(HOST) Veteran A-B-C News correspondent and commentator Bill Seamans is looking forward to next week – when General Petraeus will again appear before congress for an update on the progress of the war in Iraq.
(SEAMANS) Next Tuesday and Wednesday General David Petraeus, who carries the burden of the war in Iraq, will give his much-anticipated State of the War report to Congress and we the people await his assessment. President Bush, in his Pentagon speech on the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war, said his surge had "stabilized" that country and that we were near a "major strategic victory in the war on terror." Now, Gen. Petraeus finds himself between Bush’s view of success and what is actually happening on the ground in Iraq today.
Petraeus’s headquarters and our diplomatic mission in the fortified American green zone have been under heavy mortar attack for more than a week. Two American citizens have been killed and foreign workers have been wounded, some seriously. Uncounted Iraqis living on the fringes of the zone have been killed. The zone is under nighttime curfew. During the day the staff must travel between the buildings in armored vehicles. Baghdad, itself, was put under weekend curfew after pitched battles broke out between American troops and militia forces in their enclave of Baghdad. An intense fire fight has been waged between militia gunmen and Iraqi Army troops backed up by American forces fighting for control of the vital oil-export city of Basra.
Thus we can anticipate that Gen. Petraeus will have a stressful time next week. He will face some stiff questioning from Democratic members of Congress who oppose the war and his testimony could become a main issue as the presidential primary campaign intensifies. Petraeus’s assessment will unavoidably become so politicized that it could discourage any new initiative in Iraq until after a new President takes office next year.
While we don’t know whether or how Petraeus will support Bush’s claims of success for his surge we do know that he will call for an indefinite delay in withdrawing our troops saying that he needs more time to reevaluate our situation. That suggests that we should expect little change unless the current violence intensifies and creates the need for another American troop surge. Thus – in just two words: little change.
In the meantime, we can’t help wondering if the Bush administration simply underestimates the intelligence of the average citizen – especially after Vice President Cheney said that it doesn’t matter what we the people think about the war and that Bush is leading us like Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War. So in addition to pondering General Petraeus’s report next week we also can ponder the degree to which – as Cheney claims – the degree to which President Bush has acquired a Lincolnesque stature as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue without any indication of a resolution. For those of us whom Bush thinks are intelligence-challenged, that means there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.