Fruits of the surge

OPINION:

As it has become increasingly clear that the U.S. troop surge has dramatically reduced violence in Iraq, the argument against the U.S. troop presence has shifted. Since last summer, prominent critics of the war — including Democratic Sens. Robert Casey, Dick Durbin and Joe Biden have grudgingly acknowledged the military successes while complaining that the war is a failure because it hasn’t achieved political reform inside Iraq. We fully expect that when they testify on Capitol Hill today, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus will carefully and politely explain that this argument too is in error. Before the additional U.S. troops were deployed to Iraq starting more than a year ago, the country seemed to be headed toward all-out civil war and political progress was virtually nonexistent. In recent months, that has begun to change for the better.

“It may be that February 13, 2008 will be remembered as the day when Iraq’s political climate began to catch up with its improved security situation — or more to the point, when Iraqi leaders discovered the key to political compromise and reconciliation,” the nonpartisan Institute of Peace noted last month in a study. “That day, the Council of Representatives simultaneously passed a law setting forth the relationship between Baghdad and the provinces, an amnesty law and the 2008 national budget. Each piece of legislation is significant in its own right. Moreover, each legislative act reflects important compromises and concessions, revealing much about the political dynamics in Iraq.”

The institute’s study, “From Gridlock to Compromise: How Three Laws Could Begin to Transform Iraqi Politics” (www.usip.org), details how Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish factions managed to put aside their differences in order to move forward on laws to share oil revenues, to grant a measure of autonomy to provincial governments and to grant amnesty to persons charged with relatively minor crimes in order to bring about political reconciliation. To be certain, these changes are incomplete, and there is always the possibility that political upheaval could cause these compromise arrangements to unravel.

The question that members of Congress and the American people need to ask themselves is this: Based on the experience of the past year, when the U.S. military in Iraq was for the first time operating under a strategic doctrine that enabled it to protect the Iraqi people from terrorists and militias, are Iraqis more likely to be able to make the hard political compromises if the U.S. military remains engaged, or if it is precipitously withdrawn?

Philip Reeker, counselor to Mr. Crocker, puts it well: The U.S. troop surge, he told the National Conference of Editorial Writers last week, gave the Iraqi people a sense of normalcy that was lost as a result of the violence following the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006. That relative normalcy, after all, has helped make it possible for the Iraqis to go forward on the political front.