I wondered in my first post how Petraeus would present the recent upturn in violence. The answer: exactly as he did in September.
There has been “significant but uneven progress” in security since his last testimony six months ago, Petraeus said. Apropos of my first benchmark, Petraeus appears to be presenting an apples-to-apples comparison from his metrics last September: civilian casualties, ethno-sectarian deaths and so forth. (Of course, I don’t yet have the data myself, so that’s a tentative assessment.) But he said, and his charts documented, that violence over the last six months has declined “to levels not seen since early 2005,” despite what he acknowledged was a recent spike. Civilian deaths? Down to “a level not seen since the Samarra mosque bombing” in 2006. Similarly, ethno-sectarian violence remains down since that period, despite his acknowledgment that some of that is due to “the sectarian hardening of certain neighborhoods.” He means “ethnic cleansing.”
Petraeus also asked for more money for the 91,000 mostly-Sunni militiamen on the U.S. payroll known as the Sons of Iraq. Despite what many think — about how many of those Sunnis openly say they intend to expel the “Iranian occupiers,” meaning Iraqi Shiites — Petraeus said that the “greatest long-term threat to the security of Iraq” came not from the U.S.-backed Sunni militiamen but from the allegedly-Iranian-backed “Special Groups” of Sadr-aligned Shiite militiamen. (Interestingly, he credited Sadr with stopping the Basra conflagration.) Bombs over Tehran! Admiral Fallon, we hardly knew ye.
