Petraeus and Crocker face a tougher Senate crowd

Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker faced tough questions during their Tuesday Senate briefings on the situation in Iraq.

While Monday’s House hearing largely featured Republicans intent on backing the White House and linking Democrats to a MoveOn.org ad that referred to Petraeus as “General Betray Us,” two influential Senate Republicans took the administration’s Iraq strategy to task Tuesday.

{mosads}“One can debate, as many will do this week, whether progress in Iraq has been sufficient to justify continuing American sacrifices,” said Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking member of the Committee on Foreign Relations. “But the greatest risk for United States policy is not that we are incapable of making progress but that this progress may be largely beside the point, given the divisions that now afflict Iraqi society.”

While Lugar said that “some type of success in Iraq is possible,” he cautioned that the margins for achieving it are “extraordinarily narrow.”

The Indiana senator criticized the administration and said it must develop a long-term plan instead of going from one “milestone” to the next.

“At this stage of the conflict, with our military strained by Iraq deployments, our global advantages being diminished by the weight of our burden in Iraq, it is not enough for the administration to counsel patience until the next milestone or the next report,” he said. “We need to see a strategy for how our troops and other resources in Iraq might be employed to fundamentally change the equation.”

Lugar also criticized the White House for not using diplomacy to try to help fix the problems in Iraq.

“The pace and intensity of American regional diplomacy to Iraq has failed to match the urgency and magnitude of the problem,” Lugar said.

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a longtime critic of the White House’s Iraq policy, criticized the administration and indicated that the troop surge of earlier this year had failed to achieve its stated goal of facilitating political reconciliation in Iraq.

His question caused Crocker to concede that the Iraqi government, “in many respects, is dysfunctional.”