Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - Iraq After the Surge: Military Prospects

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SEN. RICHARD G. LUGAR (R-IN): Well, thank you very much Mr. Chairman. I join you in welcoming our distinguished panel to the Foreign Relations Committee this morning. We appreciate especially the study that our four witnesses have devoted to Iraq and their willingness to share their thoughts with us today.

The Foreign Relations Committee seeks sober assessments of the complex circumstances and policy options that we face with respect to United States' involvement in Iraq.

We are hopeful that our hearings this week in advance of the appearance next Tuesday by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker will illuminate the progress that has been made in Iraq, as well as the barriers to achieving our objectives.

Clearly, conditions on the ground in many areas of Iraq improved during the six months since our last hearings. And we are grateful for the decline in fatalities among Iraqi citizens and U.S. personnel, and the expansion of security in many regions and neighborhoods.

The violence of the past week is a troubling reminder of the fragility of the security situation in Iraq, and the unpredictability of the political rivalries that have made definitive solutions so difficult. Despite security progress, the fundamental questions related to our operations in Iraq remain the same.

Namely, will the Iraqi people subordinate sectarian, tribal, and political agendas by sharing power with their rivals? And can a reasonably unified society be achieved despite the extreme fears and resentments incubated during the repressive reign of Saddam Hussein and intensified during the last five years of bloodletting?

Even if most Iraqis do want to live in a unified Iraq, how does this theoretical bloc acquire the political power and courage needed to stare down militia leaders, sectarian strong men, criminal gangs who frequently have employed violence for their own tribal and personal ends? And can the Iraqis solidify a working government that can provide basic government services and be seen as an honest broker?

We have bemoaned the failure of the Baghdad government to achieve many political benchmarks. And the failure of Iraqis to organize themselves for effective governance continues to complicate our mission and impose incredible burdens on our personnel.

But it is not clear that compromises on political and economic power sharing would result in answers to the fundamental questions I just stated. Benchmarks measure only the official actions of Iraqi leaders and the current status of Iraq's political and economic rebuilding effort.

They do not measure the degree to which Iraqis intend to pursue factional, tribal, or sectarian agendas over the long term, irrespective of decisions in Baghdad. And they do not measure the impact of regional players, such as Iran, who may work to support or subvert stability in Iraq. They also do not measure the degree to which progress is dependent on current American military operations, which cannot be sustained indefinitely.

The violence during the past week has raised further questions about the Maliki government. Some commentators asserted that operations by Iraqi security forces in Basra are a positive demonstration of the government's will and capability to establish order with reduced assistance from the United States.

Others claimed that in attacking militias loyal to Muqtada al- Sadr, the government of Prime Minister Maliki was operating on a self- interested Shi'ite faction trying to weaken a rival prior to provincial elections.

Regardless of one's interpretation, the resulting combat poses risks for the voluntary cease-fire agreements that have been crucial to the reduction in violence during the last several months. And this improvement in stability did not result from a top-down process of compromise driven by the government.

Rather, it came from a bottom-up approach that took advantage of Sunni disillusionment with al Qaeda forces, the Sadr faction's desire for a cease-fire, and America's willingness to work with and pay local militias to keep order. We need to assess whether these voluntary cease-fires can be solidified or institutionalized over the long term and whether they can be leveraged in some way to improve governance within Iraq.

For example, can the bottom-up approach contribute to the enforcement of an equitable split in oil revenue? Can it be used to police oil smuggling? Can it provide the type of security that will draw investment to the oil sector? Can it sustain a public bureaucracy capable of managing the civic projects necessary to rebuild the Iraqi economy and to create jobs?

If the utility of the bottom-up approach is limited to temporary gains in security, or if the Baghdad government cannot be counted upon to be a competent governing entity, then United States strategy must be revised.

As we work on the short term problems in Iraq, we also have to come to grips with our longer term dilemma there. We face limits imposed by the strains on our volunteer armed forces; the economic cost of the war, competing foreign policy priorities, and political divisions in our own country.

The status of our military and its ability to continue to recruit and retain talented personnel is especially important as we contemplate options in Iraq. The outcome in Iraq is extremely important, but U.S. efforts there occur in a broader strategic, economic, and political context.

The debate over how much progress we have made in the last year may be less illuminating than determining whether the administration is finally defining a clear political-military strategy, planning the follow-up contingencies, and engaging in robust regional diplomacy.

I thank the Chairman for calling the series of hearings, and look forward to our discussions with this distinguished panel this morning, and an equally distinguished group this afternoon.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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SEN. LUGAR: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I wanted to cite is -- one of you did a testimony yesterday to the Armed Services Committee in which General Cody said on a stark assessment.

General Cody said the heavy deployments are inflicting incredible stress on soldiers and families and they pose a significant risk to the nation's all-volunteer army.

And Cody said -- he said even if five brigades are pulled out by July as planned it would take some time before the Army could return to 12 month tours.

