Presidential Campaigns Will Converge at Petraeus Hearings

WASHINGTON — In a unique moment in the history of American presidential elections, the prime candidates Tuesday will debate the controversial Iraq war with its principal strategist.

The reason the contenders are veering off the campaign trail to show up for their day jobs is that they serve on Senate committees where Army Gen. David Petraeus is presenting what promises to be the most comprehensive — and politically charged — overview of the war before the August political conventions.

Two of them — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which will host Petraeus in the morning. The third, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Petraeus will testify Tuesday afternoon.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker will appear with Petraeus at both hearings.

"It will be high theater," said Cal Jillson, a professor of political science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "The country's attention will be focused."

The panel chairmen, both Democrats, have pledged to keep presidential politics out of the committee chambers.

"The last thing we should be doing is viewing this through a political prism," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, D-Del., himself a former presidential hopeful, told reporters Friday.

Similarly, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., said he would not exercise the prerogative of the gavel to allow Clinton to address the committee before the more senior McCain, who is the panel's ranking Republican.

Under the custom that generally guides committee proceedings, Clinton would be the 19th speaker to be heard on the 25-member panel. McCain would be the second.

Levin was asked whether he might juggle those slots.

"Of course not," Levin shot back. "The American people want a discussion of policy. ... They do not want to partisanize this issue. These are matters of life and death, and we have a responsibility to deal with them that way."

For the candidates, though, Tuesday's hearings offer something rare: a chance to look genuinely presidential. More specifically, it gives each a chance to look like a capable commander-in-chief, questioning and perhaps challenging a four-star general and the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq.

It's also the chance for each candidate to showcase his or her approach to the war, which one of them will inherit come January. To do so, each must first assess a war that has taken the lives of 4,000 U.S. troops and left 30,000 wounded.

"This is an opportunity for the witnesses to offer concrete answers to questions that the members of the Armed Services Committee have a right to ask," said McCain's spokeswoman, Melissa Shuffield. "Any time there's a Senate hearing, it's important for members to have the opportunity to ask the witnesses questions that could solicit information that would be important to all Americans."

At issue Tuesday will be the state of the troop escalation, or surge, that President Bush ordered a year ago and that dramatically reduced bloodshed in Iraq until recently.

There are now 158,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, down from a peak of roughly 165,000 over much of the past year. Petraeus is expected to tell the committees that troop strength will fall to the pre-surge level of about 140,000 by mid-summer, and will hold there for the foreseeable future.

McCain has said the surge is working and that, as president, he would maintain a long-term U.S. troop presence with a robust combat mission aimed at routing terror and insurgent groups.

Democrats, though, have cast the surge as a failure.

The purpose of reducing violence, they point out, was to give Iraqis the breathing room needed for political reconciliation, and little of that has occurred.

Rival Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds remain at odds. When Iraq's parliament convened an emergency session March 28 to discuss a fresh outbreak of fighting in the south, just 54 of the country's 275 lawmakers showed up.

A national law determining how critical oil revenues will be shared has yet to be agreed upon. Laws governing elections slated for Oct. 1 haven't been passed.

"The military did their job. The violence has come down. But the Iraqis have not come together," said Biden. "This is kind of like 'Groundhog Day.' We're right back to where we started before the surge — 140,000 or plus troops in Iraq, with no end in sight."

A similar assessment is expected Monday from the same experts who advised the original Iraq Study Group, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

It said experts assembled by the U.S. Institute for Peace concluded in a new report that political fragmentation in Iraq is "so pronounced" that the United States is no closer to being able to leave Iraq than it was a year ago.

Obama vowed early in his campaign to begin bringing Americans home from Iraq as soon as he takes office and to have most combat forces home within 16 months. In recent weeks, though, aides have cautiously backed away from that time frame, saying that as president, Obama would listen to the advice of his commanders on the ground — generals like Petraeus.

Clinton has pledged that her first order of business as commander-in-chief would be to begin reducing U.S. troop levels in Iraq within 60 days of taking office, and continuing to pace drawdowns according to conditions on the ground.