Agence France-Presse,
Lawmakers girded for a week of political clashes as the US war commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, prepares to plead Monday for more time to pacify the fractured nation.
On the eve of a hotly anticipated appearance in Congress by the general and the US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, the Republican party accused Democrats of a “desperate new PR strategy to impugn Petraeus.”
Petraeus faces a hostile barrage from Democrats over if and when troops can come home from a four-year war that has killed more than 3,700 US soldiers, tens of thousands of Iraqis and cost half a trillion dollars.
The top US commander will argue that President George W. Bush's contentious strategy announced in January of surging 28,500 extra troops into Iraq has slashed sectarian violence and should be extended.
“I expect him to say that. And I really respect him. And I think he's dead, flat wrong,” Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, a contender in the 2008 White House race, told NBC television.
Bush, according to Biden, “is putting American forces in the middle of a civil war to maintain the status quo. That is unconscionable, and he's wrong.”
Petraeus also was expected to accept gradual cuts in the 168,000 US troops in Iraq from early next year — although the reductions he has in mind are unlikely to satisfy anti-war Democrats.
“My sense is that we have achieved tactical momentum and wrested the initiative from our enemies in a number of areas of Iraq,” Petraeus wrote in a weekend letter to US forces, while expressing disappointment at the pace of political reconciliation in Baghdad.
Joined by Crocker, Petraeus was to swap Baghdad's stifling heat for cool congressional committee rooms Monday and Tuesday, to complement a report on the war that Bush must deliver to US lawmakers by September 15.
They are expected to say the current troop “surge” is making Iraq safer.
Bush has repeatedly hinted that they make their cases in congressional hearings, he may be able to discuss bringing some troops home.
Bush plans a national address this week, to “lay out a vision for future involvement in Iraq” that the public “and their elected leaders of both parties can support.”
Bush on Saturday seized on a new video by elusive Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden to buttress his case that the United States must show resolve in Iraq, which he said was “a part of this war against extremists.”
Monday is billed as the most high-profile appearance on Capitol Hill by a US commander since General William Westmoreland addressed both houses of Congress in 1967 on the state of the war in Vietnam — whose shadow looms large over today's debate on future strategy in Iraq.
Calls to stay the course in Iraq are “the same kind of thinking, actually, that got us mired in Vietnam,” Democratic Senator John Kerry said on ABC television, calling the Iraq mission “disastrous.”
But Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh, speaking in Baghdad, urged against a US withdrawal because the Iraqi government needs help to “prevent the return of the terrorists.”
US lawmakers from both parties condemned stuck to their battle lines as they took to the airwaves Sunday.
Republican White House runner John McCain said he was “guardedly optimistic” that if the surge continues, “you could see a messy but favorable outcome.”
Warning of the regional consequences of failure in Iraq, Senator McCain said: “I am convinced that it will be chaos, genocide, and we'll be back with greater sacrifice.”
With the political heat rising ahead of national elections next year, there are reports of dissent even among top military commanders over the surge policy.
Petraeus has clashed bitterly with his military superior Admiral William Fallon, who believes the tactic is using up valuable troops needed elsewhere across the Middle East, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
