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Senate OKs Petraeus to lead forces in Iraq

The Senate voted Friday to promote Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus to four-star rank and to send him to Iraq as the new commander of U.S. troops there.

Although his nomination was approved on an 81-0 vote, lawmakers do not expect this to be an easy job for Petraeus.

Petraeus “has testified that he believes that the new military strategy for Iraq will work and that the U.S. military forces under his command will be able to successfully accomplish their mission,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman. “We would not want a commander who did not believe in his mission and the troops. I pray he is correct.”

Levin said he is “deeply concerned” about the new Iraq strategy that will send in 21,500 additional troops, all but 4,000 of them destined for Baghdad. The intent is to have them try to deal with the sectarian violence that continues to rage and provide time for Iraqi police and military forces to gain the upper hand and take primary responsibility for security in the capital, eventually allowing the U.S. to begin a phased withdrawal.

But Levin said the strategy “is based on the wrong assumption that there is a military solution to a sectarian war.”

Not only Democrats are worried. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the former armed services committee chairman, said he was concerned by the joint command structure Petraeus faces, in which U.S. and Iraqi commanders will share responsibility for picking missions and assigning troops.

“On the battlefield, decisions must be made in a matter of seconds, from the platoon level often right up the chain of command,” Warner said. “We cannot have finger-pointing. We cannot have a mission where the Iraqi lieutenant says we should go left and the American embedded or officer or whatever command [is] in that situation says go right. It is going to be extremely complex.”

Warner is among the senators pushing the administration to try to carry out the Iraq operation with fewer troops in Baghdad and more in Anbar province.

“I am very concerned about the American GI being thrust in the middle of the violence that really has root causes that go back 1,000 years,” Warner said.