The Crocker report
Washington Post:
Yet despite the spotlight focused on what has become known as the Petraeus report, the testimony of the man sitting beside Petraeus at the witness table, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, may carry far more import for the long-term future of Iraq and the U.S. presence there. With little progress to recount in how the Iraqis have used the political "breathing space" that Bush promised his war strategy would create, Crocker's inevitably more nuanced appeal for time and patience is likely to be the tougher sell.
One of the few points of agreement on Iraq among the Bush administration, Congress and independent analysts is that long-term security hinges on reconciliation among the country's ethnic and sectarian groups. Crocker will be able to cite small steps -- a recent agreement among top Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders to worker harder and more closely together, and Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's grudging acceptance of the U.S. military's recruitment and arming of former Sunni insurgents to fight the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.
But there has been little movement toward the legislative benchmarks Congress has insisted the Iraqi government meet, from passing laws to regulate and equitably share Iraq's oil wealth to ending prohibitions on government employment for the many skilled Sunni officials and technocrats who once belonged to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.
Like Petraeus -- a Princeton PhD who finished at the top of his 1983 class at the Army's Command and General Staff College and oversaw the rewriting of the service's Counterinsurgency Manual -- Crocker is widely considered the best and brightest the government has to offer for the task at hand. Intense and introverted, he is a career Foreign Service officer with long, high-level experience in the Middle East and South Asia.
Iraq is not the first society Crocker has witnessed fall apart firsthand. His formative career experience occurred in Beirut in the early 1980s, when a civil war between sectarian militias was well on its way to destroying Lebanon. While serving as a senior State Department officer at the time of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he warned the administration of the pitfalls of an intervention, and now he is not at all certain that the country can be put back together soon.
But like Petraeus, Crocker believes that regardless of how the United States came to be in Iraq, an abrupt withdrawal would lead to disaster and dishonor. And like Petraeus on the security front, he has been given virtual carte blanche by Washington on his diplomatic efforts.
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This is a reflection of bush's MBA style of management. Give someone a job and get out of the way. Expect them to report results. What will be interesting about his report is how he handles the grass roots reconciliation that is taking place in Iraq and how he puts it in the context of a broader political reconciliation. What is taking place will lead to a more likely long term solution than the top down process the Democrats have put into their check list for failure.
POSTED BY MERV
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