A LITTLE more than a year ago, Gen. David Petraeus, the supreme US commander in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad, “There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq, to the insurgency in Iraq.” In saying this, the general stressed that talks aimed at reconciliation between Iraq's warring factions were the true key to lasting peace in that country. President Bush's so-called surge might offer short-term stability, but only a political solution would make that stability sustainable. This week, with the president's surge winding down, Gen. Petraeus appeared before Congress to tell lawmakers that the security gains made in Iraq are “fragile and reversible,” and to recommend pausing a further reduction of troops this coming July, when US forces in Iraq return to pre-surge levels. Those in Congress who want to bring American troops home sooner, rather than later, listened to the general and realized that, despite the need for a political solution in Baghdad, there was none to be had in Washington. At least not for this Congress, under this president. Legislators who wish to impose their will on the White House continue to lack the votes to do so in the face of the executive's veto power. Meanwhile, the next president - whomever that might be - was on hand to hear what the general and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had to say. In hearings by two Senate panels, Sens. Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama were there to ask questions and advance their views on Iraq. We should listen carefully to what they each had to say and what they say in the coming weeks and months, because this week it became a near certainty that one of them will inherit the current president's war with troop levels approximately the same as they were at the start of last year. During the course of the campaign thus far, the spectrum has ranged roughly from Sen. Obama, who favors a timetable for steady troop withdrawals, to Sen. McCain, who generally wants to stick with the current Iraq strategy. In between is Sen. Clinton, who has been critical of the war's conduct and who has advocated withdrawing US troops but who has given herself political breathing room on the specifics of such a withdrawal. It was Obama who made headlines in this week's testimony, by noting that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki's government has normalized relations with its neighbor Iran, and by advocating that the US should be talking to the government in Tehran, too. But McCain made a remark, less reported on, in his questioning of Petraeus that could also prove to have implications for the fall presidential campaign. McCain appeared to persist in his repeated confusion of Al-Qaeda in Iraq - a Sunni group - with Shiites, in asking whether they were “an obscure sect of the Shiites,” before adding, “or the Sunnis, or anybody else.” Could this signal an ongoing effort on McCain's part to conflate the threats of Al-Qaeda and Iran in voters' minds? Meanwhile, it was a senator who is not running for president, Barbara Boxer of California, who provided a preview of what is likely to be the Democrats' strategy for the fall campaign, when she asked, amid rising oil prices and a faltering US economy, why Petraeus would object to asking Iraq “to pay for that entire program, given all we are giving them in blood and everything else.” “It's a fair question,” was the general's response. It's a question that the Democrats - powerless for now to change the course of the war - are likely to keep asking as they seek to make their own conflation between two of the voters' greatest concerns: the economy and Iraq. __
