Would-be presidents put Petraeus to the test

Earlier in the day, at the Foreign Relations Committee meeting, Obama told Petraeus and Crocker that if the American people had known at the outset how costly the Iraq deployment would turn out to be, and how many unintended consequences it would have, “most people would have said, ‘That’s a bad deal.’”

This seemed to be an obvious point — and one that undercut Obama’s campaign argument that those, such as Dodd, Biden and Clinton, who voted in 2002 to authorize Bush to invade Iraq should have known better.

“How long will this take, and at what point do we say enough?” Obama wondered.

Neither he nor the witnesses were able to supply anything like a definite answer to his question.

Biden was true to form, somewhat wry, sometimes with a cockeyed grin on his face, sometimes shaking his head as he listened to Petraeus or Crocker, either in apparent skepticism or perhaps ruing the sheer ugliness that awaits the new president.

Dodd, in contrast, mostly looked glum and seemed immensely weary when, during a break in the hearing, he spoke to reporters. “I’m still optimistic” that Congress might pass legislation forcing President Bush to significantly reduce the number of troops in Iraq, beyond the number — roughly 30,000 — that Petraeus recommended.

But the votes in Congress are not yet there.

Neither Biden nor his Democratic presidential rivals on the panel had anything other than pessimism and regret to offer in their allotted five minutes.

He added, “If we killed or captured every jihadist in Iraq tomorrow, we would still face a major sectarian war.… We’d still have a major war on our hands.”

A former presidential contender, Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who dipped his toe in New Hampshire presidential waters last summer before deciding not to run, was the least deferential interrogator among the Democrats, accusing Crocker and Petraeus of “myopia,” an excessive focus on Iraq and a neglect of other al-Qaida venues such as Pakistan.

It was one of the Democrats on the committee who is not running for president who brought out into the open the issue of what the next president will inherit.

“Handing that situation off with 130,000 troops to the next president, what will be your analysis of the diplomatic conditions and the chances of success under those conditions?” asked Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

Crocker answered that he was not focusing that far ahead right now.

A job for the next president
But Nelson’s question was revealing in that it seemed to assume that the new president will face the job of extracting 130,000 American troops from Iraq, not some lesser number.

How would the Democratic would-be president bring Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds together in what some committee members on Monday called “reconciliation”?

That word made it sound as if the warring groups had at some point been amicable and only needed to recover that amity.

Another question seemed obvious as the presidential rivals parried with Petraeus and Crocker: How could the Democratic presidential nominee next year, whoever it ends up being, mobilize Democratic voters on a platform of such unrelieved grimness?

Obama’s question to Crocker seemed to capture the glumness of it all: “How do we clean up the mess?” he lamented.

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