What Crocker and Petraeus didn't say

The Bush administration's top two officials in Iraq answered questions from Congress for more than six hours on Sept. 10, but their testimony may have been as important for what they didn't say as for what they did. A chart displayed by Army Gen. David Petraeus that purported to show the decline in sectarian violence in Baghdad between December and August made no effort to show that the ethnic character of many of the neighborhoods had changed in that same period from majority Sunni Muslim or mixed to majority Shiite Muslim. Neither Petraeus nor US Ambassador Ryan Crocker talked about the fact that since the troop surge began the pace by which Iraqis were abandoning their homes in search of safety had increased. They didn't mention that 86 percent of Iraqis who've fled their homes said they'd been targeted because of their sect, according to the International Organization for Migration. And while both officials said that the Iraqi security forces were improving, neither talked about how those forces had been infiltrated by militias, though Petraeus acknowledged that during 2006 some Iraqi security forces had participated in the ethnic violence. Petraeus said 445,000 people were on the security forces' payroll, but didn't discuss that many officials believe that thousands of those don't actually exist, but are phantoms whose salaries actually go into ministry officials' pockets. Petraeus presented a series of maps to show how sectarian violence had dropped in Baghdad from December 2006 to August 2007. But all of the maps showed the same color-coding for Sunni, Shiite and mixed neighborhoods, even though the ethnicity of many neighborhoods have shifted dramatically over the previous year. US military officials say that Baghdad was once 65 percent Sunni and is now 75 percent Shiite. Questions from the 107 members of Congress who sat in on the hearing rarely produced more detail.