Senate confirms Petraeus as US military commander in Iraq

[Ron Burgundy]

AFP - The US Senate, deeply skeptical about the White House strategy in Iraq, unanimously confirmed the nomination of Lieutenant General David Petraeus as commander of US forces deployed in the country.

Petraeus, who will succeed General George Casey, won the support of all 81 of the senators present for the vote out of the 100-strong body.

On Thursday, the 25-member Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously approved his nomination after his testimony Tuesday to the panel.

"He has testified that he believes that the new military strategy for Iraq will work and that the US military forces under his command will be able to successfully accomplish their mission. ... I pray he's correct," Democratic Senator Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) said before the vote.

Levin, however, expressed concern about President George W. Bush's new Iraq plan, announced January 10, which deploys an additional 21,500 troops to the violence-wracked country.

"I'm obviously concerned about a strategy which is based on an increased military presence when expert after expert, including military commander after military commander, have told us there is no military solution in Iraq, that the only way to end the violence in Iraq is for the Iraqis to reach a political settlement," he said.

During his testimony to the Senate committee Tuesday, Petraeus warned the road ahead would be difficult.

"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."

The general told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that if he determined the new strategy was not working, he would say so.

Bush's plan for an additional 21,500 troops to stem growing violence has been met by deep skepticism from the Democrat-controlled Congress and a slew of resolutions and measures criticizing it.

Petraeus, 54, is the most celebrated general to come out of the Iraq war, and the Bush administration has pointed to his record of success as the best guarantee that its new strategy can work.

He commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq and pacified the restive area around the northern city of Mosul in its aftermath by rapidly reviving the local economy and establishing Iraqi governing bodies.

When an initial attempt to create Iraqi security forces collapsed amid Sunni and Shia uprisings in the spring of 2004, Petraeus was called back to rebuild what is now a roughly 325,000-member Iraqi security force virtually from scratch.

He returned in September 2005 to head the US Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he wrote the army's first manual on counterinsurgency warfare in two decades.

But the escalating insurgent and sectarian violence has eroded many of Petraeus's previous accomplishments.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070126/pl_afp/uscongressmilitary [link]