Iraq: the unanswered questions

IN TWO DAYS of congressional testimony, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker offered sober yet willfully hopeful assessments of the prospects for stability in Iraq. The diplomat and the general tried to describe the present chaos as remediable. The most acute summary of the situation, though, came in a sequence of stark questions from Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. "Where is this going?" Hagel asked Petraeus. "Are we going to continue to invest American blood and treasure at the same rate we're doing now? For what?"

For what? Those two words did not just express the broad doubts of the American public, which appears to have lost confidence in President Bush's rationale for sticking to the current strategy in Iraq. Hagel's question also pointed to the central flaw in the case Petraeus and Crocker were trying to make for patience: There is no clear link between Petraeus's tactical gains in clearing and holding a few Baghdad neighborhoods and any achievable, worthwhile strategic aims.

So the senator's question is one that neither the military man who wrote the Army's counterinsurgency manual nor the foreign service professional who speaks Arabic and knows the region was able to answer.

Their brief, repeated in different ways over two days, was that new counterinsurgency tactics and the "surge" of 30,000 American troops in recent months may buy time for Iraqi police and army forces to stand up and begin enforcing the law impartially. The surge is also supposed to buy time for the Iraqi government to somehow transcend its own sectarian nature and bring about political reconciliation - not only between Sunni Arabs and Shi'ites, but also among the many warring factions and gangs within each of the two sectarian camps.

Petraeus and Crocker maintained that their parallel efforts are meant to prepare the way for Iraqis to forget past vendettas, swear off revenge, and make concessions to each other for the sake of an Iraqi national identity. The two were careful not to say that any such reconciliation is imminent. Their counsel to Congress and the country was to be patient. Their properly prudent assessment was that if the strategic goal of reconciliation is ever to be reached, it will take many years - and a protracted American presence in Iraq.

But even apart from Americans' loss of patience with the mounting toll in money and lives, the reality is that Iraq's different religious, ethnic, and political clans show no signs of a willingness to stitch that shattered country back together. The police forces function as a uniformed branch of the Mahdi Army, the militia of the Shi'ite rabble-rouser Moqtada Sadr. The army is a little better, but not much. And the government, dominated by pro-Iranian Shi'ite religious parties, has no interest in making any concessions that might strengthen the Sunnis in the all-out power struggle that is expected to follow the Americans' eventual withdrawal.

The answer to Hagel's question is simple and grave. No worthwhile strategic goal can be achieved by continuing indefinitely to expend American blood and treasure in Iraq.