He said Petraeus is expected to call for a pause in further troop reductions when he comes here. And back to Cody, he said quote, "I have never seen our lack of strength, strategic depth and be where it is today," said Cody who has been senior American official in charge of operations readiness for the past six years.

Now -- that some of you have reiterated in various ways but I want to couple that with a graph that appears in the Washington Post this morning entitled spike in tax that I would like to make a part of the record in.

It points out, as you do, General Scales, that you have a surge and a culmination that buys time but the past week had rather startling situations.

For example the total attacks on Americans on March 23, a Sunday, was 42 in the whole country, on Monday down to 38. But the activities of the Maliki government comments, attacks on Americans went on Tuesday to 75, on Wednesday to 128, on Thursday to 138, and so forth until the truce that Mahdi called for, and we were back down to 53 the following Monday. The Post totals all this up and finds 700-and-some during a week of time as opposed to about 300-and-some normally.

Now, the point is 60 percent of those attacks occurred in Baghdad. They were not in Basra, and they largely other Shi'ites who were using the road bombs, or various other things they do to kill Americans outside of this so-called "sphere." And we did become involved whether we knew about it or not there.

Now, the point, I think, that General Odom has made if I remember correctly is that regardless of what our tactics may be at this point there are likely to be civil strife in Iraq. In this particular case that the Mahdi forces and the Maliki government came to a standstill and both were claiming that they did better than the other, maybe that's the best we could hope for, that people do the civil strife and sort of figure out where the strength lies and then find some accommodation.

But in any event the serious point that General Cody is making while all this is going on, and this is accelerated by General McCaffrey's chart that suggests that five more years in Afghanistan, instability in Pakistan, the difficulties there really call for more forces at a time we have fewer anywhere, this is a very serious situation for our entire defense establishment, leaving aside what is happening in Iraq.

I bring this to the fore because I keep reading reports that the idea generally to be presented by General Petraeus or maybe others, and we'll hear General Petraeus --- what he has to say as a sort of staying the course. In other words, don't move people at this particular point, let's assess for a few more weeks, maybe months, what is required here.

But we have the forces there now and the point --- the chart that I've mentioned is that there are even more attacks on Americans after the surge and because of internal civil conflict of Iraqis, so that we are even more vulnerable in the past week than we have been for several weeks before that.

In view of that, you have suggested that we're coming into some difficulties if there are hostile Shi'ites who block our ability to get our troops out of the place. So I wanted to explore that point. Well, let's say that we were to withdraw. Some of you suggested sort of quietly, a few here, a few there, so almost nobody notices and so forth. But there are a 150,000-plus people, plus all the equipment. How in the world, physically do you move people by the thousands out of the place, even if you wanted to do so? And should we do so simply to save the general strength of our armed forces, generally, whether it be Afghanistan or any other contingencies? Does anybody have a thought about this?

And General Scales I've quoted you and your statement.

GEN. SCALES: Thank you, sir.

Let me go back to the process of building an Iraqi army. The best way to get the Iraqi army to be effective is to get them to fight. I'm sorry, that's all we have left right now, you get them to fight by putting them into the fight with advisers. And to my mind the best you can withdraw, pace that you can withdraw would be somewhere between one and two brigades a month. That's just --- that's the logistical problem that you have with just getting stuff out across a 400-mile line ---

SEN. LUGAR: Well, we got them into the fight last week and they fought and now, we've more attacks on us.

GEN. SCALES: So, well that, what we have --- that's right, sir, that's one division --- I think what we have to do is begin to back off and put them up in front and let them learn to fight by fighting. And it's a metering process, a partnership unit will watch an Iraqi unit in action, allow it to operate on their own autonomously, begin slowly to pull back all the support that you were alluding to earlier, like logistics, communications, training and so forth, and then as they get better that's how you temper or measure or balance that pullback.

My concern is picking up for instance an entire brigade that's advising an entire division and sending it south. I think that works against this delicate balance that I mentioned to the chairman, and it is an artful craft, and as Michele alluded, it's something that's going to take, it's going to take some time, but to her point, if you just leave those brigades there, then the Iraqi brigades have no incentive to fight. They have no purpose to fight, they can't learn to get better by simply watching us, and so again, that's where the balance comes in, sir.

SEN. LUGAR: Michele?

MS. FLOURNOY: Thank you. One of the things that I heard again and again from U.S. commanders on the ground is that we've had a plateau, that they felt that they could not with military means alone get the violence below certain levels, that the only way it was going to go down was through political accommodation.

I think we need to use the fact that we have to have some kind of draw-down in order to preserve our volunteer force, in order to address urgent needs like Afghanistan, in order as a superpower to have more than one ready brigade available to the United States for contingencies as they arise.

We have to use that leverage in negotiating with Iraqis and say, look, this is something happen; we cannot sustain this, therefore, you --- we need to see you making some specific political moves, because we cannot stay --- sustain this any longer. We have never done that and I think it would give us powerful leverage if we were to have those negotiations,

SEN. LUGAR: Thank you.

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