WASHINGTON — President Bush’s choice to be his war adviser, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, said Thursday that the U.S. military surge has given the Iraqi government a ‘golden opportunity,’ but Iraqi leaders aren’t making the economic and political progress needed to achieve national reconciliation. Lute was skeptical about the troop increase before President Bush announced it in January, arguing that a military solution wasn’t enough to bring lasting national stability. At a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, he promised to give Bush his unvarnished military advice and to keep the lives of U.S. military men and women foremost in this thinking as the administration shapes its war policy. Lute said that the Iraqis want to meet benchmarks they’ve set that are designed to lead to an end of factional fighting, but ‘have shown so far very little progress.’ Unless they start making progress, there’s unlikely to be any decrease in violence, he said. ‘I have reservations about just how much leverage we can apply on a system that is not very capable right now,’ Lute said. But he noted that the Iraqi government had been in power just over a year. ‘I think we’re in the early […]