Gen. Petraeus will document decline in sectarian violence, confidante says

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Gen. David Petraeus will be able to offer strong evidence in congressional testimony today that sectarian killings in Iraq have decreased dramatically since a security crackdown began in February, a key adviser says.

“He has the documentation. He has the facts,” retired Army Gen. John Keane, a confidante to the top commander in Iraq, told The Examiner. “This is exactly what is happening.”

Keane said he expects Petraeus to testify the troop surge is working, but that troop cuts should not come until next year, when reinforcement brigades reach a 15-month deployment limit and will start going home.

Whether there has been a drop in Sunni-Shiite violence, which turned Iraq into a big killing field, is emerging as one of the most important political issues in Congress as Petraeus prepares to testify. Without a drop in ethnic violence, Iraq has little hope of reaching political accommodation, and the Bush administration cannot claim success in the seven-month-old counter-offensive.

Keane, who toured Iraq in August and had a private dinner with Petraeus, said the command showed him numbers that reflect a 75 percent drop in sectarian killings compared with 2006, when the Sunni-Shiite bloodshed rose dramatically.

But the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’ auditor, angered the Bush administration last week with a generally negative report on Iraq that said it could not confirm any decrease in ethnic violence.

“The GAO is dead wrong,” Keane said.

The U.S. intelligence community's official word on Iraq, known as a national intelligence assessment, stated in August, “The steep escalation of rates of violence has been checked for now, and overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks.”

Comptroller General David Walker, who heads the GAO, does not trust the military's numbers. “We have not been able to get comfortable with the methodology that [the command] uses to determine sectarian violence,” Walker told Congress last week. He said his auditors had difficulty judging whether a killing was sectarian or motivated by other reasons.

His stance has brought criticism not only from the military but from outside experts. “The GAO ... made a significant mistake,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a Democratic analyst at the Brookings Institution. “It’s a war zone for heaven’s sake ... You're not going to get precise data.”

Petraeus, whose surge report already has been condemned by Democratic leaders who want a troop pullout now, begins his testimony today before a joint House committee and appears Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“The plan will be to go to pre-surge levels [132,000 troops] in ’08,” Keane said.

rscarborough@dcexaminer.com