The Petraeus-Crocker Show Gets the Hook

By FRANK RICH

THE night before last week’s Senate hearings on our “progress” in Iraq, a goodly chunk of New York’s media and cultural establishment assembled in the vast lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. There were cocktails; there were waiters wielding platters of hors d’oeuvres; there was a light sprinkling of paparazzi. Then there was a screening. We trooped like schoolchildren to the auditorium to watch a grueling movie about the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Not just any movie, but “Standard Operating Procedure,” the new investigatory documentary by Errol Morris, one of our most original filmmakers. It asks the audience not just to revisit the crimes in graphic detail but to confront in tight close-up those who both perpetrated and photographed them. Because Mr. Morris has a complex view of human nature, he arouses a certain sympathy for his subjects, much as he did at times for Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, in his Vietnam film, “Fog of War.”

More sympathy, actually. Only a few bad apples at the bottom of the chain of command took the fall for Abu Ghraib. No one above the level of staff sergeant went to jail, and no one remotely in proximity to a secretary of defense has been held officially accountable. John Yoo, the author of the notorious 2003 Justice Department memo rationalizing torture, has happily returned to his tenured position as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. So when Mr. Morris brings you face to face with Lynndie England — now a worn, dead-eyed semblance of the exuberant, almost pixie-ish miscreant in the Abu Ghraib snapshots — you’re torn.

Ms. England, who is now on parole, concedes that what she and her cohort did was “unusual and weird and wrong,” but adds that “when we first got there, the example was already set.” That reflection doesn’t absolve her of moral responsibility, but, like much in this film, it forces you to look beyond the fixed images of one of the most documented horror stories of our time.

Yet I must confess that, sitting in MoMA, I kept looking beyond the frame of Mr. Morris’s movie as well. While there’s really no right place to watch “Standard Operating Procedure,” the jarring contrast between the film’s subject and the screening’s grandiosity was a particularly glaring illustration of the huge distance that separates most Americans, and not just Manhattan elites, from the battle lines of our country’s five-year war. If Tom Wolfe was not in the audience to chronicle this cognitive dissonance, he should have been.

Mr. Morris’s movie starts fanning out to theaters on April 25. We don’t have to wait until then to know its fate. Sympathetic critics will tell us it’s our civic duty to see it. The usual suspects will try to besmirch Mr. Morris’s patriotism. But none of that will much matter. “Standard Operating Procedure” will reach the director’s avid core audience, but it is likely to be avoided by most everyone else no matter what praise or controversy it whips up.

It would take another column to list all the movies and TV shows about Iraq that have gone belly up at the box office or in Nielsen ratings in the nearly four years since the war’s only breakout commercial success, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” They die regardless of their quality or stand on the war, whether they star Tommy Lee Jones (“In the Valley of Elah”) or Meryl Streep (“Lions for Lambs”) or are produced by Steven Bochco (the FX series “Over There”) or are marketed like Abercrombie & Fitch apparel to the MTV young (“Stop-Loss”).

As The New York Times recently reported, box-office dread has driven one Hollywood distributor to repeatedly postpone the release of “The Lucky Ones,” a highly regarded and sympathetic feature about the war’s veterans, the first made with full Army assistance, even though the word Iraq is never spoken and the sole battle sequence runs 40 seconds. If Iraq had been mentioned in “Knocked Up” or “Superbad,” Judd Apatow’s hilarious hit comedies about young American guys who (like most of their peers) never consider the volunteer Army as an option, they might have flopped too. Iraq is to moviegoers what garlic is to vampires.

This is not merely a showbiz phenomenon but a leading indicator of where our entire culture is right now. It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the war or oppose it. They want to look away, period, and have been doing so for some time.

That’s why last week’s testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker was a nonevent beyond Washington. The cable networks duly presented the first day of hearings, but only, it seemed, because the show could be hyped as an “American Idol”-like competition in foreign-policy one-upmanship for the three remaining presidential candidates, all senators. When the hearings migrated to the House the next day, they vanished into the same black media hole where nearly all Iraq news now goes. If the Olympic torch hadn’t provided an excuse to cut away, no doubt any handy weather disturbance would have served instead.

The simple explanation for why we shun the war is that it has gone so badly. But another answer was provided in the hearings by Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, one of the growing number of Republican lawmakers who no longer bothers to hide his exasperation. He put his finger on the collective sense of shame (not to be confused with collective guilt) that has attended America’s Iraq project. “The truth of the matter,” Mr. Voinovich said, is that “we haven’t sacrificed one darn bit in this war, not one. Never been asked to pay for a dime, except for the people that we lost.”

This is how the war planners wanted it, of course. No new taxes, no draft, no photos of coffins, no inconveniences that might compel voters to ask tough questions. This strategy would have worked if the war had been the promised cakewalk. But now it has backfired. A home front that has not been asked to invest directly in a war, that has subcontracted it to a relatively small group of volunteers, can hardly be expected to feel it has a stake in the outcome five stalemated years on.

The original stakes (saving the world from mushroom clouds and an alleged ally of Osama bin Laden) evaporated so far back they seem to belong to another war entirely. What are the stakes we are asked to believe in now? In the largely unwatched House hearings on Wednesday, Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, tried to get at this by asking what some 4,000 “sons and daughters” of America had died for.

The best General Petraeus could muster was a bit of bloodless Beltway-speak — “national interests” — followed by another halfhearted attempt to overstate Iraq’s centrality to the war on Al Qaeda and a future war on Iran. He couldn’t even argue that we’re on a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people. That would require him to acknowledge that roughly five million of those people, 60 percent of them children, are now refugees receiving scant help from either our government or Nuri al-Maliki’s. That’s nearly a fifth of the Iraqi population — the equivalent of 60 million Americans — and another source of our shame.

The prevailing verdict on the Petraeus-Crocker show is that it accomplished little beyond certifying President Bush’s intention to kick the can to January 2009 so that the helicopters will vacate the Green Zone on the next president’s watch. That’s true, but by week’s end, I became more convinced than ever that in January we’ll have a new policy that includes serious withdrawals and serious conversations with Mr. Maliki’s pals in Iran, even if John McCain becomes president.

General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker define victory as “sustainable security” in Iraq. But both Colin Powell and Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said last week that current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan are unsustainable and are damaging America’s readiness to meet other security threats. And that’s not all that’s unsustainable. An ailing economy can’t keep floating the war’s $3-billion-a-week cost. A Republican president intent on staying the Bush course will find his vetoes unsustainable after the Democrats increase their majorities in Congress in November. No war can be fought indefinitely if the public has irrevocably turned against it.

Mr. McCain says Americans want “victory,” whatever that means today, and yes, they would if it could be won on the terms promised by Mr. Bush five years ago — fast, and with minimal sacrifice. It’s way too late to ask for years of stepped-up sacrifice now in the cause of a highly debatable definition of “national interests.”

This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.

Bush Says War's Outcome 'Will Merit the Sacrifice'

President and Petraeus Discuss Strategy as the U.S. Death Toll in Iraq Rises to 4,000

By Karen DeYoung and Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 25, 2008; A01

As the American military death toll in Iraq reached 4,000, President Bush conferred yesterday with top U.S. officials in Washington and in Baghdad and vowed in a public statement that the outcome of the war "will merit the sacrifice."

Bush held a two-hour videoconference with Gen. David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. Petraeus reiterated his plan to halt U.S. troop withdrawals, begun late last fall, at the end of July. At that point, he has said, he will "evaluate" whether Iraqi forces and a reduced number of U.S. troops can maintain the lower levels of violence.

"We have every desire to continue with the withdrawal of forces" at some time after July, one military official said. "The issue will be once we remove over 25 percent of combat power plus other associated units . . . we let the dust settle . . . and look to see where we're at," he said, adding that the evaluation period would probably be at least six weeks. Petraeus has offered no guarantee that conditions will allow further withdrawals before Bush leaves office.

In congressional testimony next month, Petraeus and Crocker are expected to describe continued but slow improvement in military and political conditions, even as recent weeks have seen an increase in suicide bombings, along with Sunday's renewal of rocket attacks on Baghdad's Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and much of the Iraqi government are located.

Among the wounded in four separate attacks were an American military contractor and an embassy employee from Jordan, both of whom remain in serious condition, a U.S. official in Baghdad said. Military officials said the munitions were Iranian-made, fired from northeastern Baghdad by renegade Shiite militia groups.

Late Sunday night, the U.S. command in Baghdad announced that four soldiers had been killed by a makeshift bomb in southern Baghdad, bringing the total number of U.S. troops killed to 4,000 since the war began in March 2003. Dozens of Iraqis were also killed in violence around the country Sunday.

Overall attacks in Iraq have sharply declined in Iraq, but the trend has begun to plateau over the past three months -- car bombings have decreased, but suicide bombings have increased. Military officials said that Petraeus will tell Congress that the withdrawal, which has now reached about 9,000 troops, will continue with three additional brigades to be withdrawn without replacement by July 31.

