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The make-or-break US strategy to quell the violence in Iraq has begun in earnest with the new commander of US troops Lieutenant General David Petraeus set to spearhead the offensive.
“He's the General Grant of the surge,” said Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham, quoted by the Washington Post, referring to the legendary Union general in the American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant, who went on to be president.
“He's our last best chance as a military commander to bring about a change on the ground,” the paper added, saying the general had flown to Iraq this week.
Much is riding on Petraeus' experienced shoulders with US President George W. Bush staving off calls for a withdrawal from Iraq by appealing to a war-weary US public to give his unpopular plan to end the sectarian violence time to work.
Petraeus, one of the key architects of the plan which boosts US forces on the ground by 21,500 extra troops, has acknowledged the enormity of the task warning skeptical senators of the tough road ahead.
“The situation in Iraq is dire, the stakes are high, there are no easy choices. The way ahead will be very hard,” he said. “But hard is not hopeless.”
This week the first of some 80,000 Iraqi and US troops began fanning out across Baghdad aiming to curb the bloodshed that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis as well as more than 3,100 US troops since the March 2003 invasion to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.
On Wednesday, US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell confirmed in Iraq that the implementation of the Baghdad stabilization plan was now fully under way.
But Petraeus warned senators at his nomination hearing last month that it could be late summer before there are any indications of whether the new strategy to secure the capital and troubled Anbar province is bearing fruit.
Bush has also insisted that the Iraqi leadership under Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki has a key role to play in ending the violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, warning that US resources and patience could wear thin.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates reiterated that if the Iraqis fail to keep up their end of the bargain, then the United States “is going to have to look at other alternatives and consequences.”
And in earlier testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gates went further than any administration official yet in discussing what the United States might do if its strategy to stabilize Iraq fails.
“I hate to get into hypotheticals, but I certainly can see circumstances in which we would, first of all, reposition our forces to take them — to try to move them out of harm's way as much as possible and then see where we go from there,” he said.
Iraqi leaders have said they are ready to step up to the mark and Maliki was said to have initiated last month's crackdown on the militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a key ally in his embattled government, in which hundreds were arrested.
But a key US intelligence report released last week offered a stark assessment of the future, suggesting Iraq was already on the brink of civil war and that the prospects of stabilizing the country in the next 18 months were bleak.
Furthermore a rapid pull-out of US-led coalition forces “almost certainly would lead to a significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian violence,” the National Intelligence Estimate said.
With the race for the November 2008 presidential elections already under starters' orders, the Iraq war is overshadowing the early stages of the campaign.
This week political jockeying stymied a bid in the Congress to pass a resolution slamming Bush's new strategy with the majority Democrats failing to muster enough support to even debate the issue.
Acknowledging public frustration, seven leading Republican senators vowed Wednesday to attach a measure protesting the president's Iraq war plans to any bill sent to the floor in the coming weeks.
The war is the “most pressing issue of our time,” read a copy of the letter. “The current stalemate is unacceptable to us and to the people of this country.”
