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The Petraeus Report - Implications for the US

By Robin Niblett, Director of Chatham House

General Petraeus has given members of the US Congress a sober, but upbeat report on the impact of the 'surge' of additional US forces into Iraq. If the targeted approach against the Shiite and Sunni insurgents that he has espoused had been undertaken three years ago, the report would be of significant military and political impact. But it was not. Hubris and a succession of bad decisions by US leaders in Washington and in Baghdad from 2003-2006 has embedded a level of sectarian mistrust and empowered a murderous cycle of violence and ethnic cleansing whose impetus has now been slowed, but not stopped. The risk is that, when the surge eases, patterns of violence will rise again.

However widely shared this assessment might be across the United States, there will be little appetite among Democrats or rebellious Republicans to provoke a crisis with the President over his Iraq policy. Recently, President Bush deliberately associated the Iraq conflict with the US experience in Vietnam because he believes that the American public, however tired they are of the growing US body-count in Iraq, do not want to plunge the United States into another period of geopolitical and psychological defeat.

Presidential candidates from both parties are also well aware of the risk of forcing the President into a corner at a time when brave US soldiers are finally demonstrating a bitterly-earned period of relative success. Providing General Petraeus can offer a quick, if modest draw-down in current US force levels, and absent a new, prolonged spike in violence, Presidential candidates and members of Congress will prefer to focus on criticizing the failures of past decisions rather than take partial responsibility for the fall-out from a rapid troop drawn-down that will carry its own unpredictable dangers.

The risks for the future are that, first, the next US President will inherit an expensive stalemate in Iraq, in both financial and human terms; and, second, that US relations with Iran can only worsen through the transition from President Bush to his successor.

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