Although administration officials have said that U.S. troop strength at that point should be about where it was before a "surge" in deployments began last spring -- approximately 130,000 -- the military official said the net number remaining may be larger. "They're in the process now of trying to scrub the numbers," he said of Petraeus's command in Baghdad. "Figuring out boots on the ground is difficult because . . . units come in at different sizes, people have left, people have been wounded."

There are similar difficulties, he said, in determining the "battlefield geometry" that will enable the withdrawal of entire combat brigades. Brigades are seldom deployed intact, and their battalions are often scattered. While one battalion could be withdrawn without replacement, others may have to be replaced by U.S. or Iraqi forces from elsewhere.

During his testimony on April 8 and 9, Petraeus expects to present Congress with firm numbers on how many U.S. troops will leave Iraq and how many will remain by the end of July.

Crocker, who in previous testimony has cautioned against hopes of rapid progress, is expected to describe some political and economic achievements but to say that much work remains. In a mid-March interview with The Washington Post, he described Iraqi political and economic institutions as "like everything else here, still very much under development."

Another senior U.S. diplomat offered positive indicators yesterday, saying that Iraqis are "spending increasingly more money than we are" on reconstruction and some military programs. "We're not starting any new projects and [the Iraqis] are getting incrementally better," he said. Iraq's "Arab neighbors are gradually engaging, although not enough. They're not embracing Maliki the way they ought to," he added, referring to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

After speaking with Petraeus and Crocker yesterday morning from the White House, Bush attended a briefing by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the State Department on cooperation between military and civilian officials in Iraq and elsewhere. In a statement to reporters, he spoke of the U.S. civilians who have died in Iraq and said: "I will vow so long as I am president to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain."

Bush will attend a similar briefing by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and military leaders today at the Pentagon, but administration officials said they do not expect any new decisions or departures from current policy.

One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that after months of friction among civilian and military leaders -- including over concerns about overall stress on the military -- there is little debate over the basic Iraq strategy for the next six months. The only real question, he said, is how long the "pause" in withdrawals after July will last.

In Turkey yesterday, Vice President Cheney told ABC News that "there's no reason now to decide what the force level is going to be in December of '08." The criterion, he said, "is how do we make certain we succeed in Iraq? It may be that we can make judgments about reductions down the road. . . . But I don't think [Bush] is likely to want to try to say now what the force level ought to be at the end of the year."

Iraqi feel-good stories prove elusive

Some American readers clamor for upbeat reports, but positive news is not easy to find.

By Garrett Therolf

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 16, 2008

BAGHDAD — Afew days after arriving in Iraq early this year, I followed Army Gen. David H. Petraeus on a walk through a marketplace on the capital's east side.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq didn't wear a helmet, and he gently scolded his security detail for encircling him. "I want to get close to people. They need to feel comfortable coming up to me," he told them.

Boys and girls recognized Petraeus from television, and they moved around him. He talked to them about soccer and their neighborhood, and he turned to me and said, "See, they say they feel safer now."

The outing, despite its made-for-TV quality, gave me a hopeful feeling. During a tour of Iraq a year earlier, I encountered mostly pessimism among the Iraqis I interviewed. A reader wrote me to say that I was an "Al Qaeda cheerleader" for a story that included quotes from U.S. soldiers troubled about the difficulties of fighting insurgents. Many more asked, "Isn't there some good news to report?"

The Petraeus appearance was an early indication that I would be able to show there was. Clearly, it seemed, I would be able to move more freely, to interview more candidly. At the time, I couldn't tell by how much, but Petraeus' media advisor suggested that I should be able to safely drive to many more sections of the city, interview people openly on the street and linger for an hour or so in homes and businesses.

Over the following weeks, I traveled across Baghdad with private security to write about a man who had allegedly been tortured by a provincial police chief and about errant U.S. military airstrikes that killed civilians. I also was embedded with the military to report on the lack of a legitimate process to resettle displaced Iraqis who returned to their homes and found squatters unwilling to leave.

I gave equal time and attention to reporting what might be called "good news" stories.

One line of inquiry concerned a bank branch in Amiriya, a Sunni Arab neighborhood on the west side of the capital that the American military said was one of Al Qaeda in Iraq's most important strongholds last year.

When I had visited the district in May, members of the Army unit responsible for the area said they were fighting desperately to open a branch of the state-owned bank. Many of the residents were former civil servants, and without the bank, they couldn't pick up their pensions.

Over the course of more than a year, the military paid to have the facility rehabilitated, sought to cajole the Finance Ministry into sending a shipment of cash and helped vet the bank's guards.

"The bank is probably one of the most important things in the neighborhood. Opening it told people the government still cares about you," Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl said when I called him shortly after he returned to the U.S.

Meanwhile, I learned of another possible story: about a Chinese restaurant that had been opened in Baghdad's Karada district by three laid-off steelworkers from China's Hubei province -- the first eatery here to be owned and operated by someone from outside the Middle East in years.

A local Times reporter, Saif Hameed, was so inspired by the willingness of the Chinese to come to Baghdad that he wrote them a welcome letter, which he got translated into Mandarin.

"The fact that you left your families behind and came here lifts my spirit and deserves the greatest respect," Hameed wrote. "I couldn't sleep yesterday, no matter how hard I tried, thinking about you and admiring you."

I visited them and they agreed to a future interview.

Within weeks, I heard back from the military regarding Amiriya. The bank was no longer something the military was willing to highlight.

"The unit operating in the same area as the bank doesn't categorize the bank operations as a top priority because they don't directly affect the good of the community of Amiriya," an Army spokesman, Maj. Mark Cheadle, wrote in an e-mail. "So, the bottom line is they would rather not sponsor an embed or visit for something they don't deal with on a regular basis." My request for a follow-up "embed" was denied.

I tried to arrange a visit that would not involve the military, but the neighborhood is surrounded by checkpoints that were judged too dangerous for us to pass. Without being accompanied by soldiers, there was no way for me to tell the story.

Cheadle proposed that I instead write about a videoconference that allowed schoolchildren in Baghdad and Texas to ask questions of each other. I declined.

A few days later, the restaurant employees said they had changed their minds about the interview. They were too scared to raise their profile through a news story. And a Chinese Embassy spokesman said his office had persuaded them to return home, although they were still operating in recent days. "The situation is far too dangerous for them to work here," the spokesman said.

Because of such fears and the inefficiency that pervades the capital, these "good news" stories evaporated before I could tell them. After only a month in Iraq, I once again left having filed mostly "bad news" stories.

garrett.therolf@latimes.com

2 Markets, of Varying Security, Highlight Challenge for U.S. Troops in Iraq

By THOM SHANKER

HAWIJA, Iraq — As Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sits down over the coming days to prepare his formal recommendation to President Bush on future troop levels in Iraq, he will reflect on his visits to two markets.

On a trip this week, Admiral Mullen first walked the Airport Road market in Dora, a neighborhood of south Baghdad. What had been an area firmly in the grip of insurgent violence is now a showcase for the American strategy of clear, hold and rebuild, with calm purchased by an increase in American and Iraqi troops and by tall concrete blast walls.

Admiral Mullen saw commerce blooming, the sidewalks filled with shoppers, including women and children. The market was safe enough for America’s highest-ranking military officer to stroll for an hour with only a modest security detail.

But he encountered a far more fragile sense of security a day later at a market here, in the north of Iraq, the region where more than 60 percent of all attacks nationwide now occur as insurgents and terrorists have been pushed from Baghdad and the surrounding belt of villages by the troop increase.

Hawija has been cleared of fighters belonging to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence says is foreign led. The numbers of Iraqi Army soldiers and police officers are growing here, as are the ranks of Sunni guardsmen, some even former insurgents, who have allied with American efforts to drive out Qaeda fighters.

Yet, calm remains sufficiently suspect that Admiral Mullen walked within a large cordon of well-armed American and Iraqi foot soldiers (although some of the Iraqis had to be reminded to keep their rifle barrels pointed at the ground while on patrol, and not waving occasionally in the direction of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs).

But that was only the inner layer of security that included rooftop snipers, Apache and Kiowa helicopters, remote-controlled Predator reconnaissance aircraft and even an F-16 fighter overhead. “A few weeks ago, you or I could not have walked here on the streets of Hawija,” Admiral Mullen said. He also acknowledged, though, that while “security is dramatically improved, it clearly remains fragile.”

In several interviews over five days of travel, ending Wednesday, Admiral Mullen repeatedly said he had not made up his mind on what recommendation he would offer the president on the way ahead in Iraq. “Honestly, I am not there yet,” he said.

But by his actions and comments, the chairman gave ample evidence that his thinking was closely aligned with that of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Philosophically, Admiral Mullen is committed to getting more American troops out of Iraq before the end of the year. But he and other commanders are trying to come up with ways to do that without sacrificing improvements secured with the toil and lives of American troops, including the five extra combat brigades scheduled to leave by July.

“An Iraq in chaos would be extremely dangerous for all of us,” Admiral Mullen said, stressing that his recommendation would reflect the “need to sustain these efforts to achieve success over time.”

