In senatorial role, a chance to take spotlight on war

WASHINGTON - When Hillary Clinton confronted Army General David H. Petraeus at yesterday's Senate hearing, it was hard to separate the roles: a junior senator pursuing her oversight authority over a Pentagon official, a leading Democratic presidential candidate staring down the public face of an unpopular Republican policy, and a would-be commander in chief criticizing a four-star general for an inadequate plan.

"The reports you provided to us require the willing suspension of disbelief," Clinton said, calling Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker "the de facto spokesmen of what many of us consider to be a failed policy."

Clinton was among five presidential candidates sitting on the two Senate committees Petraeus and Crocker visited. The presence of the top American soldier and diplomat in Iraq, and the cameras it brought, offered the candidates a platform to address not only the two officials but primary voters.

The opportunity also came with risks, as four Democratic candidates tried to walk a fine line between expressing their desire for a troop withdrawal with enough conviction to satisfy antiwar voters, and showing respect for the general and his troops.

"The Democrats have a trap: How do you challenge the political goals without challenging the military?" said Michael T. Corgan, a professor of international relations at Boston University.

Clinton, along with fellow Democratic senators Barack Obama of Illinois, Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, used most of their high-profile television time to try to look beyond the general's assertions of military success to what the ambassador conceded were the largely unrealized goals of creating a stable national government.

"You said in this testimony that it's political, the reason for the success in Anbar [province], not because of an increase in troop strength," Obama said in the morning hearing.

None of the Democratic candidates, however, committed themselves to any particular timetable for a troop withdrawal. And from the sidelines, former senator John Edwards of North Carolina continued to push his Democratic rivals to assert themselves forcefully in the chamber he left in 2005.

"It's time for Congress to act," Edwards said in a statement Monday. "They must stand firm and tell President Bush with one voice: No timetable, no funding. No excuses." At a New Hampshire debate in June, Edwards scolded Clinton and Obama for failing to come out against a bill to fund the war until shortly before voting began. "There is a difference between leadership and legislating," he said then.

In his statement, Edwards also tweaked the only Republican candidate at yesterday's hearings, saying that "doublespeak" from the committee's witnesses "may pass for straight talk inside the Beltway," invoking a catchphrase used by Senator John McCain of Arizona.

For McCain, Petraeus's report offered an opportunity to reinvigorate his campaign with a military-themed tour this week under the new slogan "No Surrender."

"I believe we cannot choose to lose in Iraq," said McCain, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee. (Another GOP candidate, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, participated in the questioning there on Monday.)

To reporters, McCain linked Democratic efforts to reduce the number of forces in Iraq to the Bush administration's earlier failure to provide enough troops, promising to "beat back attempts to return to the failed strategy of the past."

In the committee hearing, however, McCain sought to reinforce the case he has made to continue Bush's troop "surge": seeking confirmation "that Iraq is now the central front on the war on terror" and to discredit the "astonishing" claim made by Obama and others that "the surge had nothing to do with Anbar Province and the rather stunning success we've had there."

It was the Democratic candidates, not McCain, who noted that the hearings were being held on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, once cited as part of the administration's rationale for the initial invasion of Iraq.

Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gaveled his hearing to order with a moment of silence for victims. Clinton began her testimony by recounting that she had started the day at a memorial service at the World Trade Center site in New York.

Obama called attention to the anniversary, as well.

"I think that we should not have had this discussion on 9/11 or 9/10 or 9/12," he said. "Because I think it perpetuates this notion that somehow the original decision to go into Iraq was directly related to the attacks on 9/11."

Beginning with that original decision, however, the wartime role of senators has been reduced mostly to casting yes or no votes on complex questions, while governors and mayors who run for president can freely proclaim their nuanced views.

For the Democratic candidates in particular, the appearance of Petraeus and Crocker offered a chance to engage the war's architects directly.

"Our general thought is that being in the Senate is something of a liability [to presidential candidates]. It's not too often you see the upside," said Daron Shaw, an associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin.

In April, Petraeus expressed a fear that US politics would interfere with the surge's momentum, saying that "the Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock." Since then, clocks have also been set in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, where voters will begin choosing presidential nominees in four months or less.

The sound of their ticking may have ensured that the views of senators running for president on both sides would remain unchanged by the appeals for patience that Petraeus and Crocker brought with them from Baghdad.

"The American people will not support an indefinite role whose sole remaining purpose is to prevent the situation in Iraq from becoming even worse," Biden said. as Petraeus and Crocker began their 10-hour tour of Capitol Hill.

Following his opening remarks, Biden was entitled to an additional seven minutes for questions of his own, and unlike his witnesses, seemed less interested in data than anecdote. "Can a Sunni Arab travel safely to a Shi'a neighborhood in Baghdad today, without fear of being kidnapped or killed?" Biden asked three times.

After Petraeus cited "substantial mixed neighborhoods" in Baghdad where it would be possible, Biden persisted, asking if he himself, on a recent trip, would have been able to safely travel by road between two major cities.

"Well, for the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, yes, sir," said Crocker.

"Oh, I love you, I love you," Biden said, laughing.