"A year ago, the president said we couldn't withdraw because there was too much violence," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). "Now he says we can't afford to withdraw because violence is down." Asked Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.): "Where do we go from here?"
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said: "I think people want a sense of what the end is going to look like."
But the bottom line was that there was no bottom line. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker echoed what they said seven months ago in their last update to Congress -- often using similar words. Iraq's armed forces continue to improve, overall levels of violence are lower than they were last year, and political reconciliation is happening, albeit still more slowly than they would like.
"Iraq is hard, and reconciliation is hard," Crocker said in September. Yesterday, he added: "Almost everything about Iraq is hard."
In eight hours of testimony, the two men danced around the question of what constitutes success in Iraq. "As I've explained, again, from a military perspective," Petraeus said wearily as the day drew to a close, ". . . what we want to do is to look at conditions and determine where it is without taking undue risks. This is all about risk."
Seven months since the previous assessment, the general and the ambassador, standing in for George Bush and Dick Cheney, had nothing to offer the Senate, no glimmers of hope, really nothing other than a belief that the future is completely unknowable except that we know there'd be chaos if we leave. For a policy so important to our future, on an economic level and on a national security level, a policy we're shoving so much into to apparently get a chaotic muddle as a reward, this is unacceptable.
George Voinovich (R-OH) had the most honest take, and while I'm not sure he's willing to do anything about it, he definitely was able to add a touch of anger to the proceedings.
Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) said that, because of the Iraq war, “we’re at a point where we’re really strained and stressed out.” “I hate to agree with Sen. Feingold,” he added, “but I think Osama bin Laden is sitting back right now looking at this thing [and saying] in effect, ‘We’re kinda bankrupting this country.’ We are eating our seed corn. We’ve got some really big problems today, and we are in a recession, and God only knows how long we’re gonna be in it.” [...] Voinovich argued that the course in Iraq should consist of the U.S. telling its Middle East allies, “Hey guys, we’re on our way out.” We need “a surge in diplomacy,” he added. “The American people have had it up to here.”
Ultimately, this is how things are going to stay. The American people will continue to have it up to here, and the policymakers in the White House won't give a damn, and the only expression of this frustration will occur on November 4. Beyond the personalities involved and the bullshit minutiae sure to be hyped in the broadcast media, that's the only choice that matters on Election Day; Iraq frozen in amber, or a long-awaited change.
UPDATE: The House Armed Services Committee hearing can be found here.