The Measure of Things
Congress wrestles with how to judge whether there is progress in Iraq
Vice President Dick Cheney touched down in Baghdad last week to apply his unique brand of pressure to an Iraqi government about to be more closely scrutinized than ever on Capitol Hill. While urging Iraqi lawmakers to move ahead with the pressing business before them, he added, in no small aside, that it would also be best to forgo a planned two-month summer holiday. "Any undue delay," Cheney told them, "would be difficult to explain" back home in America.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put that point in more stark terms as he testified before Congress in a week in which a bomb rocked the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, killing 19 in an outdoor-cafe-studded region that has largely avoided the war's convulsions. A mortar, too, threatened to overshadow Cheney's trip as it exploded in the Green Zone, an event that has become commonplace enough to prompt a recent change in U.S. policy: Americans are now required to wear helmets and flak jackets at all times outdoors there-developments not lost on Gates. We are "buying them time," he said of Iraqi politicos. And, he continued, "every day we buy them, we buy it with American blood."
The high-level public comments were a broadcast to Iraqi officials: American patience for the war is running out. It was the same message that moderate Republicans delivered last week to the president in a candid, closed-door meeting at the White House. "People are always saying President Bush is in a bubble," noted Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia. "Well, this was our chance, and we took it." They presented Bush with poll figures showing plummeting party support in their districts and told him that his credibility on the war front is all but gone.
Benchmarks. In short, the president can't count on GOP support for the "surge" much longer. There is a sense "certainly by the Democrats and growing among the Republicans that there has to be some progress, significant progress to sustain [the surge] beyond September," said Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican. The president last week signaled his support for benchmarks to gauge progress by the Iraqi government, if not consequences for failing to meet them.
But which yardsticks to use, and how best to measure movement forward? The supplemental defense bill passed by the House last week laid out goals such as "eliminating militia control of local security" and "ensuring fair and just enforcement of laws." Military officials point out, however, that progress on those points can be difficult to quantify. Measures that are easier to track-the House bill also calls on the Iraqi government to enact a "broadly accepted" hydrocarbon law to divvy up oil profits among Iraqis-can be helpful but may not be the path to reconciliation that many hope, says Frederick Kagan, a neoconservative military expert at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the chief architects of the surge. "Sunnis aren't fighting because of the hydrocarbon law," he says. "They're fighting because they still think they should be in control of the country."
Such sectarian resentments can also make what has in the past been a closely watched metric-the training and equipping of Iraqi security forces-a dubious measure of progress, say military analysts. "The thing that worries me is not the technical proficiency of the Iraqi police," says Stephen Biddle, a national security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. "The problem is, who are they fighting for?" It's a concern echoed on Capitol Hill. "Does the growing number of trained and equipped security forces in fact drive the violence in Iraq?" asks a congressional staffer. "We don't know, because we have such poor metrics for tracking these trainees after they graduate."
Conditional. As the House supplemental now stands, the president must present a progress report to Congress by mid-July to collect the remainder of his war funding. A House-Senate conference committee will draft the final version of the bill, but Senate Republicans and many Senate Democrats oppose the House bill's language on conditional funding, since, they say, any progress on the surge will be difficult to determine by summer. Others note that the threat of a U.S. withdrawal of forces may not prove particularly motivational to many Iraqi lawmakers (who, ironically, last week backed draft Iraqi legislation calling for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal). "Is the threat to leave a form of leverage?" asks Biddle. "Or is it giving them what they want?"
On a lobbying trip to Capitol Hill, Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said that his parliament had agreed to cut its summer recess in half and that hydrocarbon laws would be approved by September. As for other benchmarks, he said, "Whether we get all of them in the right time for Washington ... remains to be seen." But congressional eyes are glued to the clock. A Gallup Poll last week showed that while the approval rate for the president's handling of the war is a low 30 percent, congressional Democrats, at 34 percent, don't score much higher. Republicans, at 27 percent, rate even lower.
That means that come September, when General Petraeus must deliver his own progress report to Capitol Hill, Republicans may be more ready to talk about withdrawal. Gates signaled last week that he will reduce forces if he sees "very positive progress" by then. But already military officials are putting out word that such progress will be far from clear cut. "I don't think it's going to be a 'this is working' or 'this isn't.' It's not going to be a thumbs up or down," says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. "There will be lots of areas of gray."
This story appears in the May 21, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.