Candidates Will Vie to Prove Preparedness at Petraeus Hearing

The three remaining senators in the race for the White House will attempt to convince Americans they would make a better commander in chief tomorrow when the most senior general in Iraq, David Petraeus, reports to Congress on the status of the war.

John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all serve on the Senate committees that will hear testimony from Petraeus and the US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and are expected to use the hearings to demonstrate their credentials on national security and the future of the war.

Petraeus has indicated he will tell Congress he wants to freeze further withdrawals from Iraq, keeping in place two of the five brigades of additional troops deployed during last year's troops surge.

The recommendation, which George Bush is expected to endorse on Thursday in a speech to mark the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, will effectively put the war on hold for the next 10 months.

That makes it virtually certain some 140,000 US troops will remain in Iraq when the next president takes office next January.Petraeus' testimony to Congress has been forecast well in advance, and it is the participation of the three presidential hopefuls that has injected an element of drama into the event, and will put the Iraq war back at the forefront of the election campaign.

McCain will use the moment to argue that the war is working, while Clinton and Obama will demand to know why the US is still in Iraq five years after the invasion.

"This is sort of a dress rehearsal for who is best prepared to be commander in chief, who has the best understanding of what has happened, what was wrong in Iraq and how to fix it," said Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, who sits on the armed services committee with McCain and Clinton.

Obama sits on the foreign relations committee which will hear from Petraeus and Crocker tomorrow afternoon.

McCain, who said in January he could see US troops remaining in Iraq for the next 100 years, got off to an early start. In a speech to war veterans in Missouri today he gave a stark warning of the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq.

"Al-Qaida in Iraq will proclaim victory and increase its efforts to provoke sectarian tensions in Iraq into a full scale civil war that could descend into genocide and destabilize the Middle East," he said.

"America's failure in Iraq would, almost certainly, require us to return to Iraq or draw us into a wider and far costlier war."

By virtue of being the senior Republican on the armed services committee, McCain will be among the first to question Petraeus and Crocker. His supporters say he will also try to score points against Clinton for her criticism of Petraeus last September.

Clinton told him his insistence the surge was working required the "willing suspension of disbelief" of the committee members.

The run-up to the general's appearance has revealed an emerging consensus in Congress, an overextended military and a war-weary public that it is time to begin drawing down troops in Iraq.

In a preparatory hearing of the Senate's foreign relations committee last week not a single Republican senator repeated the White House mantra of "staying the course" in Iraq.

"There is no political will to sustain this current national security strategy for Iraq. It is over," Barry McCaffrey, a retired general, said today.

Yesterday, General Richard Cody, the army's vice chief of staff, told Congress: "The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies."