The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (38 page)

In this regard, three traits—or rather paradoxes—characterized the next twenty-five years of Petraeus’s meteoric ascendency to the very elite of the American Army’s officer corps: (a) excellence in every imaginable assignment, but none of them as yet in actual wars; (b) unmatched intellectual preparation and academic training that tended to complement Petraeus’s superb physical condition; and (c) ambition to acquire the most challenging, prestigious, and diverse appointments possible, a drive that occasionally grated on rival officers of similar rank and earned suspicion from his superiors. Young David Petraeus was usually the smartest guy—and the most fit—in the room. Often he acted as if he knew it. And almost always both those realities annoyed peers more even than they impressed superiors.
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Just nine years after leaving West Point, Captain Petraeus graduated in 1983 as the top student at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. His academic work suggested that Petraeus would prove to be among his generation’s most gifted army tacticians. Four years later, in 1987, he earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, writing a dissertation on the deleterious effects of Vietnam on subsequent military operations—especially the American military’s incurring a troublesome, but understandable, lack of self-confidence. While still in his early thirties, between 1985 and 1987, Petraeus was proving an ascendant officer, scholar, and teacher at West Point. His subsequent multifaceted assignments shared a common theme of developing strong personal friendships with high-ranking officers, all the while showcasing his organizational and intellectual skills at the company, battalion, and brigade level.

At the height of the surge in July 2007, General David Petraeus tours the streets of Baghdad, in camouflage and body armor—his four-star rank distinguishable only by the stars on his cap and chin flap. Photo ©Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos.

After finishing Ranger School with honors, Petraeus had served in a light infantry brigade and as an assistant operations officer in a mechanized unit at Fort Stewart, Georgia. In 1988–89, Major and Dr. Petraeus was posted in Germany, under the stewardship of an old mentor, General John R. Galvin, in another combat billet as an operations officer to the 3rd Infantry Division and its 1st Brigade. Petraeus had been attached
to some of the most powerful generals in the United States, and so logically next took on a post as assistant executive officer to the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General Carl Vuono, in Washington, D.C. Superiors were impressed with his energy and academic excellence; rivals again saw a fast track based on developing friendships with four-star generals, Ivy League academics, and politically well-connected assignments.
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When Lieutenant Colonel Petraeus at last became a battalion commander, he was almost killed in 1991. A soldier under his command accidentally let off an M-16 round into his chest. The gaping bullet hole required emergency chest surgery—performed by future Tennessee senator Dr. William Frist—to repair a leaking pulmonary artery and vein and to resection a portion of the lung. Once recovered, Petraeus spent the latter 1990s as a colonel in various posts in both the 101st and 82nd Air Assault Divisions. He might have died again in 2000 in yet another non-combat accident, when his parachute incompletely opened and he fractured his pelvis in a rough landing. When Petraeus was promoted to brigadier general, he had almost been killed twice in the field—and yet had not seen battle.

Whether consciously or not, David Petraeus for two decades had been preparing himself neither for conventional warfare nor for counterter-rorist special operations—nor even for classic jungle or rural insurgency. Instead, he had prepped for large-scale postbellum occupation and reconstruction in highly urbanized, extremely hostile populations—exactly what Iraq would be like in 2003.

As a two-star general, Petraeus had served in the Balkan peacekeeping operations during 2001–2002 and there sharpened his ideas about counterterrorism before leading the initial assault on Baghdad as commander of the 101st Air Assault Division. His first formal combat assignment almost immediately became widely publicized, thanks to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and embedded reporter Rick Atkinson’s account,
In the Company of Soldiers.
In the postwar occupation, Petraeus drew more admiring reporters to Mosul who were happy to contrast his approaches with those of supposedly less imaginative, more traditional commanders. He gladly informed reporters that his brigades, in a manner consistent with his own peacekeeping experience in Haiti and in the Balkans, were employing counterinsurgency techniques rather than solely hunting down terrorists. Few others were as successful in the dark days of the early violence between 2003 and 2005 that followed the removal of Saddam Hussein.
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An increasing number of reporters conceded that while the military bureaucracy was clueless about the budding insurgency, Major General Petraeus had set himself up in Mosul like a successful Roman proconsul. He was overseeing the reestablishment of everything from the urban university to the city council. Petraeus disbursed millions of dollars to more than four thousand projects (“money is ammunition”)—often without the oversight of Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who had been monitoring civil affairs for the year after May 2003.
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Petraeus saw Iraq as a challenge to his own thirty years of experience and training; others saw his proclamations of success as implicit endorsement of the unpopular Iraq policies of the Bush administration. That was never more true than on September 26, 2004, when Petraeus wrote a progress report in the
Washington Post
reviewing his own performance (“Now, however, 18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up.”)—just six weeks before the November U.S. presidential election. Many Democrats felt that officers like Petraeus were losing the election for John Kerry, who was blasting Bush’s conduct of the war. Nonetheless, few could argue that Petraeus’s efforts at training and equipping more than 160,000 Iraqi military and police recruits in counterinsurgency were a formidable feat—despite the spike in violence to come in 2006.
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Then Petraeus was inexplicably withdrawn from Iraq back to the United States, to be given a controversial assignment from the latter part of 2005 until February 2007 as commanding general of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Some suspected that rivals within the military had managed to send Petraeus to Leaven-worth to sideline his probable rise to a four-star rank. Yet even thousands of miles away from the Iraq theater, the Petraeus mystique still grew. Reporters, for example, saw the appointment as somehow symptomatic of the inept Bush administration occupation: The only “thinking man” who had any success was purportedly crudely shuffled out to the backwaters of the American Midwest. When mavericks objected to Bush’s losing strategy, the critique went, they were apparently sent home. But Petraeus’s assignment may not, in fact, have been politically driven, given the importance of the Leavenworth appointment. In any case, the assignment provided him a rare chance to reflect on his past experience in formulating future ideas on how to defeat the Iraqi insurgents.

