IN JANUARY 2007, President Bush announced what he termed a short-term increase in troop levels in Iraq to provide the Iraqi government and people time and security to achieve political reconciliation and the end of sectarian violence.
I opposed this so-called “surge” then because I was deeply concerned about the impact of this policy on all of our volunteer troops who, four years into this conflict, were not receiving adequate rest time, resources and training. Just as important, I did not have confidence in the Bush administration’s commitment to the diplomatic effort to push Iraqi leadership to set aside sectarian loyalties and move forward in the interest of their nation.
Unfortunately, recent testimony by our top military and civilian officials in Iraq earlier this week, and independent reports last week, indicate that while some uneven gains have been made on the security front by US forces, there is a disheartening lack of progress on the political front in Iraq and in the region toward the goal of stability.
Last week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office delivered an independent report to the House Armed Services Committee on which I serve. The GAO found that the Iraqi government failed to meet 15 of the 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for progress in political, security and economic areas.
Most alarming was the finding that only one of eight critical political benchmarks had been met, including the failure to make progress on the critical distribution of oil revenues.
This paints a frustrating picture for the American people. Despite the addition of 35,000 members of the world’s finest fighting force and the allocation of hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars, American diplomats and Iraqi national politicians have failed to achieve anything more than token gestures toward political stability.
Indeed, the GAO reported that the national government of Iraq has lost critical Sunni support and is still helpless to confront violent Shiite militias that control large neighborhoods in Baghdad. These militias, in defiance of the central government, continue to control the delivery of essential services such as electricity, water and community policing.
At our hearing we were presented with the following prognosis: On the one hand Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of multi-national forces in Iraq, recommends keeping US troops at the current surge level for at least another eight months, until July 2008. Yet, at the same time, Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified that it was unrealistic to expect any progress in the next six months on the political benchmarks that the Iraqis themselves defined as necessary for reconciliation.
This begs simple, yet critical, questions: Why? Why should young American men and women be asked to continue to serve and sacrifice on behalf of a foreign government unwilling to make progress in bringing its nation together?
Why isn’t the administration concentrating a “surge” of diplomatic effort to match the military sacrifice to get Iraq closer to the end game of political stability? These are the central questions before Congress and the American people today.
Our troops have performed extraordinarily under difficult circumstances, and have done everything we have asked of them — and more.
I was proud to see their will and determination first hand during a Memorial Day trip to Baghdad this May. However, that trip and the recent testimony before Congress make it clear to me that the future of our involvement in Iraq is not contingent simply on the success of our troops, but rather the willingness of the Iraqi people and government to seek the goals of peace and security together.
The flurry of testimony and reports from the battlefield leaves no doubt that we must change our course in Iraq. We need a US diplomatic surge in the region — inexcusably overdue from the Bush administration. And we need to initiate a significant drawdown of our military involvement in Iraq for the sake of our overextended troops, and to signal that the patience of the American people is not infinite and the time for serious political action by Iraq’s leaders is now.
In the final analysis, the Bush plan over the next 11 months is to slowly draw down our troop levels to the same number we had in January 2007, with absolutely no end in sight after that. Our troops and the American people deserve better. Our men and women in uniform, our military readiness and our national security require a real policy change in Iraq.
— Rep. Joe Courtney, a Democrat, represents Connecticut’s 2nd District.