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen is also responsible for managing risks across this region and around the globe, which means freeing up forces from Iraq as rapidly as possible to assure the military can pivot to another crisis.

As he visited bases, training centers and neighborhoods across Iraq, Admiral Mullen expressed frustration that the Iraqi leadership was not doing enough to cement security gains in the provinces. “Dora and Hawija brought this out, that the central government must be in contact with, and engaged with, the local community,” he said. “I went into many of the shops. They need sewage services. They need water. They need electricity.”

His walking tours of the two markets also proved that there continued to be wrangling over sufficient troops for the war.

Baghdad has been defined as the American center of gravity, with the five brigades of reinforcements focusing their efforts there. The Bush administration said it needed to make Baghdad secure to accomplish its objectives; that meant it needed the north of Iraq just to hold steady.

The fight in the north, where most of the fighting is under way today, especially in Mosul, is thin of American troops. It is what the military calls an “economy of force” mission. That thinning of American troops, and the necessary reliance on Iraqi forces to step into the fight, certainly foreshadows the future of the American mission across the nation.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, met several times with Admiral Mullen during his tour of Iraq and declared that the “key is to hang on to what you’ve got.”

Indicating that the American focus will remain on security in the capital after the extra brigades leave in July, he cautioned against an “eagerness to go after something new,” if that put at risk gains achieved by the troop increase.

In an interview, General Petraeus said that when he made his separate reports to Congress and the president in April, his recommendation on future troop levels would be based on such criteria as numbers of attacks nationwide; American combat deaths and injuries; Iraqi civilian and security forces losses; and the ability and size of the Iraqi police force and army.

“If the population supports what we want to do, it won’t let Al Qaeda put roots down,” he said.

Is Mosul on the Mend?

By Mark Kukis/Mosul

U.S. military officials say violence is dropping around Mosul, where insurgents have for months escalated attacks. In January, U.S. military data show there were more than 500 attacks across Ninewa Province, where Mosul is the largest and most volatile city by far. A senior military official speaking on condition of anonymity said the attacks in the province in February were expected to total roughly 400.

Even if the projections bear out, Mosul still remains a vicious battleground for Iraq, which has seen overall violence fall dramatically in recent months in the wake of the surge. And the city of 1.8 million people continues to vex U.S. military leaders, who have watched its troubles ebb and flow over the years.

In late 2003, Mosul was largely peaceful by comparison with the rest of Iraq at the time. The burgeoning insurgency, then beginning to spread across other areas of Iraq, was slower to take hold in Mosul for a number of factors. Mosul drew a measure of stability from its history as place of relative wealth and sophistication, whereas early insurgent havens like Fallujah and Ramadi were poor, troubled places even under Saddam Hussein. And some leaders among Mosul's Sunni community for a time held out hope of finding a role in the emerging post-invasion power structures even when Sunnis elsewhere were quickly adopting a rejectionist mentality. General David Petraeus, who was then head of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, says Mosul's first real plunge into violence came in 2004, after he handed over command of the area. The police force collapsed, and insurgents moved in. "Once the roots go in, then you have a real challenge," Petraeus says of the insurgency. "You just start to spiral downward."

In the years afterward, violence in Mosul fluctuated as insurgents kept up a presence in the city. But the situation there seemed much more stable than many parts of Iraq such as Baghdad and Ramadi. Then in 2007, as surge forces began reducing violence across Iraq, the picture in Mosul worsened, leaving it the only place in the country where violence was rising as the year closed. Iraqi and American officials agree that Mosul is now probably the last urban stronghold of the insurgency. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki dispatched additional Iraqi army troopers to the area, promising a "decisive battle" that has yet to materialize. But in any case Petraeus and other U.S. commanders believe that efforts to fix Mosul this time are destined to work better, chiefly because nationalist Sunni fighters are rethinking their alliances with al-Qaeda in Iraq and, in some cases, becoming open to reconciliation.

"Sunni Arabs have evolved," Petraeus says. "They realize that al-Qaeda has brought them nothing but indiscriminate violence and bloodshed and in many cases oppressive practices such as forced marriages. And in some cases bizarre practices such as breaking fingers of people who smoke."

The military strategy in Mosul for both U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces is much the same approach used elsewhere in Iraq over the years, with mixed results. Absent, however, is one key aspect that shaped progress in other places over the past year: local volunteer security forces who, in many cases, were nationalist insurgents who broke with al-Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. officials say that strategy won't work in Mosul, because standing up bands of irregulars could inflame existing ethnic and sectarian divisions in the city. So many U.S. military officials see provincial elections as a way to sap the insurgency's strength in Mosul. In the 2005 elections, many Sunnis across Iraq simply did not participate, a defiance that left them dejected and marginalized — and susceptible to the embrace of insurgent elements. Petraeus and other American officials in Baghdad think Sunnis will take part in elections this time and rejoin the civic process rather than rage against it. "They want their seats at the table back," Petraeus says.

Still, an opportunity for reconciliable Sunnis to turn from the insurgency to participation in the government does not appear to be near. Last week, Iraq's presidential council blocked a proposal for new provincial elections, sending the measure back to the parliament for reconsideration. So U.S. and Iraqi forces in Mosul are left to slog on against the insurgency rooted there without the prospect of a change in the political dynamic that might alter the situation in the way the tribal revolt in Anbar Province against al Qaeda in Iraq did last year.

Daily missions by U.S. and Iraqi troops continue in Mosul, a pivotal hub for insurgents operating throughout Iraq. Petraeus says U.S. and Iraqi forces are eliminating one insurgent roadside bomb team a night and taking out key insurgent leaders. "You've got to chip away at the enemy," he says. "Al-Qaeda knows they can't win without Baghdad, but they can't survive without Mosul."

Officials Lean Toward Keeping Next Iraq Assessment Secret

By Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 7, 2008; A07

A new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is scheduled to be completed this month, according to U.S. intelligence officials. But leaders of the intelligence community have not decided whether to make its key judgments public, a step that caused an uproar when key judgments in an NIE about Iran were released in November.

The classified estimate on Iraq is intended as an update of last summer's assessment, which predicted modest security improvements but an increasingly precarious political situation there, the U.S. officials said.

It is meant to be delivered to Congress before testimony in early April by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, according to a letter sent last week by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell to Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.).

Since the Iraq invasion in 2003, the intelligence community has been more cautious than the military and the White House in assessing political, economic and security gains in Iraq. And the war's progress has been a prominent issue in the presidential campaign.

In his letter to Warner, McConnell said that separate estimates are also being prepared on the "terrorist threat to the homeland" -- focusing on al-Qaeda and Pakistan -- and on "the tactical and longer-term security and political outlook for Afghanistan." Both are scheduled for publication by early fall.

Warner requested all three estimates in January, describing them as key to upcoming policy discussions in Congress.

Intelligence officials said that the National Intelligence Board -- made up of the heads of the 16 intelligence agencies plus McConnell -- will decide whether to release the Iraq judgments once the estimate is completed. But they made clear that they lean toward a return to the traditional practice of keeping such documents secret.

In internal guidance he issued in October, McConnell said that his policy was that they "should not be declassified." One month later, however, the intelligence board decided to publicly release key judgments from an NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons program, saying that it had weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security against the necessity to protect classified information."

The estimate, which said Iran had halted the weaponization element of its nuclear program, appeared to undermine the Bush administration's position on Tehran's overall effort. With Bush arguing that Iran remained "a danger," McConnell publicly said the NIE judgment was poorly written because it emphasized a halt in the weapons program rather than Iran's continuing nuclear enrichment.

Key NIE judgments on Iraq had previously been made public, beginning with a highly controversial October 2002 assessment warning that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. That estimate was later proved wrong, with no such weapons discovered in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, and the matter led to charges that the intelligence community had been politicized by the Bush administration.

"Overall, professional life is less complicated if nothing becomes public, and one doesn't have to organize classified assessments always having in the back of one's mind, 'If this is ever leaked, how would it read' " in the news media, a former intelligence analyst said.

Chiarelli Likely to Command Iraq Forces

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2008; A03

Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli appears to be the most likely officer to succeed Gen. David H. Petraeus as top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq by the end of this year, as the other two leading candidates have recently been named to senior positions in the U.S. military establishment.

Since taking over in Iraq in February 2007, Petraeus has become the face of the war effort, receiving unusual deference from the White House and using high-profile testimony last September to stave off Democratic efforts to sharply curtail the U.S. presence in Iraq. Widely credited with the success of the "surge" -- the counteroffensive that sharply reduced violence in Iraq last year -- Petraeus has indicated interest in moving sometime this year to the top U.S. military slot in Europe, where he could attempt to revitalize the flagging NATO alliance.

Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a veteran Special Operations officer whom top Bush administration officials have considered as a possible replacement for Petraeus in Iraq, has been nominated to become director of the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon announced yesterday. That is a key position within the Pentagon, though not as prominent as the top U.S. officer in the war in Iraq.

Another possible candidate discussed by administration officials, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, was nominated earlier this month to be the top U.S. Army commander in Europe. Dempsey is currently the deputy chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East.

