What did we learn from the Iraq hearings?

The Associated Press

Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker went Tuesday to Capitol Hill.

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What did we learn from the Iraq hearings?

Security is getting better, and Iraq's own forces are becoming more able, Gen. David Petraeus said during Congressional hearings Tuesday. But he also ticked off a list of reasons for worry, including the threat of a resurgence of Sunni or Shiite extremist violence. And he said the U.S. should pause its drawdown of surge troops in July -- resuming only when the security situation warrants. What should the U.S. do next?

Ben likes: Beyond benchmarks

Rich Lowry/National Review Online

in the age of instant communication, it takes three months or more for developments in Iraq to have any impact on the U.S. political debate. The war is like a distant star whose light we only see well after the fact. Already, there has been a shifting of goal posts. Zakaria warned that some of the new laws passed only “after months of intense wrangling.” Horrors! What was so remarkable about the February 13 passage of a package including a budget, a provincial-powers law, and an amnesty provision wasn’t the intensity of the wrangling but the cross-ethnic and -sectarian logrolling that produced a grand compromise unlocking the stuck wheels of the Iraqi parliament. Logrolling, alas, is not one of the benchmarks. The last time Gen. David Petraeus came to Washington, he heralded tentative but widely discounted security gains. Now he brings news of tentative but widely discounted political progress. We’ll know he’s had an impact when the benchmarks fade away from antiwar discou

Joel likes: The surge is working

Matthew Yglesias/The American Prospect

General David Petraeus' testimony Tuesday and Wednesday of this week will be another chapter in U.S. foreign policy's long-running "is the surge working?" debate. The General and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will offer up some good news counterpoints to the not-so-good news out of Basra from the last weekend of March. But in the ways that matter, there's no need to debate in the present tense -- the surge isn't working, it's already worked, and the question is what the Democrats plan to do about it.

To evaluate the surge, you have to consider its goals. Peter Feaver, who spent years working on the National Security Council on Iraq issues as a specialist on domestic public opinion, has explained in Commentary the administration's desire "to develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush's successor." Or as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden less charitably put it there's no plan at all other than "to muddle through and hand the problem off to his successor."