At Leavenworth, Petraeus more or less oversaw strategic and tactical
thinking and training for the army’s entire officer corps—especially incorporating lessons learned in Iraq in terms of official military counter-insurgency thinking that could be uniformly applied throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Along with Marine Lieutenant General James N. Mattis—whom Petraeus would subsequently serve both over and under in Afghanistan—Petraeus shepherded the military’s publication of Field Manual 3-24,
Counterinsurgency,
the new bible of dealing with insurrections such as those ongoing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis himself had commanded the 1st Marine Division during the assault on Baghdad and had seen that ad hoc counterinsurgency strategies were critical in winning over the population. In part, his early advocacy reflected why the Marine Corps for most of the reconstruction had proven effective in stabilizing their assigned areas of the occupation.
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Petraeus disseminated those lessons in the context of securing Iraq in two widely read articles that would be later published in the winter 2006 and fall 2008 issues of
Military Review:
“Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq” and “Commander’s Counterin-surgency Guidance.” Twenty-six highlighted talking points in the latter essay were clearly intended to be a practical guide to securing Iraq. Sympathetic observers figured that it was only a matter of when, not if, Petraeus returned from his Kansas sabbatical to Iraq.
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How had David Petraeus—from his February 2007 return to a violent Iraq as supreme commander of the multinational forces to his mid-September 2008 departure from a more or less quiet country—pulled off such a stunning reversal?

The first challenge was political, both at home and in Iraq: to ensure that the new Democrat-controlled Congress did not cut off funds for his last-ditch efforts to save Iraq. But that high-wire act simultaneously also required that he not show ingratitude for the president’s vote of confidence in him—and, indeed, for his own meteoric rise. As the noted military correspondent John Burns put it at the time, “For General Petraeus, being cast as the president’s white knight has been a mixed blessing.” Burns emphasized that Petraeus was careful to cast himself as the servant of both Congress and the president, hoping to invest both in his own success and thereby preclude any demands on his own particular loyalty.
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Wisely, Petraeus avoided domestic politics and ensured that his subordinates did not directly engage congressional critics or bask in administration praise. The result was an end to talk of cutoffs; congressional funding continued. Bush was delighted in the salvation of his war; meanwhile, many in the Democratic Congress felt that their past harsh criticism had led to necessary changes. Most strikingly, public attitudes about Iraq slowly began to change. In February 2007, 67 percent of the public felt that the war was going badly. But just a year after the arrival of Petraeus, Americans were split 48 percent to 48 percent over whether Iraq was faring well or poorly, an unexpected turnabout that might provide political cover for wavering supporters.
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In Iraq, the politics were trickier. A Shiite majority long oppressed by Saddam Hussein had come to power through American-sponsored elections—to the dismay of a once privileged Sunni and Baathist-tainted minority with strong ties to the rich nearby Sunni-dominated Gulf sheikdoms. The challenge was not just persuading the government of Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, who had become prime minister of Iraq in May 2006, to move beyond retribution for Baathists and to treat his Sunni countrymen equitably. It was unfortunately far more complicated than that. Petraeus also had to ensure that the wily Maliki would also act against his own supporters, specifically thousands of Iranian-supplied Shiite terrorists organized by the fiery demagogue Muqtada al-Sadr, who wished to turn Iraq into a Shiite theocratic client state of Iran. Thanks to Maliki’s acquiescence, for much of Petraeus’s tenure, Sadr was either quiet or in exile, especially after he had provoked a fight with the far more revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani—and lost the confrontation. And, in fear of government crackdowns—and convinced the U.S. military might well kill him—Sadr finally at last ordered a stand-down of his militias by August 2007. Looming behind these religious fault lines inside Iraq were even greater regional challenges: It would do no good to remove Saddam Hussein’s threat to the oil-exporting Sunni Gulf sheikdoms only to replace his Baathist dictatorship with a Shiite-dominated elected government, in name a democracy, in reality a client state of theocratic Iran.

Petraeus also had to turn the Sunnis of Anbar Province against the Sunni fundamentalists of al-Qaeda and various former Saddam supporters. Those gymnastics meant a de facto Sunni alliance with the Shiite-dominated government that was often shunning Sunni parliamentarians. For the most part, Petraeus was able to induce each faction to suppress
its own extremists while transitioning to a Shiite-dominated government in a Sunni-dominated neighborhood—with a new, more deadly U.S. military eager to enforce these new protocols of understanding.