There was a single, unmistakable message emerging from the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker in Washington this week: the Iraq war may have started on President George W. Bush’s watch, but it will not end on it.
Petraeus was as impressive as you would expect a four-star general with a Princeton PhD to be. But his timetable for the withdrawal of US troops was revealing — consisting merely of a series of question marks after March 2008. Anyone who thinks that the US military will be out of Iraq by 20 January 2009, when the next president takes the oath of office, or even inside the next administration’s first 100 days, is as deluded as those who believed that democracy would follow dictatorship in Iraq as night follows day.
The surge came when time was running out for the politicians in both Washington and Baghdad. To date, the results have been impressive. Increased troop levels have only been in full effect for a few months, but the surge has already succeeded in gaining back some of the ground that was lost under the disastrous Rumsfeld strategy. In Baghdad — the primary focus of the surge — civilian deaths are down 70 per cent since their peak in December 2006. Across the country as a whole they are down by a little less than half. The capital, the key to a political solution to the country’s problems, has seen an 80 per cent decrease in sectarian killings, and the rest of Iraq a 55 per cent drop.
For months Washington has been convincing itself that September would be decisive for the war in Iraq. But, as Petraeus told Congress, we will have to wait at least another six months before we know if the surge can salvage Iraq or if the country is already too far gone.
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