Is al Qaeda a greater threat to U.S. interests in Iraq, or in the Afghan-Pakistan border region? In one of the more interesting exchanges of yesterday’s hearings on the Hill, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden asked Ambassador Ryan Crocker that question, got an honest response, and set the Bush administration’s talking points back quite a bit.
Crocker clearly didn’t want to answer the question, and did his level best to avoid it, but Biden wasn’t going to let it go: “You had a choice: Lord almighty came down and sat in the middle of the table there and said ‘Mr. Ambassador you can eliminate every Al Qaeda source in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or every Al Qaeda personnel in Iraq,’ which would you pick?” Grudgingly, eventually, Crocker conceded he would pick al Qaeda “in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area,” which prompted Biden to respond, “That would be a smart choice.”
I suspect the White House would take issue with that assessment. As Spencer Ackerman noted, Crocker was in an untenable position: “give the correct answer and humiliate the Bush administration [or] give the administration’s answer and look like a fool.” He went with the prior.
DDay added, “The Ambassador to Iraq just admitted that Iraq is not the central front in the war on terror. He just admitted that the potential for Al Qaeda to gain a beachhead in Iraq should the United States withdraw is miniscule compared to the already-established beachhead along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. He admitted that the global fight against terror is currently misdirected.”
It was that kind of day yesterday.
The fine folks at Democracy Arsenal had an excellent wrap-up of some of the things we learned, and didn’t learn, over the course of yesterday’s hearings, including:
* Petraeus and Crocker refuse to tell us what our long term strategy is in Iraq, holding to the weak excuse that they can’t make predictions into the future. But they have no problem making scary predictions into the future about what will happen if we withdraw. Contradiction? We think so. […]
* Iran is the new Al Qaeda. A large portion of the questioning from Martinez, Lieberman, Graham was based on trying blame Iran for what happened in Basra. But as Senator Jack Reed pointed out, the Iranians are actually supporting all of the various Shi’a groups in Iraq, including those in league with the central government.
* Petraeus and Crocker repeatedly quoted Osama Bin Laden and his deputies that Iraq was the central front in the war on terror. But as Senators Bayh and Feingold pointed out we shouldn’t take our marching orders from Al Qaeda, as their strategy is to bleed and bankrupt the United States in Iraq.
* Ryan Crocker continues to present a rosy picture of what happened in Basra last week, saying that it has strengthened Maliki’s hand. But news on the ground today seems to undermine this claim with Sadr actually picking up support from various religious leaders.
* When asked by Senator John Warner whether Iraq was making us safer, Petraeus kept hedging and stated that it would ultimately be up to history. Not very comforting. […]
* Petraeus and Crocker can’t tell us if political reconciliation, the whole point of the surge, is actually happening.
I’d just add that it was Barack Obama, late in the day, who put on his lawyer hat and walked Petraeus and Crocker towards an important point.
Near the end of the afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama, the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee but a junior member of the foreign relations committee, finally got his turn to ask questions — and he homed in on one of the administration’s key conceptual failures.
Obama built up to his point with a series of questions. Our goal, he asked, isn’t to wipe out every member of al-Qaida in Iraq (an impossible feat), but rather to reduce AQI’s threat to manageable proportions, right? Petraeus agreed. And we’re not going to erase Iran’s influence in Iraq—they’re neighbors, after all. The goal is to make this relationship somewhat stable.
That being the case, Obama continued, what is the standard of success? What level of stability in Iraq would let us reduce our presence there to, say, 30,000 troops? What does a stable-enough Iraq look like? “If the definition of success is so high — no al-Qaida in Iraq, a highly effective Iraqi government … democracy, no Iranian influence — that portends … staying 30 to 70 years,” Obama said. What’s a more achievable definition? What’s a realistic goal, and what are we doing to get there? “I’m trying to get to an end point,” he said. “That’s what all of us are trying to do.”
This is what many critics and thoughtful supporters of the war have been trying to do for five years now. The Bush administration hasn’t addressed the issue. And, ultimately, neither did Petraeus or Crocker today.
Pressed on Obama’s search for an “end point,” Crocker could only say that it was “hard and complicated.” Brilliant.
We’ll have related fun throughout the day today.