Levin: ‘Open-Ended Troop Pause Just Another Page in a War Plan With No Strategy’

Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, opened the Petraeus hearing by implicitly dismissing the surge in a strategic sense: “The new increase in violence raises questions about the military success of the surge.” He also telegraphed a Democratic goal for this hearing: blocking what Levin called an “open-ended troop pause.”

Interesting. Petraeus wants to hold the line on troop reductions. But Levin said the U.S.’s “open-ended commitment” to Iraq encourages “dependency,” and told a story about an Iraqi official telling a U.S. commander on a reconstruction project, “As long as you are willing to pay for the cleanup, why should we do it?” An “open-ended troop pause” would just be more of the same, Levin said: “just another page in a war plan with no strategy.”

We’ll see how Petraeus parries that.