Chiarelli, currently the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, commanded the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004 and early 2005, and then was the No. 2 officer in Iraq in 2006, preceding Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno. Opinions inside the Army are mixed, with some officers noting that Chiarelli was one of the first advocates of shifting course in Iraq and adopting classic counterinsurgency techniques, while others say that in his second tour, he presided over a failing strategy as violence skyrocketed. Some influential insiders are still advocating that Odierno, who was recently nominated to become the Army's vice chief of staff, replace Petraeus later this year.

McChrystal's nomination is likely to make the Joint Staff increase its focus on Iraq. McChrystal has spent most of the past several years in Iraq, although he ostensibly was assigned to Fort Bragg, N.C. He has a sharp intellect and a good feel for the interagency process, according to retired Army Lt. Col. Roger D. Carstens, a former Special Forces officer who advised the Iraqi National Counter-Terror Force in Baghdad.

Separately, the Defense Department said yesterday that its controversial general counsel, William J. Haynes II, is stepping down. "I have valued his legal advice and enjoyed working with him," Gates said in a statement. Haynes had been in the job since May 2001.

Senior military lawyers have clashed with Haynes frequently since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, especially regarding the handling of terrorism suspects at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Most recently, Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, said that he would testify as a defense witness in the trial of the former driver for Osama bin Laden and that Haynes had stated that acquittals of suspects held at Guantanamo would make the United States look bad. Through a spokesman, Haynes denied making such a comment.

Haynes had been nominated twice by President Bush for a federal judgeship, but the White House withdrew his name in January 2007 in the face of Senate opposition. Haynes was seen as an ally of Vice President Cheney, having worked as the Army's top lawyer when Cheney was defense secretary during the George H.W. Bush administration.

Petraeus: Iran Trying to Bolster Influence in Iraq

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 12, 2007; 1:10 PM

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, accused Iran today of seeking to "create a Hezbollah-like force" in Iraq to exert Tehran's influence there, but denied that he was preparing the ground for a U.S. attack on Iran.

In a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington after two days of testimony on Capitol Hill, Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, defended their assessments of incremental progress in Iraq and again warned that the way forward will be difficult.

"It will be a long, hard grind," Crocker said. "Right now, I think that grind is making progress."

Asked whether his testimony about Iran could be viewed as part of a campaign to build toward an attack, Petraeus said: "I'm not blaming Iran for all that's gone wrong in Iraq." But he said Iran has contributed to sophisticated attacks in Iraq that otherwise would not be possible, including strikes with armor-piercing "explosively formed projectiles" and 240mm rockets.

"The evidence is very, very clear," Petraeus said. He cited documents discovered during the capture in March of Qais Khazali, a Shiite Muslim militant with ties to the Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the arrest of a deputy commander of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite group supported by Iran. Petraeus said the evidence links Iran to an attack in Karbala in January that resulted in the deaths of five U.S. soldiers.

Under interrogation, Khazali was asked if he could have carried out that attack without Iranian support, Petraeus said in the news conference. "He literally throws up his hands and laughs and says, 'Of course not,' " the general said.

Khazali and other captives have told U.S. investigators about funding, training, weapons and ammunition they had received from Iran, he said.

A videotape of the Khazali interrogation was shown to Iraqi leaders, "several of whom then went to Iran and made their case, quite forcefully, about their concern of Iranian involvement," Petraeus said.

In response to another question, Petraeus said he and Crocker agree that "you can't win in Iraq . . . just in Iraq." Rather, success requires "greater involvement with respect to some of the neighboring countries, some of the source countries for foreign fighters," he said. "And it certainly involves Iran."

He said Iraqi leaders "have developed much greater concern about Iran's activities, about the activities of the Quds Force with respect to the militia extremists that, in many respects, appear to be trying to create a Hezbollah-like force that they could use to gain influence in Iraq."

Petraeus said that he has the authority he needs to conduct operations inside Iraq and that his concern about Iran "doesn't mean that it's something for which I should have the authority to pursue, any more than we should have that with respect to Syria or elsewhere."

In written testimony submitted to Congress, Petraeus said U.S. forces had captured "the deputy commander of Lebanese Hezbollah Department 2800, the organization created to support the training, arming, funding, and, in some cases, direction of the militia extremists by the Iranian Republican Guard Corps' Quds Force." He also cited the recent discovery of Iranian-backed forces called the "Special Groups" in Iraq.

"These elements have assassinated and kidnapped Iraqi governmental leaders, killed and wounded our soldiers with advanced explosive devices provided by Iran, and indiscriminately rocketed civilians in the International Zone and elsewhere," Petraeus testified.

"It is increasingly apparent to both Coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds Force, seeks to turn the Iraqi Special Groups into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq."

In a separate development, U.S. officials said Washington would press for new, tougher U.N. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program when diplomats from six nations meet next week. The gathering of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany, is set for Sept. 21 in Washington. Two participants -- Russia and China -- have been reluctant to go along with tougher sanctions than those adopted in two Security Council resolutions, and contentious negotiations are expected.

During today's news conference, Petraeus said al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq has been driven from some former strongholds but continues to pose a major threat.

"We believe that al-Qaeda-Iraq is off balance," he said, although it "certainly remains very dangerous." He said he calls the group "the wolf closest to the sled" because it "has carried out the most horrific attacks in Iraq," notably those that have sparked the greatest "ethno-sectarian violence."

The general said al-Qaeda in Iraq now is "much more on the run than they have been at any time that I can recall since they really established themselves in Iraq," having been largely driven out of Anbar province and Baqubah. He indicated that the group still operates in Diyala province and several Baghdad neighborhoods and is trying to open "new fronts" in northern Iraq.

Asked if he expects "tens of thousands" of U.S. forces to remain in Iraq for at least the next five years, Petraeus said, "I wouldn't hazard a guess on that. It's very, very difficult to project out much farther beyond the horizon at this point in time, even just to mid-July of next year."

According to recommendations Petraeus made public Monday, that is when about 30,000 troops should be withdrawn, bringing the U.S. military presence down to about 130,000 -- the level before a "surge" of reinforcements ordered earlier this year by President Bush.

Crocker said the two days of congressional testimony showed that there are "deep divisions" and "a lot of frustration" among lawmakers--feelings he said are shared by U.S. officials serving in Iraq. But he said he came away "somewhat encouraged" that amid the frustration, lawmakers showed "willingness to listen to our explanations" and asked a number of "thoughtful and probing questions."

As long as Iraq is moving on an "upward" trajectory, Crocker said, "we need to demonstrate some strategic patience, some resolve and commitment, because this will be a long process. There are no shortcuts. There is no switch to flip."

Bush and Top Aides Visit Iraq Days Ahead of Assessment

By DAVID S. CLOUD

AL ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq, Sept. 3 — President Bush and his top national security advisers made a surprise joint visit to Iraq today for talks with Gen. David H. Petraeus and top Iraqi officials a week before the American commander is scheduled to deliver a long-awaited assessment of the situation in Iraq.

Administration officials said Mr. Bush decided to travel to Iraq along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to meet face-to-face with General Petraeus and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki because it was his last chance to do so before completing a review of his Iraq strategy.

“He has assembled essentially his war cabinet here, and they are all convening with the Iraqi leadership to discuss the way forward,” the Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said. “This will be the last big gathering of the president before the president makes a decision on the way forward,” he added, noting that Mr. Bush would l leave here for a trip to Australia to meet with leaders of Asian and Pacific nations.

It was the first time Mr. Bush was in Iraq with his top advisers, and his third trip to the country.

Ms. Rice and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made a joint visit to Baghdad last year, shortly after Mr. Maliki took office.

Mr. Bush held talks today with his commanders and then he and the American delegation met with Iraqi officials including Mr. Maliki and President Jalal Talabani. The group sat across a narrow conference table facing one another.

Mr. Talabani had been delayed getting to the meeting, but when he arrived, Mr. Bush greeted him warmly, according to Mr. Morrell.

“Mr. President. Mr. President. The president of the whole country,” Mr. Bush said to Mr. Talabani, before shaking his hand and sharing a traditional Middle Eastern greeting.

Mr. Bush’s one-day stop at this desert air base in Anbar Province underscored the administration’s intention as part of the strategy review to bolster support for the Sunni Arab region, where former insurgents are increasingly cooperating with American forces.

But the dramatic meeting also had a clear political goal — to shift the focus this week away from Congress, where a series of hearings on reports critical of the progress of the administration strategy are planned, and to buttress White House assertions that its efforts in Iraq are beginning to produce results.

Administration officials rejected the idea that the trip was a publicity stunt ahead of the reports.

“There are some people who might try to derive this trip as a photo opportunity,” the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said. “We wholeheartedly disagree.”

“This is an opportunity for the president to meet with his commander on the ground and his ambassador on the ground while they are in fact all on the ground together,” Ms. Perino said. “It’s also a chance for him to meet with Prime Minister Maliki and other national government leaders. And he will be able to look Prime Minister Maliki in the eye and talk with him about the progress that is starting to happen in Iraq, what we hope to see and the challenges that remain.”

