The General's Long View Could Cut Withdrawal Debate Short

He said it is too early to recommend longer-term reductions, telling lawmakers he will not be ready to propose further cutbacks until sometime next year, probably in March. Beyond that, he offered a drawdown chart that had more question marks than dates.

Petraeus showed members of Congress a slide -- the last of 13 he presented -- that projected U.S. forces staying in Iraq for an indeterminate time. It did not attach dates indicating any set timetable for withdrawal. Rather, Petraeus's spokesman said, the envisioned drawdown to 35,000 to 50,000 troops would be "conditions based."

No one engaged him on this point, trying to get him to flesh out the slide and explain its assumptions. The bottom-line question -- how long until the last U.S. troops will return from Iraq -- was never asked. "Overall, I haven't seen such impressive charts since I worked in the Pentagon when McNamara ran the place," commented retired Army Col. Charles Krohn, referring to Robert McNamara's tenure in the 1960s. Krohn served in the Vietnam War and as a civilian in Iraq.

Rather than stopping the clock, U.S. troops have turned it back, Petraeus said, showing charts indicating that violence has fallen to roughly the level it was when sectarian battles erupted in Iraq in mid-2006. Neither Petraeus nor Crocker mentioned the nearly 4 1/2 years of U.S. military involvement that began with the March 2003 invasion; both seemed to date U.S. involvement in Iraq as beginning anew with the troop escalation that started early this year.

Crocker, whose voice seemed at times tinged with sadness, said the only valid way to judge Iraq now is to understand what Saddam Hussein did to the country. He then jumped ahead, describing 2006 as "a bad year" in which Iraq nearly unraveled.

Ignoring the years after the invasion and before the troop increase in which the United States unsuccessfully tried to fashion a representative government, Crocker said that "the sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007 had its seeds in Saddam's social deconstruction, and it had dire consequences for the people of Iraq as well as its politics."

The country, he said, "is experiencing a revolution -- not just regime change. It is only by understanding this that we can appreciate what is happening in Iraq and what Iraqis have achieved, as well as maintain a sense of realism about the challenges that remain."

Realism, Crocker suggested, means suspending demands that Iraq reach 18 political and security benchmarks that Congress has set for it -- few of which the Iraqis have achieved -- and accepting instead more modest forms of progress.

"Some of the more promising political developments at the national level," Crocker said, "are neither measured in benchmarks nor visible to those far from Baghdad."

The legislation that imposed the benchmarks remains in place, and Bush still owes Congress a report at the end of this week on whether they have been met. But Petraeus and Crocker succeeded to a large extent yesterday in making them irrelevant.