Mission Accomplished

The New York Times editorial board writes: "For months, President Bush has been promising an honest accounting of the situation in Iraq, a fresh look at the war strategy and a new plan for how to extricate the United States from the death spiral of the Iraqi civil war. The nation got none of that yesterday from the Congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. It got more excuses for delaying serious decisions for many more months, keeping the war going into 2008 and probably well beyond.

"It was just another of the broken promises and false claims of success that we've heard from Mr. Bush for years, from shock and awe, to bouquets of roses, to mission accomplished and, most recently, to a major escalation that was supposed to buy Iraqi leaders time to unify their nation."

Howard Fineman writes for Newsweek: "Bottom line: Americans will go to the polls on Nov. 4, 2008 with basically the same Iraq policy in place as we have now. All of the rest is the sound and fury of political positioning. If the American people want to end this war faster, they will have to vote to do so -- again, since that is what most of them thought they were doing in 2006."

What They Said (and Didn't Say)

Peter Baker and Jonathan Weisman write in The Washington Post: "Army Gen. David H. Petraeus told Congress yesterday that the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Iraq has made enough progress that the additional combat forces can be pulled out by next summer, but he cautioned against 'rushing to failure' with a larger and speedier withdrawal. . . .

"The drawdown Petraeus presented moves up the previous military timetable that would have governed the troop increase barring any change in military policy. Military planners have said that the extra forces would have to begin withdrawing in April and that all would be out by August. Petraeus effectively proposed starting sooner but finishing by nearly the same deadline."

Michael R. Gordon writes in the New York Times that Petraeus "proposed an American presence that would not only be longer and larger than many Democrats have advocated but would also provide for a greater American combat role in protecting the Iraqi population. . . .

"The American commander was not only rebuffing the demand for a firm timeline for withdrawing the bulk of American forces, but also putting critics on notice that even when reductions come he has a different vision of the manner in which many of the remaining troops would be used."

Nancy A. Youssef and Leila Fadel write for McClatchy Newspapers: "The Bush administration's top two officials in Iraq answered questions from Congress for more than six hours on Monday, but their testimony may have been as important for what they didn't say as for what they did.

"A chart displayed by Army Gen. David Petraeus that purported to show the decline in sectarian violence in Baghdad between December and August made no effort to show that the ethnic character of many of the neighborhoods had changed in that same period from majority Sunni Muslim or mixed to majority Shiite Muslim.

"Neither Petraeus nor U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about the fact that since the troop surge began the pace by which Iraqis were abandoning their homes in search of safety had increased. They didn't mention that 86 percent of Iraqis who've fled their homes said they'd been targeted because of their sect, according to the International Organization for Migration. . . .

"Petraeus also didn't highlight the fact that his charts showed that 'ethno-sectarian' deaths in August, down from July, were still higher than in June, and he didn't explain why the greatest drop in such deaths, which peaked in December, occurred between January and February, before the surge began.

"And while both officials said that the Iraqi security forces were improving, neither talked about how those forces had been infiltrated by militias, though Petraeus acknowledged that during 2006 some Iraqi security forces had participated in the ethnic violence."