After meeting with top military advisers last week in Washington, Mr. Bush approved an acceleration of a new program to intensify assistance directly to Sunni areas of Iraq, officials have said. Mr. Gates’s trip seemed aimed at least in part in explaining the American concept for stepped-up assistance to officials in Iraq’s government, who have raised strong concerns about the idea of assisting their Sunni rivals, before it is announced publicly.

General Petraeus is widely expected to ask that additional troops sent to Iraq earlier this year be kept in place at least until next spring, a course Mr. Bush appears to support. But a senior Defense Department official said the gathering would be “instrumental” in formulating recommendations to Mr. Bush on possible adjustments to the plan. The move to increase aid to Sunni groups is one example of the adjustments that are coming out of the strategy review, and the move reflects frustration that Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government has not taken advantage of improvements in security to move forward on reconciliation with Sunni rivals.

But the administration has seized on the Sunni tribes’ sudden willingness to cooperate in fighting the homegrown extremist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a promising political development that they hope will convince members of Congress, especially Republicans who have been calling for withdrawals from Iraq, that political progress is happening, albeit from the ground up, not from the top down, as the administration strategy initially envisioned.

While backing Sunni groups is an attempt to circumvent Mr. Maliki, Bush administration officials stress that the goal is not to undermine his government but to broaden its support.

Mr. Maliki has been deeply worried that outreach to Sunni tribes, which has included American support for setting up armed neighborhood watch groups in Anbar and other Sunni areas, amounted to backing his enemies.

But the senior Defense Department official said the American aid to the Sunni tribes comes with “a quid pro quo” — the need to recognize the legitimacy of the Mr. Maliki’s government in Baghdad.

The official added that spending in Anbar province by military commanders would be increased.

Mr. Bush and his cabinet members were also scheduled to meet today with Sunni tribe leaders from Anbar, many of whom until recently opposed the American presence. Mr. Maliki and other top Iraqi officials had scheduled a rare trip into the Sunni heartland for the talks with the American delegation but it was unclear if Mr. Maliki intended to hold talks with the Sunnis during his visit.

Mr. Bush and Gates planned to press the two sides to move forward on reconciliation and to discuss such steps as provincial elections that are aimed at drawing the former Sunni insurgents into a closer relationship with Mr. Maliki, the senior Defense Department official traveling with Mr. Gates said.

“One of the great concerns many have is that it not be a temporary marriage of convenience,” he said, referring to the growing American relationship with Sunni tribes. The goal, he added, was to ensure that “Sunnis in Anbar are drawing closer to the central government.”

Aides said that Mr. Bush and Mr. Gates also wanted to speak face-to-face with General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, as he considers recommendations for adjusting strategy in Iraq.

The high-level visit was conducted with extraordinary security precautions. American officials said the measures, which included withholding disclosure of Mr. Gates’s arrival after Mr. Bush was on the ground, were necessary because of the top officials from Iraq and from the United States who were present. Although Mr. Gates arrived on a C-17 transport plane, Mr. Bush traveled on Air Force One, which could be seen sitting on the air base’s baking tarmac.

There had been intense speculation among the White House press corps that the president would make such a trip either on his way to or back from Australia, and the White House went to great lengths to keep the secret. The president slipped out of a side entrance at the White House on Sunday evening. Instead of taking Marine One, the presidential helicopter, he was driven to Andrews Air Force base with just one car accompanying him, as opposed to the two dozen or so vehicles that ordinarily make up a presidential motorcade.

Mr. Bush typically takes a small, rotating, pool of reporters with him aboard Air Force One. The members of the pool assigned to travel aboard the president’s plane to Sydney were summoned to the White House over the weekend for face-to-face meetings with Mr. Bush’s top press aides.

They were told to show up at Andrews Sunday between 6p.m. and 6:30p.m., not this morning, as had been publicly announced. Reporters were permitted to inform their spouses and just one editor, who could tell no one else, and were asked not to pass the information by cellphone. When they boarded Air Force One inside a hangar, not on the tarmac, as is typical, the shades were drawn and Secret Service agents took their pager devices and cellphones until shortly before the plane landed in Iraq.

The president is expected to spend about six hours on the ground in Iraq before leaving for Australia.

Though Mr. Bush and General Petraeus had met as recently as last week by video hookup, the seemingly last-minute nature of the trip and the array of top officials from both governments who attended did not mean there were deep disagreements among President Bush’s top advisers about strategy in Iraq, they said.

“Nothing beats the opportunity to look Dave Petraeus in the eye and Ambassador Crocker and say, ‘What do you think? What do we need to do?’” said a senior Defense official traveling with Mr. Gates.

Mr. Bush has been touting developments in Anbar recently and wanted to meet with Sunni sheiks who have formed alliances with the United States this year. Some of the tribal leaders he is expected to meet with were likely involved in operations against American forces before switching their allegiances.

“You don’t reconcile with your friends; you reconcile with your enemies,” Mr. Morrell said, explaining the decision to met with the tribal leaders.

The meetings were held at Al Asad air base rather than in Baghdad because Mr. Bush wanted to see first hand the progress in Anbar, he said, although the president is not scheduled to leave the base, a sprawling complex far from the province’s population centers.

The air base, the second largest in Iraq, is a parched, sunny, dusty place. Troops here said temperatures today were about average for this time of year—about 115 degrees.

After his tarmac greeting, Mr. Bush, wearing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt and slacks, posed for pictures before being taken by motorcade to a building where a marine gave him a short briefing.

Mr. Bush leaned slightly forward, both hands on a makeshift table, and listened to the marine, with a pointer in hand, as he gave an overview.

The marine said there was progress being made with Iraqi security forces in Anbar, handling more urban duties, allowing the Marines to hunt for insurgents, according to a pool report. But he also said that there is a problem with the short home leaves — five months — which he said strains training, not to mention family life.

“Morale? How is morale?” Mr. Bush was overhead asking.

“Very high, sir,” the marine responded.

Petraeus Gave Student Summer VIP Tour of Iraq

Talk About Field Trips!

By Megan Greenwell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 3, 2007; C01

CAMP TAJI, Iraq -- The briefing was top secret, limited to a group of men with titles ranging from captain to four-star general -- plus one awed 19-year-old civilian.

At first, the teenager sat outside the briefing room with a handful of reporters. Then an aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, poked his head out of the door and said, "Wesley Morgan? General Petraeus wants you in here."

Morgan, a sophomore at Princeton, spent his summer vacation in Iraq on a personal invitation from Petraeus. He met with the visiting then-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, and had access to multiple classified briefings. He helped patrol streets in Baghdad. His identification card read "journalist," because he keeps a blog about his experiences, but he was treated more like one of the members of Congress or other VIPs who have passed through Iraq.

The trip was the chance of a lifetime for Morgan, an ROTC cadet who said he first became interested in military history and counterinsurgency at age 6. But Petraeus's invitation also highlights his desire to attract more people like Morgan to military service -- the guys with degrees from places like Princeton (where Petraeus himself earned a doctorate), the slightly nerdy ones who are as comfortable poring over treatises on counterinsurgency tactics as going out on patrol.

"He has studied Iraq deeply and is exceedingly well read," Petraeus said of his protege. "I love to see these types of people here."

Petraeus's willingness to be a mentor stems from a desire to position himself as the man who rebuilt the Army, people who have worked with him in Iraq and elsewhere say. He has been open about his desire to shape the officer corps into a group of highly educated thinkers and has surrounded himself with Rhodes Scholars and PhDs, a group that has come to be known as his brain trust.

"I think he's universally well known for finding smart people who are interested in doing things a little differently, and I think that's a major reason for his success," says Capt. Elizabeth McNally, a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who is Petraeus's speechwriter.

Still, Petraeus says this is the first time he has taken someone so young under his wing, with the exception of his own son, a junior ROTC cadet at MIT.

The seed for Morgan's improbable summer vacation in Iraq was planted last October, when he wrote a lengthy profile of Petraeus for Princeton's student newspaper. They spoke on the phone for two hours, with Petraeus asking nearly as many questions as he was answering, both men recalled.

The two began e-mailing regularly, and in March, the general asked: Wouldn't Wes like to spend a summer in Baghdad?

"It's amazing," Morgan said after the briefing at Camp Taji last month. "It's the weirdest summer vacation ever, but to finally get to see what's happening for myself is unbelievable."

Morgan's blog maintains an adulatory tone in discussing Petraeus, concluding that nobody understands the situation in Iraq as well as the general does. Each post is a several-thousand-word wrap-up of three or four days spent in the field in which Morgan demonstrates a deep knowledge of Army operations, slipping easily into Army jargon and painstakingly detailing conversations and sights with a sense of awe.

"Advancing toward the sound of the guns with a squad of armored Manchu infantrymen in a damp, muddy palm jungle -- definitely an exhilarating feeling, even if to them the procedure was routine," he wrote in describing a patrol just north of Baghdad.

