions; extend the Sunni rebellion against extremists into the Shiite regions; break the control that Shiite militias now exert over the Interior Ministry and the police.
We do know how this is going to end: with U.S. troops returning home. The question is what they will leave behind. It's likely to be a ragged, patchwork quilt, and there isn't much time left to stitch it together.
© 2007, Washington Post Writers Group