That was the message to emerge from testimony by the ambassador and the general at yesterday's joint session of the Armed Services/Foreign Affairs committees. They didn't put it quite as bluntly as Pundita, but there were seconds during their testimony when they came close to a stark assessment of the scope of the mess they inherited.
For Pundita, there were two great moments in the six hours of the session -- much of that time given to speeches by committee members. The first came when General Petraeus broke from his very careful demeanor and asked sarcastically, "What are you going to do with an army of 11,000 Sunni generals?"
At that moment it became painfully clear that for all the reports their aides digest for them, many members of Congress still don't understand much about what's been going on in Iraq.
David Petraeus made the comment in the course of defending the initial order to de-Baathify the Iraqi army. He was trying to convey the scope of problems with the old Iraqi army and why it had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Pundita didn't know either that there were 11,000 generals in Saddam's army, and along with several congressionals I had been harshly critical of de-Baathification. Petraeus's observation underscored that little is cut and dried when it comes to analyzing the situation in Iraq as we found it, and as it changed since 2003.
The second moment came when Ambassador Ryan Crocker said that Iraqi provincial governments had discovered the Supplemental. The remark would have been funny if not for the shattering implications. We always knew in a vague way that things were really bad under Saddam Hussein's regime. But what was never clear, until Crocker's testimony, is that under Saddam there were no absolutely no political and economic mechanisms for connecting the provinces with the central government in Baghdad -- none. The provincial governments didn't even have a budget.
Iraq as we found it was never actually a nation by any modern concept of nationhood; it was a collection of tribes that depended on patronage from Saddam Hussein. Crocker brought home the point by saying that Iraq is "undergoing a revolution, not just regime change" and that the country has to be rebuilt almost from scratch.
The revolution is moving forward now that some security has been restored, and further progress is dependent on security holding and building. "We're seeing the center and provinces begin to knit together on a political and economic basis." And at the same time, Crocker explained, Iraqis are now ready to tackle the question of federalism and realizing that central government is not a panacea.
Again and again, Crocker made the point that neither the Iraqis nor the Americans had understood the complexity of the technical and political problems reflected in the benchmarks set by Congress.
He also made the point that while key benchmarks for Iraq have not been made into legislation they have been implemented on the ground. He amplified on the point during his interview with Bret Hume on Fox news Monday night, and gave a couple examples:
> The central government is getting resources to the provinces, even without revenue distribution legislation.
> Even without legislation overturning de-Baathification, the central government is accommodating the return of ex-Baathists to government jobs.
Did the congressionals gathered to hear testimony really give a fig about all the complexities? I think when they have time to chew it over, they will confront the subtext to the wealth of detail provided by Petraeus and Crocker. The subtext goes like this:
Once upon a time the United States toppled a regime in Iraq and found a real big mess there. Then the United States made every mistake in the book and some that were never in the book. The mess got bigger and bigger until al Qaeda scored a huge victory by bombing the Golden Dome Mosque, which set off civil war.
Then Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus were sent in with a surge of troops in an effort to do something. Then they were stopped even though they were making progress because Congress was too scared to explain to their constituents that once you make a big mess, it takes time to work your way out of it. And if you don't want that to be the legacy for the US adventure in Iraq, find a way to explain the complexities to those who put you in office.
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