With the exception of professions of admiration for Petraeus, Morgan expresses few opinions in his blog. He describes himself as a moderate and advertises his support on Facebook for both John McCain and Barack Obama.

"I don't think I have enough information or experience to really have strong opinions one way or the other," he wrote after the day at Taji with Petraeus.

Morgan's path toward becoming the youngest American civilian known to have spent time in Iraq started at least 15 years before he actually landed in Baghdad. In fact, when the e-mail from Petraeus came, Morgan's mother wasn't even surprised.

"I really think this interest and this aptitude is hard-wired into him," says Kerry Tucker, who lives with Morgan's father and younger brother near Boston. "So the fact that he's been able to take it to this level is wonderful, but I can't say it's totally unexpected."

Morgan once came home from preschool nearly in tears after learning that teachers at the school, which served a politically liberal population in Cambridge, Mass., had gone through illustrated books about cars and trucks and torn out the pages showing military vehicles.

"He said, 'Why did you send me to Dandelion School?' " she recalls, laughing. "It was a lovely school that was the worst possible place for him."

As Morgan got older, he largely contained his military interest to his bedroom, where he would spend hours reading and building hundreds of G.I. Joe-inspired action figures dressed in uniforms from various wars in world history. Once he built a scale model diorama of Kandahar, Afghanistan, then constructed a pulley system that would raise and lower helicopters as he rolled across the floor in his desk chair. His parents began calling his bedroom "the situation room."

Through his research, Morgan began following Petraeus's career 10 years before most Americans had ever heard his name. He read Petraeus's highly regarded guide to counterinsurgency and started to think that someday he could be one of Petraeus's "designated thinkers," as the general calls his circle of advisers with advanced degrees and combat experience.

"General Petraeus was one of the first people to legitimize his interest," Tucker says. "I was hoping this day would come when he wasn't sitting alone in his room drawing maps of Iraq and reading."

Petraeus has encouraged Morgan to take classes at Princeton's prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which admits a few undergraduates each year, to learn Arabic and to improve his performance on physical tests like push-ups, sit-ups and running. Whenever the general visits Princeton, which he does as often as possible, he competes against ROTC cadets -- and generally wins.

Petraeus scoffs at the notion that the man running the war in Iraq should not be taking time to mentor teenagers.

"This is someone who is knowledgeable enough to be an officer here right now," he says. "We need all the brilliant young people we can get. I'll just have to wait three years or so for this one."

Iraq Reports To Be Released Soon

• The August 23 Iraq NIE
  On August 23, the Director of National Intelligence released a mixed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) reflecting some successes, notably cleavage between Sunnis and Al Qaeda in Iraq, but an overall lack of political breakthroughs necessary for success in Iraq.
  
  Both sides of the Iraq debate have used this report as ammunition.


• The GAO Report
  Karen DeYoung and Tom Ricks of The Washington Post were given an advance copy of this "strikingly negative" report from the GAO, a legislative branch auditing and research agency, by a government official afraid the report's conclusions would be watered down when it is officially released.
  
  It is due to be released on Tuesday, September 4.
  
  The GAO Report was prepared at Congressional direction and GAO does not have the leeway other required reporters have in stating that Iraq's government has made "progress" toward specific benchmarks. It mus make a "success" or "failure" determination on each benchmark.
  
  Stung by the harsh conclusions of the report, the Bush Administration has pushed back, emphasizing the report's limitations.
  
  An interesting point of cleavage highlighted by the report is the backsliding of formerly relatively independent Iraqi military units. These have declined from 10 to 6. Some U.S. military leaders in Iraq have stated that training and building of Iraqi forces is a slow-building success. But General James Dubik, who is is in charge of U.S. training efforts, has stated that the problems of Iraqi forces are significant and should not be taken lightly.


• The Jones Report
  This report was prepared by a group headed by recently-retired SACEUR and Marine Corps Commandant James L. Jones, consisting of 14 former military and law enforcement officers.
  
  One of the group's major recommendations has been a complete reformation of the Iraqi National Police and Iraqi local police. The Iraqi police have been cited by nearly everyone as an Iraqi institution that has been thoroughly infiltrated by sectarian militias. In Shiite areas, the police are known to actively collaborate with militias against U.S. forces.
  
  Democrats will certainly seize on this reported failure, though the Department of Defense and Bush Administration have stated that they will not give up on the existing Iraqi police. The report is due to be presented to Congress next week, and Administration officials were briefed on it last week.


• The Petraeus Report
  It is hard to overstate the extent to which the Bush Administration's efforts continue fighting the war in Iraq are tied to the credibility of one man, General David Petraeus. To a significant extent, Congress has held off on a full-throated effort to end the war in Iraq until General Petraeus has an opportunity to implement his new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.
  
  Next week, General Petraeus is to report on the successes and failures of American strategy in Iraq under his leadership. A poor report will give impetus to Democratic efforts to end the war. A positive report will give the Bush Administration war effort a stronger hand.
  
  Petraeus is to testify to Congress along with our Ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, on September 10.
  
  At present, the only thing that has been agreed by everyone in Congress and the White House is that they will consider the Petraeus Report very important. Due to its importance, the report is likely to be significantly influenced by the White House and will be viewed skeptically by Democrats in Congress.


• The Report To Petraeus
  A military official and intelligence officer reported to General Petraeus in an internal assessment that concludes the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government is truly unenthusiastic about a government of national unity. Apparently Petraeus receives a reports like this frequently. It reflects the intellectual struggle within the military to define and address the problem we face in Iraq.


• Conclusion
  None of these reports is likely to change many minds. But these reports will be the ammunition that Congress, the White House, press and the public will have to get used to using over the momentous Iraq debates likely to come during the next couple of months.

Reports add fuel to Iraq debate

Updates on the war are expected to pit Bush and Congress; they may also redefine military and political strategy.
By Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 2, 2007

WASHINGTON — President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress are heading for another collision over the war in Iraq this month, framed by a flurry of conflicting assessments of military and political progress, and culminating in an impassioned debate over how soon U.S. forces should be withdrawn.

Even before the debate has formally begun, officials on both sides are forecasting its likely course: The general who commands U.S. forces in Iraq will report that the current increase in troops has improved security, and will ask that it continue. Democrats will try again to impose a timetable for a withdrawal but acknowledge they don't have the votes in the Senate. Bush will continue to resist pressure for a major change in strategy but will weigh what aides call "adjustments."

On one level, the battle may merely look like a rerun of the fiery but abortive one that Congress staged only two months ago, when Senate Democrats failed to pass measures that would have forced Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq.

"It's going to be 'Groundhog Day,' " predicted Mark Helmke, an aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who has criticized Bush's handling of the war.

But there could still be surprises.

Republican members of Congress and some Bush aides have urged the president to begin laying out a new strategy for next year, when the buildup of troops is scheduled to end.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who was widely criticized for cutting off debate on compromise measures in July, now says he is willing to seek a middle ground.

And even if the clash doesn't lead to an immediate change in policy, it may produce -- as a side effect -- an important debate over the future of the war. Administration officials say they recognize that the buildup cannot be sustained next year as the Army and Marine Corps run out of available troops, that political progress in Baghdad has fallen short and that U.S. strategy in Iraq must be redefined.

But the central elements of that strategy remain unresolved: How fast will the post-buildup drawdown be? How far will it go? How will the mission of the remaining forces be defined? What kind of Iraqi political order should the administration seek?

"The essential question is: What should our objective in Iraq be today?" said Dennis Ross, who was a Middle East negotiator under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton. "The president says we're going to prevail without saying clearly what the objective is. There are people on the other side who say, 'Let's pull out,' but they need to spell out what happens next if you do. . . . I don't think this will be the center of the debate in September -- everybody has already staked out their turf -- but it ought to be."

A flurry of reports

This month's showdown was set up in the spring, when Congress agreed to fund Bush's additional 22,000 combat troops on the condition that he report by Sept. 15 on whether the offensive was working.

The first reports have already come in. An official "estimate" from the nation's intelligence agencies released last month found that the buildup had produced "uneven improvements in Iraq's security situation" and little or no political progress -- but warned that a U.S. withdrawal would make things worse. A draft report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that Iraq's government had met only three of the 18 benchmarks for political progress that the administration accepted as goals.

This week, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, are to brief the president on their assessments. Next week, they are to deliver them in public before four committees of the House and Senate.

Petraeus and Crocker have frequently said they believe the buildup is making progress. Petraeus "wants to keep as much force on the ground as we possibly can, for as long as we possibly can," said one administration official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and asked not to be identified.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are also scheduled to testify before Congress next week. That could provide a telling contrast. Officials say that Pace and the other members of the Joint Chiefs are worried that continuing the buildup too long would do serious damage to the Army and Marine Corps, and that they favor a significantly smaller force in Iraq next year.

The buildup has increased the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 162,000, from about 130,000 last year. Under current plans, the force will gradually shrink to its pre-buildup level of 130,000 by late next summer.

