On Monday, General David Petraeus, the head of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, along with Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, testified in front of Congress to present a progress report of the war in Iraq. All the major news stations like Fox News and CNN were broadcasting live feeds of the six-hour Congressional hearing. The two were faced with a barrage of questions, so many that the hearing will continue for a second day, to find out the status of the War in Iraq.
In watching the few minutes of the hearing on Fox News, I could not believe how hard-hitting and almost cutthroat the questions were. It seemed almost as the members of the hearing were trying to catch Petraeus in some sort of a lie, and that they wanted him to fail.
One of the points that irritated me was when Gen. Patraeus was explaining the plan to withdraw five Army battalions and two Marine units by next summer, one of the members of the hearing claimed it was “too late” for action. Representative Ike Skelton, D-Mo., said “he’s almost certainly the right man for the job in Iraq, but he’s the right person three years too late and 250,000 troops short” (foxnews.com). No matter what anyone says, it is not good enough apparently. All summer long we’ve been hearing about how everyone wants the United States to pull out of Iraq as fast as possible. Now that a solid plan has been formulated and it is too late. It is not as easy as everyone thinks to pull our troops out of the region. We may not have approached the situation in the right way, but the fact of the matter is that we are there, and now it is the damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t mentality. If we pull out of the region now, we leave the region in shambles, even if we are partly to blame for it, the region is war-torn, and we’ll be looked at to help repair the area. If we stay, we face criticism from the nation complaining about how the war on terrorism is failing and how the war in Iraq was a failure. We cannot pull out of the area as quickly as everyone thinks. It takes more time and effort than people think. Patraeus comes up with a strategy to at least make an attempt to start removing troops from Iraq and bringing out soldiers home, and the idea is considered too late, and some members went as far as to claim they did not even believe the general, and that Patraeus is merely a voice of the White House. Frankly, if people do not like the effort that is trying to be made, they should stop complaining about it. I agree that the search for weapons of mass destruction was a failure, but Saddam Hussein did pose a threat to national security and needed to be removed from power. I’m not sure anyone else would have done a much better job given the situation that was presented to them. The group MoveOn.org who posted a full page article in The New York Times called General Patraeus “The General Who Betrayed Us”, but the fact of the matter is a plan is in motion to start bringing American soldiers home, and people need to realize that it will not happen overnight. Just like the old saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, the troops cannot be removed overnight, and people need to understand that we’re making an effort to bring them home, whether it may be “too late” or not, we are starting to remove troops from Iraq.
– Joe Monninger’s Journalism Class