There were some brave and intrepid souls who endured every word of the six-and-a-half hours of testimony before the House Armed Services and House Foreign Affairs Committees. They heard Gen. David Petraeus point to impressive charts that looked encouraging — as long as you didn’t look too close. They heard Ambassador Ryan Crocker struggle to highlight non-existent political progress. They heard Republican lawmakers throw softballs, and Democratic lawmakers try to avoid being overly aggressive.
But the truth is, we could have skipped the six-plus hours of the joint hearing and allowed the Bush administration to issue a three-word press release: stay the course. That was the message — the only message — Petraeus and Crocker came to the House to deliver. We’re supposed to take a leap of faith, based on practically nothing, and hope that a policy that hasn’t worked suddenly will. I’m at a loss to explain why anyone would find this persuasive.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan explained that if you missed the hearing, you didn’t miss much. He called the political theater “mainly a disgrace.”
Petraeus’ testimony was predictable, Crocker’s was almost pathetically strained, and the legislators’ questions were by and large weak-kneed, even by House standards. […]
It was a pro forma session. All involved had their say. There was nearly no intellectual tussling or back-and-forth, very little real discussion of policy, strategy, or tactics. (Only a few of the junior members, whose turn came toward the end of the hearing, even broached such matters as whether there even is, or soon will be, an Iraqi nation, thus raising the question of just what is the war’s political goal.)
I wasn’t at the hearing. Like most people, I watched it on television. But a pall of paralysis and gloom seemed to drape the room. Nobody could have been surprised by the questions or answers. Nobody could have been satisfied by what anyone said. The situation is indisputably grim. Nobody seems to know what to do about it.
Regrettably, that includes Petraeus and Crocker.
Among the other things worth keeping in mind this morning about what we learned (and what we didn’t) yesterday afternoon:
* McClatchy reports that what Crocker and Petraeus didn’t say was as noteworthy as what they did say.
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.
While 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 while 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.
* The NYT had a strong editorial on the testimony.
For months, President Bush has been promising an honest accounting of the situation in Iraq, a fresh look at the war strategy and a new plan for how to extricate the United States from the death spiral of the Iraqi civil war. The nation got none of that yesterday from the Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. It got more excuses for delaying serious decisions for many more months, keeping the war going into 2008 and probably well beyond.
It was just another of the broken promises and false claims of success that we’ve heard from Mr. Bush for years, from shock and awe, to bouquets of roses, to mission accomplished and, most recently, to a major escalation that was supposed to buy Iraqi leaders time to unify their nation. We hope Congress is not fooled by the silver stars, charts and rhetoric of yesterday’s hearing. Even if the so-called surge had created breathing room, Iraq’s sectarian leaders show neither the ability nor the intent to take advantage of it.
* Many of the claims presented as facts at yesterday’s hearing didn’t stand up well to scrutiny. The Senate Dems and House Dems both did some fact checking.
* Petraeus and Crocker move on to the Senate today, where they will speak with the Senate Armed Services and Senate Foreign Affairs Committees. Unlike the House, the two hearings will be held separately. Given that some of the participants will be presidential candidates, the hearings should be more engaging than yesterday.