Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - The Petraeus-Crocker Report on Progress in Iraq

Interview

Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - The Petraeus-Crocker Report on Progress in Iraq

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SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): Mr. Chairman, I will say that we've had this experience before, for those who are on the Homeland Security Committee. And I hope the vote really is going to go the full amount of time.

SEN. WARNER: I'll go down and protect you. I'll protect you.

SEN. COLLINS: I hope I'll be protected on that since I've never missed a vote.

General, Ambassador, let me begin by thanking you for your courageous service.

General, you've testified three times now that, quote, "the fundamental source of conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources." As you stated in your confirmation hearing and reaffirmed here today, success in Iraq requires a political as well as a military component.

So let's look ahead a year from now. If, a year from now, the Iraqi government has still failed to achieve significant political progress, what do we do? How long should we continue to commit American troops, American lives, American treasure, if the Iraqis fail to make political gains that everyone agrees is necessary to quell the sectarian violence?

I'm going to ask both you and the ambassador this question.

GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, I would -- if -- Senator, if we arrived at that point a year from now, that is something I would have to think very, very, very hard about.

And that is my honest answer to you right now. That would be a very, very difficult recommendation to make at that point in time, because on the one hand, we have very real national interests that extend beyond Iraq. They are true American national interests. On the other hand, there clearly are limits to the blood and treasure that we can expend in an effort, and I am keenly aware of that. And as I've mentioned a couple of times, that awareness did in fact contribute to these recommendations.

SEN. COLLINS: Ambassador?

AMB. CROCKER: Senator, what I said in my testimony yesterday and today is that it is my judgment that the cumulative trajectory of political, economic and diplomatic developments in Iraq is upwards, although the slope of that line is not steep.

As we move forward, I will be constantly reviewing and assessing with myself, my team, General Petraeus and members of his command how we see things developing on the political level. I can't say what I'll be seeing a year or even six months from now, but what I can tell you is that I will make the same objective and honest assessment that I've tried to do for this testimony.

And, you know, again, if I should at some future point come to the judgment that, instead of a slight upward trend we have a line moving in a downward direction, I'll be clear about it.

SEN. COLLINS: Ambassador, the third chart that General Petraeus showed us listed the major threats to Iraq, and it talked about foreign fighters coming in from Syria, the possibility of Turkey coming in and the concern about the PKK. From Iran, we've had lethal aid training and funding. There are also foreign fighters coming in from Saudi Arabia.

The Iraq Study Group's major recommendation, in addition to a change of mission, was for a diplomatic surge, to undertake a major diplomatic effort to involve Iraq's neighbors and to deal with all of these threats. I know that you have met with the Iranians, but there really has not been a consistent, ongoing effort to engage all of Iraq's neighbors. Should we be doing more on the diplomatic front?

AMB. CROCKER: It's a great point, Senator, because the reality is that while Iraq's problems in their own context are extraordinarily difficult, Iraq also exists in a region -- and as that slide demonstrates, the neighbors can make a hard situation that much worse, so that has to be part of the overall strategy.

We're doing two things on that. One is the neighbors initiative, if you will. There was a ministerial meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh in May that involved all of Iraq's neighbors, plus the P-5 and the G-8. Since then, there have been meetings of three working groups among the neighbors to focus on border security, refugees and energy. We were observers at those. There was a -- just a meeting of the neighbors representatives in Baghdad at the level of ambassadors on September 9th, and there will be another ministerial at the end of October or the beginning of November in Istanbul. There is also a proposal out there to establish a permanent secretariat so that there will be kind of an ongoing coordinating mechanism for some of these difficult issues. So that's at one level.

The other thing we're doing is -- and we coordinate together on this -- kind of bilateral initiatives, demarches in capitals and so forth, and we will continue to do that as well.

SEN. COLLINS: Thank you.

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