DRANT #249: LOBSTER LUNCH

I send this without comment.
The unspeakable speaks so eloquently that there is truly nothing to add.
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The New York Times
Hear a General, Hug a Sheik: Congress Does the Iraq Circuit
August 26, 2007

http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2007/08/26/world/middleeast/26visits.html&tntemail0=y

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAMIEN CAVE

WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 — On a Sunday morning in early August, just hours after Congress had recessed for the summer, Representative Jan Schakowsky and five of her colleagues boarded a military jet at Andrews Air Force Base. Three flights and a Black Hawk helicopter ride later, they were lunching on asparagus soup and lobster tortellini at the home of Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker in Baghdad.

“It was a lovely lunch, a nice-napkin lunch,” said Ms. Schakowsky, a liberal Democrat and ardent war critic from Chicago. But it was also, she said, a lunch with a message.

The featured guest was Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq. With an array of charts and maps behind him, he told the lawmakers President Bush’s troop buildup had produced “tactical momentum,” a phrase that he would use repeatedly in Congressional briefings and that lawmakers are now beginning to use as well.

The meal was just one stop in a jam-packed tour that included visits with Sunni and Shiite tribal leaders (“a sheik engagement,” the Pentagon itinerary said), a chat with the Kurdish deputy prime minister and the all-important photographs with hometown soldiers to show constituents at election time. Just another day in Baghdad in August, high season for Congressional travel to Iraq.

The trips, highly choreographed affairs known as codels, for Congressional delegations, are an annual rite of summer for lawmakers, but they have taken on fresh urgency. With Democrats running Congress and Mr. Bush’s troop increase due for an intense re-evaluation in September, roughly 50 lawmakers have tromped through Iraq this summer, and their impressions are having a profound effect on the debate.

Last week, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said after visiting Iraq that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki should be ousted for making such poor progress in bridging his country’s sectarian differences. Then Mr. Levin’s Republican counterpart and Iraq travel partner, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, dropped his own bombshell, calling on the president to begin bringing troops home by Christmas.

Congress has had notoriously testy relations with the Pentagon over the war. But with a new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, in charge, this summer’s trips have amounted to a kind of Pentagon charm offensive. Lawmakers say Mr. Gates seems especially encouraging of their visits; six freshmen traveled to Iraq recently at his invitation.

Inside the Pentagon, some were concerned about how the top generals in Baghdad could fight the war and accommodate so many lawmakers, with all their briefings, travel and security needs. The Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said Mr. Gates and General Petraeus were determined to do both.

“You can’t fight the war in a vacuum,” Mr. Morrell said. “The reality is that there’s an audience in Washington that you need to be attentive to.”

The trips have clearly set the story line for the September debate, cementing the perception that the military is making progress, even if Mr. Maliki is not. For the White House, which sold the troop buildup as a way to create “political breathing space” for the Iraqis to form a unity government, it’s a glass-half-empty, half-full situation.

Ms. Schakowsky, for example, came away from the Petraeus lunch convinced more than ever that “the surge is a failure.” Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican, took the opposite view; he’s now “leaning in the direction” of giving the buildup more time.

In Baghdad on Saturday, just hours after his own meeting with General Petraeus, James P. Moran, a Virginia Democrat and senior member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, also said he was impressed with the presentation. “Based on the outline,” Mr. Moran said, “I just don’t see Congress pulling up stakes.”

The Pentagon is pleased and a senior White House official called the trips “a net plus.” And at least one Democrat, Representative Brian Baird of Washington, an early opponent of the war, has changed his mind.

Mr. Baird was especially struck by his trip to Yusufiya, a farm town about 15 miles south of Baghdad in an area long dominated by Sunni insurgents. He met the mayor, visited a market and chatted with two sheiks, a Sunni and a Shiite, who “embraced us in front of everybody out on the street,” he said.

“That’s real progress,” Mr. Baird said, though he confessed he did not tell his wife about the region’s nickname, the triangle of death, and said the whole scene was a little surreal. “You have your flak jacket on, and your Kevlar helmet and you’re surrounded by guys with automatic weapons as you’re standing there, talking to the mayor. And you realize there’s a dusty old car next to you and you’re saying, ‘God, I hope that doesn’t blow up.’ ”

The Congressional Iraq tours rarely include chats with ordinary Iraqis. “You don’t have the mobility for that,” Mr. Kingston said. And Iraqis are a tad suspicious of the marketplace scenes. When faced with an American in a business suit and a flak jacket, they tend to react warily, unsure of who the visitor might be, or what role he plays in Iraq policy.

Iraqi officials view the Congressional visits — quick in-and-out trips — with a blend of appreciation and scorn. Most wish the Americans would stay longer.

“They need to get out of the circle, to meet some new people, to understand, to hear some new ideas,” said Shatha al-Musawi, a Shiite lawmaker who founded a well-known women’s group soon after the American invasion. She said several women in Parliament asked to meet the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, during her recent visit. But the speaker did not have time.

Some lawmakers were frustrated too. “I call it the embassy P.R. tour,” Ms. Schakowsky said.

For members of Congress, visiting Iraq is a badge of honor, a license to stand on the House or Senate floor and begin a speech by saying, “When I was in Iraq ... .” Some keep going back; Representative Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican, just ended his 18th visit.

The trips also confer a certain credibility at home. Representative Peter Roskam, a freshman Republican from Illinois, held a conference call with his constituents from his dormitory room in Baghdad this summer; 6,000 people listened in. He had just come from dinner with General Petraeus at Ambassador Crocker’s house and, like others, said that the phrase “tactical momentum” stuck in his mind.

That is not entirely surprising; after a while, a kind of “how I spent my summer vacation” sameness emerges from the lawmakers’ accounts.

There is the helicopter ride out of the Green Zone to an open-air market, maybe in Anbar Province, a staple of Congressional tours now that local tribal leaders are cooperating with Americans in the fight against the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. A meeting with sheiks, a local mayor, or perhaps the Kurdish deputy prime minister, Barham Saleh, whose name some cannot seem to remember. (“If you told me who it was,” Mr. Roskam said, “I’d believe you.”)

Mr. Saleh is a regular on lawmakers’ itineraries; he said he has met with about two dozen this summer at the request of the American embassy, including Mr. Moran and two others on Saturday. His message — that Iraqis need more time and that Congress has put too much emphasis on forcing the Maliki government to meet benchmarks — dovetails with the Bush administration’s.

“He painted a very direct picture for us,” Mr. Kingston said. “He said: ‘You need to understand how far we have come. We’re in a culture where just to get a Sunni and a Shiite just talking about talking is a huge step.’ ”

For his part, Mr. Saleh, who welcomed Mr. Moran and two other members of Congress to his spacious home in the Green Zone on Saturday evening, says he has just one goal: to impress on his steady parade of American summer visitors just how complex, difficult and nuanced Iraq can be.

“I tell them not to expect any miracles,” he said.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Washington, and Damien Cave from Baghdad. James Glanz contributed reporting from Baghdad.