Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq: The Crocker-Petraeus Report

Interview

HEARING OF THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE
SUBJECT: IRAQ: THE CROCKER-PETRAEUS REPORT

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI (R-AK): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ambassador, General, I too want to echo my appreciation, my admiration for your work, for your service, and to echo the support of all Americans for those men and women that are serving us in such an incredible way in so many different places.

You know, we had asked you to come and report to Congress this week. I think your testimony has been one of the most anticipated testimonies certainly that I can recall here in the Congress. Many of us have withheld either comments or projecting on what may happen until we heard directly from you. So we appreciate this report today.

We also acknowledge that preceding your testimony we have received numerous reports, all giving various assessments. So this much anticipated testimony is in many ways a little bit preempted by some of what we anticipated that we would be seeing.

So rather than focus on whether or not we agree or disagree with the number of benchmarks that have been met or whether you support the Jones report, I would like to focus a little bit this morning on how we move forward, and to use your words, General Petraeus, your recommendations for the way ahead, because I think that's what people want to know. What happens next, now that we know this information and all this data that has been collected?

And you have been very helpful, General, in outlining the various drawdowns that will take us through to March. Those recommendations will be presented to the president. But as I listen to your testimony and the comments, I'm struck by the statement that what we're doing with our recommended force reductions mission shift -- and I appreciate the slide that you've got here -- we're saying that -- and these are your words, General: "We are showing the recommended reductions of brigade combat teams as the surge runs its course and illustrating the concept of our units adjusting their missions and transitioning responsibilities to Iraqis as the situation and Iraqi capabilities permit." This is sounds very much -- sounds identical to what President Bush has been saying all along, that U.S. forces will draw down as the Iraqis are able to stand up.

So the question is: Is this a change in strategy? Is this a mission shift? Are we continuing the same path we have laid out before, entirely reliant on the ability of the Iraqis to come together to achieve that political reconciliation, and unless they are able to do that, we are not able to execute your recommended force reductions. General?

GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, Senator, thank you. We have, indeed, already been shifting responsibilities to Iraqis in a number of different places around Iraq, some of them surprising places, the most surprising, probably, Fallujah, a city in which the -- first of all, after us clearing it in November of '04, we had to bring in Iraqi army and substantial coalition forces to hold it, because there were no local young men that would volunteer to serve in the police or even in the army, for that matter, in Anbar province at that time.

We've just completed a process of establishing 10 police precincts in Fallujah with actual gated communities, the same as we do in some of the very difficult ethno-sectarian areas, but so that the local individuals in those neighborhoods, those 10 precincts, can actually control access to the areas, have population control, if you will, to keep al Qaeda out of Fallujah, something that they worked hard to do. And this has allowed us not only to thin out our own forces -- we do still have a Marine squad or so in each of those precincts, but a substantial amount less than we have in the past -- but we're even thinning out the Iraqi army forces, which as I mentioned earlier have gone from three battalions there most recently now down to just one, so that the other two can move up and in fact replace our forces that are coming out of an area and the ones that are going home later this month.

Mosul is another example. That city has been under enormous pressure by al Qaeda. Al Qaeda has tried to open a second front there, as they did do successfully in November '04, when they brought the police to their knees in Mosul as we went into Fallujah. This time, the Iraqi army and the police have really hung very tough, and we're down to a single combat U.S. battalion there. There's a brigade headquarters also that has all of Nineveh province -- again, a smaller force than in the past. That shows what it is that we are trying to do and will do over the course of the months ahead.

It is clearly conditions-based, but we're trying to push the conditions as fast as we absolutely can without, again, rushing to failure. And what we do not want to do is put ourselves back in the position that we found ourselves, say, in the latter part of 2006, which did enormous damage, frankly, to the entire effort that we had launched. I believed that my optimism back when I showed those very fine Iraqi forces to Senator Boxer was justified. I felt that -- and by the way, if you read the op-ed piece, I don't think that it's all that dramatically optimistic. It was stating what we were doing.

SEN. MURKOWSKI: Can I --

GEN. PETRAEUS: A lot of this was undone by that sectarian violence in 2006, which did cause not just horrific casualties but it also caused the hijacking of certain elements of the Iraqi security forces by sectarian interests.

SEN. MURKOWSKI: I don't want to interrupt that, but I want to ask one very important question that really hasn't been brought up here today, and that's the civilian side. When I was in Iraq and had a sit-down with General Odierno, he said as important as the military surge is going to be the civilian surge, and that piece, in his opinion, had not yet played out, had not yet been effective. And Ambassador, you've stated that there is appropriate civilian posture, and I think that that means that you're satisfied with the level of the civilian commitment that you have with your PRTs. Yet we look at the economy; we recognize, to use your words, the economy is performing under potential. Is the civilian surge adequate to support the military surge?

And Ambassador, I'm going to kind of let you off the hook because you have said that it is appropriate. General, do you have the support that you need on the civilian side?

GEN. PETRAEUS: We would like to see more. I agree with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has said repeatedly that certain elements of our government are at war -- DOD, State, AID -- but not all the others. So we can use help in those areas. Some of these areas are quite thin -- agriculture, health and some others. The PRTS are enormously helpful. We need to make sure that they are filled as they are supposed to be. The projection is they will be, but that's something we need to watch carefully.

And even, frankly, in our own DOD, the FMS system really has to respond more rapidly given all of the commitment that the Iraqis have made in becoming one of our bigger Foreign Military Sales customers. And we've got to try to push that process as rapidly as we can so that we can, in fact, equip them in the way that we have promised to do.

SEN. BIDEN: Thank you very much, Senator.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source