Senators show lack of strategic patience in Iraq

Washington Post:

Asked repeatedly yesterday what "conditions" he is looking for to begin substantial U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq after this summer's scheduled drawdown, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said he will know them when he sees them. For frustrated lawmakers, it was not enough.

"A year ago, the president said we couldn't withdraw because there was too much violence," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). "Now he says we can't afford to withdraw because violence is down." Asked Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.): "Where do we go from here?"

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said: "I think people want a sense of what the end is going to look like."

But the bottom line was that there was no bottom line. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker echoed what they said seven months ago in their last update to Congress -- often using similar words. Iraq's armed forces continue to improve, overall levels of violence are lower than they were last year, and political reconciliation is happening, albeit still more slowly than they would like.

"Iraq is hard, and reconciliation is hard," Crocker said in September. Yesterday, he added: "Almost everything about Iraq is hard."

In eight hours of testimony, the two men danced around the question of what constitutes success in Iraq. "As I've explained, again, from a military perspective," Petraeus said wearily as the day drew to a close, ". . . what we want to do is to look at conditions and determine where it is without taking undue risks. This is all about risk."

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The senators are displaying their ignorance of warfare and counterinsurgency warfare in particular. The reason Petraeus can not give them a specific answer is that he is dealing with a thinking enemy that reacts to events and tries to compensate for set backs. He would be doing this in Afghanistan if we were just in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has chosen to make Iraq the central battle in its war with us and is losing. Al Qaeda can only be bailed out at this point by impatient members of Congress.

If Congress is dumb enough to vote for a pullout and the country makes the mistake of electing a Democrat, then they will be giving al Qaeda something it has not earned on the battlefield and in addition they will be giving them a PR victory. That is al Qaeda's objectives and the Democrats appear to be just the guys to give it to them.

I saw where some of the lefty blogs though Joe Biden had made a point about fighting in Afghanistan along the Pakistan border. He just demonstrated his ignorance of the strategic importance of winning in Iraq, something that has unfortunately, escaped too many Democrats. This group will go down in history as the worst group of Democrats since the 1860s if not the worst in history.