Senate Iraq Hearings - Obama’s Performance
April 8th, 2008 BrianToday Gen. Petraeus and Amb Crocker came before the Sen. Foreign Relations and Defense Committees. I was interested to see how the presidential candidates handled it. There is a running diary by Tom Ricks on the WAPO that gives a good summary of the days events. Here’s a post at DailyKos that also discusses how the hearings transpired. Overall I think Hillary went for the outraged gentile attack, McCain took fire for his party as the ranking minority member, and Obama came across as seriously focused and down to business.
The Daily Kos post summarizes it well:
UPDATE IV: George Voinovich was very impressive; I’ll try to find a transcript. Obama is up right now. He’s getting right on to asking questions instead of making a speech. He corners Petraeus about Al Qaeda in Iraq, saying they weren’t in there before we invaded. And he’s asking whether we can ever reach a point where AQI couldn’t reconstitute themselves. He’s trying to pin down Petraeus on some metrics. This seems like a windup for a big pitch. I LOVE that he mentioned that Maliki said there was no room in the security forces for the Sunni Awakening groups and yet he recently added 10,000 Shiite Badr Brigade members, and he’s picked up on Sen. Boxer’s point that the Iraqi government is as pro-Iranian as the “special groups” that Crocker claims is the source of all Iraq’s problems. I think Obama’s remarks reflect a facility with the situation on the ground and a reasonable expectation of the goals we can expect in Iraq when we eventually withdraw. Best of all, Obama is doing his job instead of grandstanding. He added that the two malign groups Crocker and Petraeus keep discussing, AQI and Iran, were a DIRECT result of our initial invasion. He did an excellent job.
Read the Obama Transcript here for the entire conversation but here are a few particular exchanges that I thought were enlightening. You must read the whole exchange to really get a feel for his handling of it as he sets the groundwork perfectly then he jumps in with the tough questions once Petraeus and Crocker were in vulnerable positions. He wasn’t there for a gottcha moment but rather to get them on record on the true nature of the Iraq debate.
OBAMA: Should we be successful in Mosul, should you continue, General, with the effective operations that you’ve been engaged in, assuming that in that narrow military effort we are successful, do we anticipate that there ever comes a time where Al Qaida in Iraq could not reconstitute itself?
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, COMMANDER, MULTI-NATIONAL FORCE-IRAQ: Well, I think the question, Senator, is whether Iraqi security forces over time, with much less help, could deal with their efforts to reconstitute. I think it’s…
OBAMA: That’s my point.
PETRAEUS: I think it’s a given that Al Qaida-Iraq will try to reconstitute just as any movement of that type does try to reconstitute. And the question is whether…
OBAMA: I don’t mean — don’t mean to interrupt you, but I just want to sharpen the question so that — because I think you’re getting right at my point here.
I mean, if one of our criteria for success is ensuring that Al Qaida does not have a base of operations in Iraq, I just want to harden a little bit the metrics by which we’re measuring that.
At what point do we say they cannot reconstitute themselves or are we saying that they’re not going to be particularly effective and the Iraqis, themselves, will be able to handle the situation?
PETRAEUS: I think it’s really the latter, Senator, that, again, if you can keep chipping away at them, chipping away at their leadership, chipping away at the resources, that comprehensive approach that I mentioned, that, over time — and we are reaching that in some other areas already.
…
OBAMA: OK. I just want to be clear if I’m understanding. We don’t anticipate that there’s never going to be some individual or group of individuals in Iraq that might have sympathies toward Al Qaida. Our goal is not to hunt down and eliminate every single trace, but rather to create a manageable situation where they’re not posing a threat to Iraq or using it as a base to launch attacks outside of Iraq. Is that accurate?
PETRAEUS: That is exactly right.
More after the Jump……
