Thoughts on Petraeus/Crocker Hearing, Part II
Okay, back for Round 2 in front of the Foreign Relations committee. One thing just off the bat is that this is an impressive committee with a lot of impressive people. Some brief thoughts:
(1) Biden Nails Crocker: One of the best moments of either hearings was when Biden asked Crocker whether, if he had to choose between taking out al-Qaeda in Pakistan/Afghanistan or al-Qaeda in Iraq, which he would want to focus on. It placed Crocker in a tough spot, and of course he was forced to give the only sensible answer, which is to focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan. This is a central point, and Biden made it better than anybody.
(2) Sensible Republicans: Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel showed off the best we can expect from the Republican Party on Iraq. Neither have been ideal, and Lugar in particular has shown a disappointing reluctance to show some more fight in his opposition to our Iraq policy. But nevertheless, they both clearly realize that we are engaged in a failing strategy - or, more accurately, we have no strategy at all.
(3) Feingold Shows These Hearings Are Pointless: Russ Feingold, unsurprisingly, rocked the house. He expressed his disappointment that the only two people testifying at these hearings are people whose jobs are to narrowly focus on Iraq rather than taking a broader regional or global perspective. It’s a point that Petraeus and Crocker themselves drove home throughout the hearings as they repeatedly answered questions about the broader consequences of our Iraq strategy by saying (accurately) that it isn’t their job to look at those broader consequences. These hearings are getting a lot of attention, and in a lot of ways that’s good because Iraq needs to be paid more attention than it has been recently. But ultimately, these are not the guys we most need to hear from. They’re doing the best they can with the mess they’ve been handed, but the important decisions that the Congress and the President need to make require a broader view than either Petraeus or Crocker can possibly provide.
(4) Obama Doesn’t Disappoint: I wasn’t quite sure where Obama was going when he started out. His questions seemed meandering and a little insignificant, but he tied everything up pretty neatly in the end, making two good points. The first was that if Prime Minister Maliki can engage in relations with Iran despite the fact that everybody knows Iran is supporting insurgent Shi’ite militias who would like to bring Maliki’s government down, then surely the United States can participate in the same kind of diplomacy. The second addressed directly the point I made in my previous post on these hearings about McCain’s stunningly ambitious definition of success in Iraq. Obama first forced Petraeus and Crocker to acknowledge that we have no hope of creating a situation in which there is no remnant of al-Qaeda in Iraq and there is no degree of influence from Iran, and used these two points to illustrate the fact that any realistic notion of success in Iraq has to be messy. Requiring success in Iraq to meet something like McCain’s definition, Obama said, “portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.” We have to acknowledge that when we leave, there will be some level of terrorist violence, some level of Iranian influence, and Iraq’s government will not be a fully functioning, prosperous democracy.
Comment by Augur on 8 April 2008 at 10:01 pm:
thanks for doing these two posts. i wasn’t able to watch the hearings so I appreciate your summaries.
I <3 Claire McCaskill