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Analysis: Petraeus, Crocker Gird for Assault on the Hill

Council on Foreign Relations

April 7, 2008
Author: Greg Bruno

When the top U.S. diplomat and chief commander of U.S. forces in Iraq sat side by side on Capitol Hill six months ago, assurances of a speedy U.S. victory in Iraq were absent. Some important things have changed since then. Overall violence is down dramatically (PDF) since June 2007, according to Pentagon statistics. Analysts—Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, for instance—also see signs of political reconciliation, and 53 percent of Americans now believe the U.S. effort in Iraq will one day succeed (Pew). And yet, when Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker reappear in front of Congress this week, their message will sound strikingly familiar.

With the U.S. war effort in Iraq in its sixth year, progress on the ground remains mixed. The success of an Iraqi tribal revolt, originally dubbed the “Anbar Awakening,” is widely credited with stabilizing once volatile Sunni regions in central and western Iraq. A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad tells CFR.org more than 95,000 former insurgents and tribesmen have turned their weapons on al-Qaeda in Iraq; they receive three hundred dollars a month for their services. CFR Senior Fellow Stephen Biddle says that the strategy isn’t perfect. “But given the alternatives,” he says, “stabilization from the bottom up may be the least bad option for U.S. policy in 2008.” Others aren’t so sure. CFR Senior Fellow Steven Simon writes in Foreign Affairs that the Anbar model may have brought short-term successes but has done so by stoking the fires of “tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism.”

There are other red flags. Recent Shiite-on-Shiite clashes in Basra and the capital underscore the fragile nature of U.S. military gains. The Iraqi Army was reportedly unprepared (NYT) for the resistance of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, according to senior U.S. military commanders.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.