Summation of the hearings with a bigger one ahead
Via the NY Times:
WASHINGTON — The senior commander of multinational forces in Iraq warned Congress Tuesday against removing “too many troops too quickly” and refused under stiff questioning to offer even an estimate of American force levels by the end of this year.
Those comments from Gen. David H. Petraeus were met by sharp criticism from a senior Democrat, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, that the Bush administration had adopted “a war plan with no exit strategy.”
As hearings to define the future course of American strategy in Iraq opened Tuesday morning, General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, the American envoy to Baghdad, described an Iraq that is the scene of significant, if still-fragile, progress in security and politics. But they made that case without reference to Congressionally mandated benchmarks that defined their testimony last September.
General Petraeus said that security progress has been “significant but uneven.” Under questioning, he declined to estimate American troop levels beyond the withdrawal by July of five additional combat brigades sent to Iraq last year. And he acknowledged that the government’s recent offensive in Basra was not sufficiently well-planned.
The security situation remained in flux, General Petraeus said, in part because of the “destructive role Iran has played,” and he said that “special groups” of Shiite radicals supported from Tehran posed the greatest immediate threat to security. Ambassador Crocker added, “Iran has a choice to make.”
C-Span has switched to House speeches on the illegal Iraq War. But later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be hosting Petraeus and Crocker, with all three presidential candidates part of that committee. It should provide voters with direct comparisons about their thinking and competence on the war.
One added note: NASDAQ dropped 11 points immediately after the adjournment. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 40 points.
