Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - The Situation in Iraq and Progress by the Government of Iraq in Meeting Benchmarks and Achieving Reconciliation

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SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): Thank you.

General, four and a half years of deployment truly represents extraordinary sacrifice. And I want to begin my comments by thanking you and Ambassador Crocker for your service. It's been courageous. It's been extraordinary.

General, for years this committee has heard that progress is being made in the training and equipping of Iraqi forces. Each year military commanders come before us, and they tell us that Iraqi troops are becoming more and more capable. Today, for example, you testified that the number of combat battalions capable of taking the lead in operations has grown to well over a hundred.

Success always seems to be just around the corner when it comes to training and equipping of Iraqi forces. Yet when put to the test, the Iraqi forces have performed very unevenly. And it's very disturbing to me to read the press reports that more than a thousand Iraqi soldiers refused to fight, fled or abandoned their positions during the battle in Basra.

Ultimately, as the ambassador has said this morning, the fate of Iraq is up to the Iraqi people. My concern is, as long as we continue to take the lead in combat operations, rather than transitioning to more limited missions, the Iraqis are never going to step up to the plate and fight for their country.

So my question to you is, why should American troops continue to take the lead in combat operations at this point, after years of training and equipping the Iraqi forces, after spending tens of billions of dollars training and equipping of Iraqi forces?

GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, Senator, in Basra we did not take the lead.

Basra is a province that is under Iraqi control. The sovereign Iraqi prime minister made a decision to confront a challenge. It was not just a political challenge; this is a militia gang -- criminals who were threatening the population. And then deployed forces very rapidly -- frankly, more rapidly than we thought they would deploy -- over the course of a week deployed the combat elements of a division. And then they moved very rapidly into combat operations. Again, too rapidly, most likely, without setting all the proper conditions and so forth. But they were in the lead.

We provided support. We did provide some close air support, attack helicopters. We augmented their C-130 fleet, their helicopters were also ferrying in and out of Basra as well. But we clearly did provide a number of enablers.

They do not yet have intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms. They don't have counterfire radar. They don't have a sufficiently robust expeditionary logistics structure. They do now provide their own logistics at their own bases, at their own police academies and all the rest of that, but again, taking that -- the next step is doing it after you've deployed, again, the better part of a division's worth of combat forces. Two brigades within about 36 hours of notification, another later in that week.

They are actually taking the lead in Anbar province in a number of different places. Again, there's a guiding hand there, but one of the largest reductions in the reduction of surge forces will come in Anbar, which you'll recall, of course, in the fall of 2006 was assessed as lost, and then through the awakening, through the combat operations, additional forces and so forth, Iraqi as well coalition over time has become a province that is actually relatively peaceful and actually on the road toward prosperity. Again, it is a -- it's a process, rather than a light switch, and when the going has gotten tough or whether -- where it requires more sophisticated application of force, we have had to help them out. But over time --

SEN. COLLINS: But 1,000 troops --

GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, it's 1,000 out of I don't know how many 10s of thousands actually were there, confronted by very, very tough militia elements. And, in fact, again, because of the positioning of the forces where they were able to get overwhelmed by larger groups of the militia, put them into an untenable situation. So I'm not in the least bit apologizing for them, but I do see the situation that they were confronted with because of the speed with which they went into action was a very, very difficult one for any troopers.

So again, what I would point to is that in other provinces where we have virtually no presence or perhaps a Special Forces A Team again, such as in Karbala province, in Najaf, in Hillah, in Nasiriyah and others in the south where, because of the operations in Basra, there were also outbreaks of militia violence. In those areas, the Iraqis proved equal to the task and in fact were able to maintain security; again, the same with varying levels in certain areas of Baghdad.

REP. COLLINS: Ambassador, in 2003, several of us proposed that the reconstruction aid to Iraq be structured as a loan rather than a grant. You may recall that debate. We didn't prevail.

Now we look at $100-a-barrel oil, an Iraqi budget that was predicated on $50-a-barrel oil. And the Iraqis, sir, are clearly reaping a windfall from the higher oil prices.

You mentioned that the era of our paying for major reconstruction is over. But we're continuing to pay the salaries of the Sons of Iraq, in many cases. We're continuing to pay for the training and equipping of Iraqi forces. I'm told that we're even continuing to pay for fuel within Iraq.

Isn't it time for the Iraqis to start bearing more of those expenses, particularly in light of a windfall of revenues due to the high price of oil?

AMB. CROCKER: Senator, it is, and that is something that both General Petraeus and I are engaged on.

We've had several discussions with the prime minister, for example, on the importance or the need for the government of Iraq to pick up the funding for employment projects. And he agrees, so we're working out the ways to do this.

I think what we've got to focus on in the period ahead is this kind of transitioning. And it will be, like everything else in Iraq, a complex process. What have they got the capacity to do? How do they get the capacity to do it? But I think that's clearly the direction that not only should we move in but that we are moving in.

SEN. COLLINS: Thank you.

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