The debate within the military has been over whether the buildup should continue longer than planned and whether troop levels should be held at 130,000 or reduced to about 100,000. Continuing the buildup could require deployments to be extended; they've already lengthened to 15 months, from an initial 12 months.

Congress will also hear from retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, who has drafted a report on the Iraqi security forces that gives relatively good marks to the Iraqi army but recommends that the National Police be rebuilt from scratch.

Petraeus is key

The White House hopes that a bullish assessment from Petraeus, who is widely respected by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, will swing public opinion in favor of the buildup and prevent further erosion in GOP support for the war.

"There are a number of reports coming out," but only one will provide the complete picture, White House spokesman Tony Snow said last week. "The people who are going to be best able to do that are the folks who live and work there every day, and that would be Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker."

Said Republican political consultant David Winston: "Petraeus will define the starting point. If a lot of people actually sit down and watch his testimony, there could be a public reaction -- and Congress will respond if the public reacts one way or the other."

Meanwhile, Bush used speeches before veterans organizations last month to hammer at three major themes he will return to this month: The "surge" has been a military success; the administration has a new "bottom-up" strategy of promoting regional political leaders to compensate for the apparent failure of its "top-down" effort focused on Prime Minister Nouri Maliki; and the consequences of withdrawal would be disastrous.

Some members of Congress -- and some Bush advisors -- have urged the president to add another theme: that the buildup will soon end, the number of U.S. troops in Iraq will decline, and responsibility for security will increasingly shift to newly trained Iraqi forces.

"The surge can't go on forever; we don't have the manpower to do that," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said last week. "I think it's entirely possible that the president will lay out a strategy that takes us into a different place."

But so far, there has been no sign that Bush intends to soften his stance by talking publicly about a troop drawdown, even one that looks inevitable. Policymakers fear that announcing even a partial withdrawal will convince U.S. adversaries in Iraq and the Middle East that the United States intends to leave entirely -- giving "the wrong signal," one official said.

In effect, the administration faces a dilemma: It would like to reassure Americans that it will soon begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, but reassure its Iraqi allies that it plans to stay.

Democrats, on the other hand, face a dilemma of their own: Their party's most fervent supporters insist that Congress force Bush to withdraw from Iraq within months. But even with a handful of Republican dissidents joining Democrats, Reid is short of the 60 votes he needs under Senate rules to pass such a controversial bill.

In July, the result was a theatrical all-night debate, an angry standoff, and a controversial decision by Reid to cut off debate without allowing several compromise proposals to come to a vote. At the time, Democratic strategists said they expected public opinion to swing dramatically in their direction over the summer and put considerable pressure on Republicans.

But that didn't happen. Last week, in a change of strategy, Reid told the Washington Post that he was willing to help pass a bipartisan compromise. "I don't think we have to think that our way is the only way," he said.

Reid spokesman Jim Manley acknowledged that it might still be impossible to pass a binding timetable for troop withdrawals. "Until you have 60 votes, you can't force a change in policy," he said. "Sen. Reid remains committed to changing the course in Iraq and bringing the troops home, but there are a number of ways to do that legislatively."

One leading possibility, he said, is a proposal by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) that would limit the administration's ability to deploy troops by requiring that the duration of soldiers' leaves be at least as long as their most recent deployment. The measure would not explicitly set a timetable for withdrawal, but it would have a similar effect.

"It is another way to get at the issue," Manley said.

In July, Webb's measure won 56 votes, seven of them from Republicans.

The White House has said Bush would veto a bill that included Webb's language.

In the end, an administration official said, the White House is confident that war critics remain far short of the 67 votes they would need to overcome a veto -- and thus unable to tie Bush's hands between now and the end of his term in January 2009.

"There's no indication that President Bush is going to change course in any significant way," said Ross, the former Middle East negotiator and author of a new book, "Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World."

"But we should be negotiating a timetable with the Iraqis. We should be organizing a national reconciliation conference. We should be dealing with the neighbors more seriously," said Ross.

"We still need to answer the question of how we marry our security strategy to a political strategy. It would be nice if this debate in Congress could do that, but it's not very likely."

Bush Fights Back on Iraq Debate

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — President Bush, appearing confident about sustaining support for his Iraq strategy, met at the Pentagon on Friday with the uniformed leaders of the nation’s armed services and then pointedly accused the war’s opponents of politicizing the debate over what to do next.

“The stakes in Iraq are too high and the consequences too grave for our security here at home to allow politics to harm the mission of our men and women in uniform,” Mr. Bush said in a statement after his meeting with the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines in a briefing room known as the Tank.

The meeting, which lasted an hour and a half, was among the president’s last Iraq strategy sessions before he leaves for Australia to meet with leaders of Asian and Pacific nations. It came on the eve of a string of reports and hearings that, starting next week, could determine the course of the remaining 16 months of Mr. Bush’s presidency.

Beginning on Tuesday, when Congress returns from its August recess, lawmakers are prepared to debate what to do in Iraq in daily hearings that will culminate on Sept. 10 and Sept. 11 with appearances by the ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, and the military commander there, Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Congress has mandated a progress report from the White House before Sept. 15, and Mr. Bush chided lawmakers for calling for a change in policy before hearing the views of the two men who are, as administration officials repeatedly point out, “on the ground in Iraq.”

“Congress asked for this assessment,” Mr. Bush said in the statement, “and members of Congress should withhold judgment until they have heard it.”

That has not stopped Mr. Bush from making an impassioned defense of the increase in American troops that he ordered in January, making the judgment that the new strategy was working and deserved a chance to continue doing so. In recent speeches, Mr. Bush has highlighted what he and others have called an improvement in security in Iraq and signs of political compromise that have so far been absent among Iraq’s political leaders.

Other reports — including a National Intelligence Estimate released last week, an early draft of a Government Accountability Office study, and a grim assessment of the Iraqi national police by a commission established by Congress — have tempered some of Mr. Bush’s claims, setting the stage for a furious debate with lawmakers in September.

“What we’re hearing is a pretty consistent message of failure on the political front in Iraq,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat, who visited Iraq in August.

In a telephone interview from Iowa on Friday, where he was campaigning for Senator Barack Obama, Mr. Durbin said the White House had distorted remarks made upon his return in which he noted an improvement in security following the increase in American troops to more than 160,000.

On Friday, Mr. Durbin expressed hope that more Republicans would join in forcing the president to begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq.

The cacophony of reports has done little to unify lawmakers, giving each side of the debate evidence to support their arguments. “All these reports will almost cancel each other out,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former Reagan administration defense official, who published a recommendation for a withdrawal for the Center for American Progress.

An administration official said Mr. Bush would present his Congressionally mandated report only after Mr. Crocker and General Petraeus appeared on Capitol Hill. All indications, however, suggest that the president has settled on maintaining a sizable commitment of American forces in Iraq well into next year, with only a gradual reduction of troops from the current levels.

At the Pentagon, officials said Mr. Bush’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Gen. George W. Casey Jr. of the Army, Adm. Michael G. Mullen of the Navy, Gen. T. Michael Moseley of the Air Force, and Gen. James T. Conway of the Marine Corps — was part of a process to air a variety of views, including those favoring a faster or deeper reduction than the commanders in the field think is appropriate.

Vice President Dick Cheney joined the meeting on Friday, as did Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman. General Pace and Mr. Gates returned to the White House with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for further talks, officials said, declining to discuss the substance of the meetings.

All the chiefs have expressed concerns about the strains that repeated and extended deployments have placed on the military, though they have not publicly made clear whether they would recommend a significant reduction as a result.

A senior Pentagon official said after the meeting, “Secretary Gates wanted the joint chiefs to have an opportunity to present the president with their assessments of the surge and the impact it is having on our forces, and that’s what happened today.”

General Casey and General Pace are said by several Defense Department officials to be considering recommending steep reductions in troops by the end of 2008, perhaps to half of the 20 combat brigades now in Iraq.

“Our force is stretched and out of balance,” General Casey said Thursday at a ceremony. “The tempo of our deployments are not sustainable, our equipment usage is five times the normal rate and continuously operating in harsh environments.”

Pentagon officials have said publicly that the goal of Mr. Bush’s meetings on Iraq strategy was not necessarily to produce a consensus among Mr. Bush’s military advisers, an unusual depiction of a process in which disagreements are normally shielded from public view.

Rather, the officials said, the goal was to ensure that Mr. Bush was hearing a diversity of views. It may become difficult, however, for the White House to avoid acknowledging that there are growing differences between officers in Washington and in Iraq.

The administration has made an aggressive effort to hold on to Republicans who returned to their constituencies this month at a time of rising antiwar sentiment. The White House scheduled conference calls for lawmakers with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Aug. 14 and with Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman this past Tuesday.

Democrats balked at participating in the briefing with Mr. Edelman, who in July caused a furor when he rebuffed a request from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to see Pentagon contingency plans for withdrawing from Iraq by accusing her of assisting enemy propaganda.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, said the Democrats had asked for Mr. Gates to brief them instead, but were refused.

