War Chiefs Tell Congress There is Still No End in Sight to Us Military Presence in Iraq

The top advisers to the White House on its war strategy yesterday conceded there was no end in sight to America's military commitment to Iraq, and no sign of political reconciliation in Baghdad before President Bush left office.

The bleak assessments were extracted from the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, during two days of testimony to Congress in which they have stoutly defended the progress of the war in Iraq.

Asked whether he could foresee a day when all US forces would be withdrawn from Iraq, Gen Petraeus said: "I would be doing a disservice to our soldiers if I tried to lay out a specific timeline at this point that took us all the way out."

It was an uncanny echo of Mr Crocker's response moments earlier when asked if he thought the government in Baghdad would achieve political reconciliation before Mr Bush left office in January 2009. "I could not put a timeline on it or a target date," Mr Crocker said. Asked whether there could be a peace without reconciliation, he said: "No."

Yesterday's angry and often emotional session of the senate foreign relations committee offered the most rigorous scrutiny so far of Gen Petraeus's and Mr Crocker's claims of progress in Iraq.

The first chinks in Gen Petraeus's amour appeared with a seemingly innocent question: Can a Sunni Arab travel safely to a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad without getting kidnapped or killed?

Gen Petraeus, who brought poster-sized charts of casualty figures to the Senate to make his case for maintaining US military presence in Iraq, could not hazard a clear answer. He said: "It depends on the neighborhood frankly. Travel of Sunni Arabs to a number of Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad is still hazardous." But he did not actually dare to offer an assurance that it would ever be possible for a Sunni Iraqi to venture outside his own enclave.

The tone of yesterday's session was underlined by the sixth anniversary of 9/11. It opened with a moment of silence for the victims, and a number of senators accused the Bush administration of compromising the hunt for Osama bin Laden by opening a new front on the war on terror in Iraq. But on a day when comparisons between the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed unavoidable, Mr Crocker refused to be drawn. Although he was US ambassador to Pakistan before his transfer to Iraq, he said he could not possibly say whether it was more important to lead the fight for al-Qaida in Afghanistan or Iraq.

In their testimony to Congress on Monday, Gen Petraeus said he recommended the US begin drawing down its forces in Iraq later this month, which will result in a force strength of 130,000 by next July - about the same number of troops as there were at the start of this year.

President Bush is to give his report on the progress of the war this week in a televised address, and if Gen Petraeus and Mr Crocker's testimony is any indication, it will dwell heavily on the improved security in Anbar province, and the dangers of a "proxy war" with Iran.

But it is unclear whether that will satisfy a significant portion of the American public that is tired with the war. As Gen Petraeus began his testimony yesterday, a white-haired man in a summer suit rose to his feet and shouted: "Hundreds and thousands of people dead, isn't that enough for your blood thirst?"

Although Congress has yet to unite around a plan that would force the White House to begin making plans for an exit from Iraq, senators yesterday warned Mr Bush they would not accept his revised definition of success in Iraq. In the face of sectarian war, the gains in Anbar were beside the point. "If every single jihadi in the world was killed tomorrow we still have a major war on our hands," Joseph Biden, the chairman of the senate foreign relations committee, said.

Other senators accused Mr Bush of running the war without a clear strategy for the region. "We need to see a strategy for how our troops and other resources in Iraq might be employed to fundamentally change the equation," said Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the senate committee.