Petraeus: Troop Buildup Working in Iraq

SYDNEY, Australia -- America's troop buildup in Iraq has sharply reduced sectarian killings and roadside bombings and lowered al-Qaida's influence, the top U.S. general in the country said in an interview published Friday.

"We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress and we believe al-Qaida is off balance at the very least," The Australian newspaper quoted Gen. David Petraeus as saying.

Petraeus said there had been a 75 percent drop in ethnic and religious killings since last year, a doubling in the number of seizures of insurgent weapons caches between January and August, a drop in the number of coalition deaths from roadside bombs, and an increase in the killing and capture of al-Qaida fighters, the newspaper said.

The rise in al-Qaida "kills and captures" had caused the group to lose influence with Sunni Muslims, he said.

Petraeus said the buildup, in which an additional 20,000 troops were deployed in Iraq, would continue for several more months and the troop level would then be phased down. He said the U.S.-led coalition would try to hold onto all the gains that had been made.

Petraeus is to testify on the troop buildup to Congress during the week of Sept. 10, and President Bush is to deliver his own progress report by Sept. 15. The reports are seen as key elements in the debate in Washington over how the war should be fought _ and whether U.S. troops should be brought home.

A draft report by the independent Government Accountability Office, circulated this past week, concluded that Iraq has made little political progress in recent months despite the influx of U.S. troops.

A separate independent commission established by Congress to study Iraq's security forces is expected to recommend scrapping the 25,000-member national police force and starting over because it is so corrupt and influenced by sectarianism.

The Australian said it interviewed Petraeus at his headquarters in Baghdad after he briefed visiting Australian Defense Minister Brendan Nelson on the situation in Iraq. Australia participated in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and still has about 1,600 troops in and around the country, 550 of them in combat roles.

Petraeus said the buildup strategy had turned U.S. forces into pursuers instead of defenders, "and that is a much better place to be."

He said religious and ethnic killings, or "ethno-sectarian deaths," were the most important measure of progress and that the number of people killed on religious and ethnic grounds in the capital was going down.

"If you look at Baghdad, which is hugely important because it is the center of everything in Iraq, you can see the density plot on ethno-sectarian deaths," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

"It's a bit macabre but some areas were literally on fire with hundreds of bodies every week and a total of 2,100 in the month of December '06, Iraq-wide. It is still much too high but we think in August in Baghdad it will be as little as one quarter of what it was," it quoted Petraeus as saying.

“On October 11, 2000, George W. Bush said, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.”

In January 2003, President Bush was presented with two post-invasion plans for Iraq. One, authored by the Defense Department, called for a hard and fast invasion, establishment of a provisional government in Baghdad, and an exit from Iraq in very few months, to enable our forces to deal with the neighboring state sponsors of terrorism, Iran and Syria. The other, authored by the State Department and the CIA, was for the extended occupation and nation-building in Iraq. But between October 2000 and January 2003, President Bush became a neocon.

Since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, President Bush has focused our war effort on building a new democracy in Iraq. We have not been either decisive or forceful with Iran or Syria.

Gen. Petraeus is operating the surge magnificently, and it may — by March or April — have established a sustainable success against the insurgency. At the same time, the Maliki government is — as the new National Intelligence Estimate says — dysfunctional and not able to govern.

The President has said our goal in Iraq is to create a nation that can defend and govern itself and will be an ally in the war on terror. That definition of our endgame puts America on the strategic defensive.

We didn’t go to war with Iraq because it wasn’t a democracy. If that were our casus belli, we’d be at war with about three-fourths of the nations of the world. We went to war because — relying on all the intelligence we had — the President in good faith judged Iraq to be a clear and present danger to the United States.

Our forces swept through Iraq and entered Baghdad in a combat crouch, very aware of the equal — or bigger — threats posed by Iraq’s neighbors. And there we stopped, as the neocons wanted us to, spending soldiers’ lives to build a democracy in Iraq.

Victory isn’t an Iraq that can defend and govern itself. Victory is defined as the end of state sponsorship of Islamic terrorism, which means forcing Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and others out of that business. Nothing more is needed, and nothing less will defeat an existential threat to America. We who lived through the Vietnam era understand that the lesson of Vietnam isn’t that we have to win the “hearts and minds” of the peoples of the Middle East. We know it isn’t that we cannot pull out of Iraq prematurely. We know that we can be in Iraq for another sixty days or another sixty years and the situation will not improve much while Iraq’s neighbors continue to man, fund and arm the insurgency.

The lesson is this: if you fail to fight a war in a manner calculated to win it decisively, you will lose it inevitably.By waiting for the Iraqis to establish democracy and failing to deal with the terrorist nations that surround them, we have enabled our enemies to control the pace and direction of the war. It is time for the President to “Trump” the neocons: tell them they’re fired. And get on with the business of fighting a war that will end the threat to America.

We are impatient with Mr. Bush’s neo-Wilsonianism because it allows the enemy and its apologists to control the pace and direction of the war. We are unwilling to allow the prosecution of this war against the terrorist nations to be delayed for however long it takes for Iraqis to sort themselves out. It is impossible for them to do so while neighboring nations — Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia — actively interfere.

Conservatives don’t want to be caught in the web of failed nostrums of Vietnam. We won’t wait for Islam to be reformed or to win the hearts and minds of the mullahs in Tehran. We don’t consider Islam unreformable; but we understand that it is unreformable by non-Muslims. Fire the neocons, Mr. President, and reject their theories. Order Gen. Petraeus to do what is necessary for now in Iraq, and turn our military and intelligence establishments’ attention to the nations that surround it.

Stop thinking about how to not lose. Think about how to win.”
Jed Babbin

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