An Only-Time-Will-Tell View on Political Gains

Maybe the Iraqi government will seize the opportunity for political reconciliation that the United States set out to buy for it with blood and treasure, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker said yesterday. And maybe it won't.

"My level of confidence," Crocker replied dryly to a question from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), "is under control."

Monday's House appearance by Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, focused on President Bush's troop buildup and improving security trends. In two Senate hearings yesterday, Crocker took the lead in offering a look at the political side of the Iraqi equation. His message was one of lowered expectations and small seeds of progress that might bear fruit in some distant future.

"We are pushing them constantly in all sorts of ways," he said of the Iraqi government. "But I've got to be honest. This is going to take more time."

A little over four years ago, when the Bush administration claimed its mission had been accomplished in Iraq, warnings that it would be hard and maybe impossible to remake Iraq were whispered only in the bowels of the State Department -- by Crocker, a career Foreign Service officer with long Middle East experience, among others. Diplomatic caution was dismissed as timid "clientism" from "Arabists" who were out of step with what the White House saw as the march of democracy in the region.

Now, with Crocker as its point man for explaining why political progress has been so halting, the administration has embraced the complications of the Arab world and of Iraq, in particular.

Even Petraeus seemed to catch the noncommittal diplomatic bug yesterday. Although he had expressed optimism during his last tour in Iraq, when he was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, "I am not a pessimist or an optimist at this point," Petraeus said. "I am a realist about Iraq, and Iraq is hard."

With the kind of painstaking detail that drove an earlier team of Bush White House and Pentagon officials to exasperation, Crocker spoke of "moderately encouraging factors," such as obscure comments by important clerics and meetings between Iraqi politicians who formerly either ignored each other or spoke only in angry confrontation.

With the level of violence lower in Anbar province -- the result of Sunni tribes joining the fight against the group al-Qaeda in Iraq -- space had opened for local politics, Crocker said. "Not to overemphasize this one particular province," he said, but Anbar cities and towns had elected governments and sprouted politicians who were starting to act like local politicians everywhere, demanding more money from the capital. But, Crocker said, he did not want "to overstate what's going on."

Crocker mentioned the Iraqi budget process several times, saying that "an awful lot of this is about resources, services, equitable distributions." Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), in the first of the two Senate hearings, asked whether mechanisms to promote ethics in government and stop corruption were working. "To a degree," Crocker replied. "I mean, it's like a lot of other things in Iraq, quite frankly, Senator. Works in progress."

Part of Crocker's goal was to wean Congress away from fixation on what he called "the benchmark exercise" toward less ambitious goals. By the end of this week, Bush must report on whether Iraqi performance on 18 congressionally mandated security and political goals has improved since an interim White House assessment in July. That report, giving Baghdad extensive benefits of the doubt, found that fewer than half of the benchmarks had been met.

"I think in the past we have set some expectations that simply couldn't be met," Crocker told Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Any chance that Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites will reconcile before the end of the Bush administration? asked Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). Crocker pointed to some positive steps and "hopeful signs" but said that "clearly, there is a great deal more to do both at the national level and down on the streets." The security situation in Baghdad is somewhat better, he said, but "how long that is going to take and, frankly, even ultimately whether it will succeed, I can't predict."

When Dodd asked what would happen if U.S. troops left Iraq, Crocker did not suggest that Iran or al-Qaeda would take over. What was "rather more likely," he said, was that the Iraqis would start "building the walls, stocking the ammunition and getting ready for a big, nasty street fight without us . . . [to] push them toward compromise and accommodation."

Crocker said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Iran is preparing to "fill the void" after the United States' inevitable defeat and withdrawal in Iraq had the virtue of truth in terms of Iranian intentions. But when Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) asked Crocker to talk about Tehran's meddling in Iraq, his response was a State Department classic.

Although the two rounds of discussions he held this year with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad had "not resulted in any visible improvements of the security situation . . . as it is attributable to Iran," he said, "Iran is a complicated place, and they make complicated calculations, and I don't pretend to be able to read their minds. Therefore, I'm not prepared to say this channel is not worth pursuing. It has not produced results as of yet. Maybe that will change in the future."