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March 16, 2008 Violence is down, but U.S. officials admit the road ahead is still rough
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy-Tribune
BAGHDAD — Five years after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq remains a divided country with an unstable government and endemic violence.
The violence has subsided some, however, and that's opened new prospects for the top two U.S. officials in Iraq.
"As progress is made, it clears away some of the smoke and dust that maybe has obscured challenges down the road, so you see those with greater clarity," Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told McClatchy Newspapers. "It is going to be a long, long process of building and developing a stable and safe society."
Crocker goes to bed every night with "at least 187 challenges" on his mind; every time something gets better, a new problem reveals itself, he said.
Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, has a slide show of what he calls "storm clouds." Among the clouds: sustaining security gains after a quarter of the American ground troops return home in July, providing basic services, preparing for provincial elections, helping more than 93,500 mostly Sunni Muslim security forces now being paid by the United States transition into the Shiite-led Iraqi government.
He worries about keeping militants and insurgents out of areas that have been largely secured, and about fighting them in the Diyala River valley, the Tigris River valley, the Zaab River triangle and in Ninevah province.
He also watches Iran and what he calls its continued support of Shiite militias.
"We've got to continue and complete the reduction of our forces ... by over a quarter of our ground combat power," he told McClatchy. The challenge is to "carry that out while preserving the security gains that we've fought so hard with our Iraqi partners to achieve ... we very much have to continue to help Iraqi authorities to cement those gains."
Missed benchmarks
In the last year, only one of the benchmarks legislated by U.S. Congress to measure progress in Iraq was accomplished, a law that's supposed to soften the hard-line stance that banned members of Saddam's Baath Party from power.
These benchmarks, which include a law on the distribution of Iraq's oil wealth, are important, but not the only measure of progress, Crocker said.
"Having heard the first six months I was here 'security, security, security' — very few people are talking about security now," he said. "Now it's how come the power doesn't work, my cousin needs a job, we've never seen a single soul from the municipality."
Crocker and Petraeus are to return to Washington in April to testify before Congress.
With Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama vying for the Democratic presidential nomination with differing proposals for an accelerated troop withdrawal, Crocker warns that the course they advocate carries real risks.
"I think it's vital that we stay with it because the cost of failure ... would be pretty dramatic," he said. "For us to walk away from this now, I think, would send Iraq, the region and us down that road of failure."
Petraeus is on his third tour in Iraq, and he soon will have served for 3 1/2 years.
When he arrived as the top commander, Sunnis were pitted against Shiites in a spiraling civil war. A year later, things are calmer. The surge of additional U.S. troops and a strategy to put more U.S. troops in the streets were key elements in the change, along with recruiting U.S.-paid Sunni militias to fight al-Qaida in Iraq, and a cease-fire by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
"We had very, very tough challenges during that period in particular," Petraeus said of his first six months. "The ambassador and I will often say that we're neither optimists nor pessimists; we are realists, and the reality is that everything in Iraq is hard."
March 16, 2008 Violence is down, but U.S. officials admit the road ahead is still rough
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy-Tribune
BAGHDAD — Five years after the U.S.-led invasion, Iraq remains a divided country with an unstable government and endemic violence.
The violence has subsided some, however, and that's opened new prospects for the top two U.S. officials in Iraq.
"As progress is made, it clears away some of the smoke and dust that maybe has obscured challenges down the road, so you see those with greater clarity," Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told McClatchy Newspapers. "It is going to be a long, long process of building and developing a stable and safe society."
Crocker goes to bed every night with "at least 187 challenges" on his mind; every time something gets better, a new problem reveals itself, he said.
Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, has a slide show of what he calls "storm clouds." Among the clouds: sustaining security gains after a quarter of the American ground troops return home in July, providing basic services, preparing for provincial elections, helping more than 93,500 mostly Sunni Muslim security forces now being paid by the United States transition into the Shiite-led Iraqi government.
He worries about keeping militants and insurgents out of areas that have been largely secured, and about fighting them in the Diyala River valley, the Tigris River valley, the Zaab River triangle and in Ninevah province.
He also watches Iran and what he calls its continued support of Shiite militias.
"We've got to continue and complete the reduction of our forces ... by over a quarter of our ground combat power," he told McClatchy. The challenge is to "carry that out while preserving the security gains that we've fought so hard with our Iraqi partners to achieve ... we very much have to continue to help Iraqi authorities to cement those gains."
Missed benchmarks
In the last year, only one of the benchmarks legislated by U.S. Congress to measure progress in Iraq was accomplished, a law that's supposed to soften the hard-line stance that banned members of Saddam's Baath Party from power.
These benchmarks, which include a law on the distribution of Iraq's oil wealth, are important, but not the only measure of progress, Crocker said.
"Having heard the first six months I was here 'security, security, security' — very few people are talking about security now," he said. "Now it's how come the power doesn't work, my cousin needs a job, we've never seen a single soul from the municipality."
Crocker and Petraeus are to return to Washington in April to testify before Congress.
With Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama vying for the Democratic presidential nomination with differing proposals for an accelerated troop withdrawal, Crocker warns that the course they advocate carries real risks.
"I think it's vital that we stay with it because the cost of failure ... would be pretty dramatic," he said. "For us to walk away from this now, I think, would send Iraq, the region and us down that road of failure."
Petraeus is on his third tour in Iraq, and he soon will have served for 3 1/2 years.
When he arrived as the top commander, Sunnis were pitted against Shiites in a spiraling civil war. A year later, things are calmer. The surge of additional U.S. troops and a strategy to put more U.S. troops in the streets were key elements in the change, along with recruiting U.S.-paid Sunni militias to fight al-Qaida in Iraq, and a cease-fire by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
"We had very, very tough challenges during that period in particular," Petraeus said of his first six months. "The ambassador and I will often say that we're neither optimists nor pessimists; we are realists, and the reality is that everything in Iraq is hard."