“Why in the world would any United States senator want to get a briefing from Eric Edelman?” Mr. Manley said in an indication of the partisan tensions the question of Iraq has fueled.

General Petraeus told an Australian newspaper in an interview published Friday that he envisioned a gradual reduction in the roughly 30,000 additional American troops sent to Iraq this year.

He gave no timetable for that reduction, but most Army officials believe those troops will have to begin leaving by the spring unless the White House extends tours longer than 15 months.

The general’s remarks suggested that he would not provide the news that many Democrats in Congress would like to hear. “Obviously we have some months with the surge forces,” General Petraeus told The Sydney Morning Herald.

White House Wants Iraqi Leaders to Reach 'Political Accommodation'

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2007; A06

Having won a two-month reprieve from Congress to demonstrate progress in Iraq, the White House does not intend to give up on trying to forge a grand political bargain among Iraq's sectarian leaders, even though such a deal has proved elusive since the 2003 invasion, administration officials said.

The officials said they hope to develop the framework through which competing factions can sort out their differences and enact a national oil law, pass legislation aimed at bringing ex-Baathists into the government and demonstrate progress on other measures aimed at achieving national reconciliation.

But the officials privately acknowledge that the Iraqi government probably will not fulfill all of those tasks, which are among the political goals Congress is demanding before a Sept. 15 deadline. Asking the Iraqi parliament to move such legislation by September, one senior administration official said, is a bit like asking the U.S. Congress to handle abortion, gun control and other hot-button issues in a matter of months.

Instead, the senior official said, the White House wants to set Iraqi leaders on a path to "political accommodation on some of the major issues" and create "a very sound foundation to build upon." The official, who, along with several others in the administration, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss White House strategy more candidly. Many outside Iraq experts are deeply skeptical that the administration's initiative will bear fruit, given the divides in Iraqi society and suspicions between Shiites and Sunnis. After all, they point out, such a political bargain has essentially been the goal of U.S. efforts for more than four years, with little to show for it.

U.S. officials "have not recognized that the [Iraqi] government is not the determinative force in the country, but the government is made up of fractured interests, each of whom are pursuing their own objectives," said Mark L. Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, which has closely followed the politics in Iraq. "They haven't figured out a way to corner them, to bring them into a single negotiating framework."

The White House approach appears dictated in no small part by the necessity of satisfying key Republicans in Congress that the president's political strategy in Iraq has some chance of working.

With congressional Democrats unable to muster enough votes to force a withdrawal of U.S. troops, administration officials appear confident that they will have a free hand in Iraq for at least the next two months. They say they will use that time not just to focus on a larger political settlement inside Iraq but also to continue offensive military operations and to expand regional diplomacy -- while holding out the prospect of modest troop withdrawals sometime after September.

A key focus, they said, is the political situation in Iraq. To obtain more funding for the war last May, President Bush agreed to a series of benchmarks for the Iraqi government, such as parliament passing the oil law, holding provincial elections and protecting the rights of minorities. Even by his own administration's assessment, progress toward meeting these benchmarks has been mixed.

Thus, administration officials have taken in recent days to describing the benchmarks as imperfect indicators, saying a better gauge right now is political reconciliation in local areas. They are also playing up broader Iraqi and U.S. efforts at "top-down" reconciliation, such as strengthening the Presidency Council in Iraq, composed of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, Kurdish president Jalal Talabani and the two vice presidents, one a Shiite and the other a Sunni.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker told Congress on Thursday that the council is meeting weekly to deal with crises, and officials are hoping this will become a forum to develop consensus on broader political issues. Bush has taken to including the two vice presidents -- Adel Abdul Mahdi and Tariq al-Hashimi -- as well as Talabani in some of his regular video conferences with Maliki.

Crocker and other administration officials said that this new political approach would be accompanied by a new regional diplomatic initiative, which will include trips to the region by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and possibly a second regional conference that could also include key players such as Syria and Iran.

But Democrats seemed unimpressed. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Crocker that he sees "no prospect of building that trust or capacity" from the government in the next several years and that the president's policy is based on a "flawed premise."

"Iraq cannot be governed from the center, absent a dictator or indefinite occupation," Biden said. "I believe we should promote a political settlement that allows the warring factions breathing room in their own regions."

Iraq security steps lagging, report says

Its military can't build a supply network and militias pose obstacles, a joint panel finds.
By Ned Parker
Times Staff Writer

July 20, 2007

BAGHDAD — A committee directed by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and President Bush to accelerate the transfer of security responsibility to Iraq's army and police has warned that Iraq is lagging in a number of categories.

The quarterly report, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, says the Finance Ministry is blocking the Iraqi military from spending $660 million to build a logistical network; that militias are an obstacle to handing over to Iraqis responsibility for security in three mainly Shiite Muslim provinces; and that competition among rival security organizations has prevented the country from settling on a national security structure.

"I agree it is mixed results," said Iraqi national security advisor Mowaffak Rubaie. "We are behind schedule, but we made good progress."

A foreign advisor to the Iraqi government agreed that progress was being made.

Iraqi forces are now responsible for security in seven out of 18 provinces.

The findings by Iraqi, U.S. Embassy and U.S. military officials were the latest report card on Iraq's progress.

The report follows an assessment by the Bush administration last week of Iraq's steps toward healing sectarian and ethnic rifts.

That survey of 18 "benchmarks" found Iraq lagging on passing major legislation and described the country's security forces as battling sectarian and militia influences.

The reports come as Congress has been heatedly debating the future U.S. role in Iraq.

The second quarterly report since Bush and Maliki launched the review at a summit in November rates the training and equipping of the security ministries; their ability to achieve self-reliance; the development of Iraq's intelligence apparatus and national security structure; the readiness of provinces to be controlled by Iraqi security forces; and the ability of the army to assume control.

The report also evaluates security coordination and Iraq's counter-terrorism units.

The categories are color-coded red for off schedule/requires attention; amber for proceeding adequately and green for on schedule.

No category is deemed completely on schedule. Only the training and equipping of the Defense Ministry is judged close to running on time, with a combined green and amber rating.

The Iraqi army's ability to assume operational control and Iraq's counter-terrorism forces both received amber ratings.

The report says Shiite militias are a major obstacle to handing over security in the mid-Euphrates provinces of Karbala, Babil and Wasit.

Corruption and militia infiltration of security personnel ranks pose another hurdle, it says.

The report also points up divisions over who should control Iraq's intelligence apparatus.

One piece of legislation written with American backing would give control to Rubaie; another would give it to Sherwan Waili, the minister of state for national security.

Waili's critics accuse him of following a hard-line Shiite nationalist agenda.

"It's a political issue of the highest order. That's not going to be resolved tomorrow. It's waiting on a political solution in the parliament," a foreign advisor to the Iraqi government said.

Iraq's chain of command is also unclear, and the report calls for Waili's responsibilities to be better defined.

Waili has a nationwide network of agents involved in arrests and intelligence-gathering, but he is doing so without any charter.

"It's a very sensitive and important topic. I don't think it's a gargantuan death squad or cleansing squad, but they are definitely some people who are operating in that gray area between intelligence and policing and doing things without full … legal sanctions," the advisor said.

The report also urges that the powers of officials who deal with military affairs in Maliki's office be clarified. They have issued orders to troops and some are pushing to take charge of military and police operations.

The advisor warned that that would rob the Defense and Interior ministries of their functions.

The survey also points up the Finance Ministry's refusal to authorize the Defense Ministry to spend $660 million to build its own supply network for food, water, maintenance and waste removal, which it says has slowed down the handoff effort by six to nine months.

Meanwhile, five Americans and three British troops were killed in action, their military commands reported Thursday.

The U.S. command said that four soldiers and their interpreter died Wednesday in a roadside bombing in east Baghdad, and that a fifth soldier was killed Thursday by gunfire southwest of the city.

The deaths raised the number of U.S. military fatalities in the Iraq theater since March 2003 to 3,628, according to the website icasualties.org which tracks deaths and injuries in the conflict.

The three British troops were killed Thursday in a mortar attack on their base in the southern city of Basra, the British Defense Ministry said. That brought the number of British troops killed in Iraq to 162.

In Baghdad, the main bloc of Sunni Arab lawmakers returned to parliament Thursday, ending a five-week boycott and vowing to work with their Shiite counterparts to save the country from chaos.

Iraq's legislature has been deadlocked for weeks despite U.S. pressure to meet the 18 benchmarks, which include passage of laws on sharing oil revenue and the rehabilitation of employees purged from government because they were members of the late dictator Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

It was unclear whether the Sunnis' return would lead to a quick push to pass the measures before a recess in August, or whether the parliament would delay its break to give U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, legislative accomplishments to cite when delivering their September assessment of military operations to Congress.

The Iraqi Accordance Front's 44 lawmakers returned after striking a deal under which parliament Speaker Mahmoud Mashadani, a Sunni, could retain his post.

The speaker was suspended last month after one of his bodyguards hit a Shiite member of parliament.

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ned.parker@latimes.com

Times staff writers Saif Rasheed and Zeena Kareem contributed to this report.