(HOST) This was the week that for many months had been touted by the White House as the time when America’s Iraq policy would be critiqued and clarified by the military and political experts on the ground. This morning, commentator Barrie Dunsmore offers his assessment.
(DUNSMORE) There sat General David Petraeus – top of his military class, PhD in International Relations from Princeton, and the man who re-wrote the U.S. Army’s manual on counterterrorism. Beside him, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, career Foreign Service officer, fluent in Arabic, tempered by his experiences in Lebanon’s sectarian civil war, and a man who had expressed serious doubts about the wisdom of the Iraq invasion.
Petraeus and Crocker would appear to be among the best and brightest this country has to offer as top general and diplomat in Baghdad. Their service in Iraq, under nearly impossible and often dangerous circumstances, must not be denigrated – even if their credibility was being exploited by a President who has so little of his own.
As I watched their appearances before four congressional committees over two days, I could not escape the feeling that had men like these been seriously consulted before invading Iraq things might be very different today. Even if they had been listened to immediately after the invasion, they could have changed things for the better. Petraeus would have wanted far more troops for the occupation. Crocker would have been much more in tune to the political dynamics of the situation.
But those with their type of expertise were not consulted. Instead, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his cadre of neo-conservatives – who knew nothing about the Middle East – decided to run the occupation on the cheap with far too few forces. And they completely rejected the advice – or even the participation – of knowledgeable people like Crocker in the State Department.
Unfortunately, when Petraeus and Crocker arrived in Iraq earlier this year, with a desperate President’s almost blank-check mandate, it was about four years too late. In the years after the invasion, the situation in Iraq had so deteriorated that "succeeding" – by even the flimsiest definition – is a very long shot. Petraeus and Crocker claim success is possible. But if it comes, it will take a significant American military presence – perhaps for years to come – with of course the crippling cost of many billion dollars a month.
President Bush has evidently accepted Petraeus’ recommendation to slowly withdraw the 30 thousand additional troops added during the so called surge – meaning that about a year from now there will still be 130,000 American troops in Iraq – and we’re told – things may or may not be better by that time.
So what has been accomplished by this whole exercise? Apparently Petraeus was sufficiently persuasive about modest military gains during the surge to have kept most congressional Republicans from abandoning the President’s Iraqi policy. That means Bush will be able to successfully veto any effort by the Democrats to impose a time-table for significant withdrawal because without substantial Republican support, Democrats simply don’t have the votes to over-ride a Presidential veto. In other words, the "decider" will continue to run out the clock and hand the mess of Iraq to his successor.
Barrie Dunsmore is a veteran diplomatic and foreign correspondent for A-B-C News, now living in Charlotte.