Men's Journal

How do you keep from losing when you can’t win? General Petraeus’s struggle to save Iraq.

By Charles M. Sennott

General David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, looked exhausted.

A competitive miler who loves to challenge young field commanders to five-mile footraces and push-up contests (that he usually wins), he appears fit as ever. But for the first time in the five years since I met him, there are dark circles under his eyes. Leading this war had be­gun to exact a visible toll.

“You are on the edge of having just enough sleep to sort of make it through every day,” he says, conceding that he has reconfigured his schedule to a less grueling pace than when he first led the “surge” of five additional brigades, or 30,000-plus American troops, into Iraq just more than a year ago. Even for compulsively athletic, all-but-canonized generals, he allows, “There is a point of no reservoir.”

We are seated together in his office inside the former Republican Palace of Saddam Hussein, in the heavily fortified “Green Zone” in Baghdad. It’s a cool, gray day in late February. On a delicate tea table sits a file folder bulging with field reports and “weekly attack trends,” as well as a series of charts tracking the body count in Iraq.

The office is in a corner of the palace he shares with Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Crocker arrived in Baghdad with Petra­eus in February 2007. Both came intending to undo a series of mistakes by the generals and diplomats who preceded them and made the war a fiasco teetering on the edge of defeat. Petraeus brought a new play­book - a 240-page counterinsurgency manual he wrote during 2005-’06 and whose precepts he was determined to test.

The room does not reveal much about him; it’s like the office of an executive camped out on a consultancy. On one wall he’s hung an airbrushed painting - the Iraqi equivalent of the souvenir felt paint­ings sold in Florida parking lots - of the Marsh Arabs. A gift, he says. In one corner, his flak jacket and helmet are draped on a wooden cross. On a reading stand I notice a Bible full of Post-it notes. When I ask which passages they mark, he shifts the topic of conversation.

I had returned to Baghdad on the fifth anniversary of the start of the war to see for myself the progress attributed to the surge, includ­ing a measurable drop in bombings, sectarian violence, Iraqi civilian deaths, and U.S. combat deaths. Across all categories the grim metrics of war were down by more than 60 percent from the relentless highs of 2004. I wanted to see if this improved security seemed likely to continue after the brigades are sent home this summer. Already, a spate of new bombings and fighting between the Iraqi Army and Shiite militia factions, which left hundreds dead in Basra, seemed to have shattered any tentative optimism supporters of the surge may have had. Could the relative stability hold? Had Petraeus helped the Iraqis turn a corner or had he merely forestalled catastrophe? Beyond assessing the war, I was interested in getting a read on him, too.

Petraeus is disarmingly frank, but far from an open book. As much scholar as soldier, he wrote his doctoral thesis at Princeton on lessons to learn from Vietnam. The lessons he deduced differed sharply from those of the military brass nearest to President Bush during the Iraq invasion. The administration’s ideas ranged from former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “fast and light” military that could strike surgically to neutralize a threat without committing large numbers of personnel and material in country, to the Powell Doctrine, named for Colin Powell, which called for overwhelming firepower and focusing on immediate, attainable objectives in “popular, winnable wars.”

Petraeus, in contrast, perceived that the post-9/11 world would afford no such clarity of tactics and cut-and-dried goals, and that the guerrilla warfare of Vietnam represented the kind of complex struggle for which the U.S. forces needed to prepare. Defeating terrorists, he contended, required a fresh approach to counterinsurgency, the judi­cious application of “hard power” (killing the enemy) and “soft power” (getting the lights back on), far more than just the “shock and awe” of the initial U.S.-led invasion that began on the evening of March 19, 2003. So now here he was, back in Iraq, with sometimes startling hu­bris, attempting to prove that he knew better how not to repeat the mistakes of the past. “If we are going to fight future wars, they’re going to be very similar to Iraq,” he tells me, adding that this was why “we have to get it right in Iraq.”

One of the mistakes of Vietnam, he knew, was a failure on the part of the military to manage the message, and Petraeus is very fo­cused on getting his message out. He is an inveterate e-mailer, some­times following up with colleagues and even reporters in the wee hours of the morning with intensive, exhaustive replies to even the smallest questions. (During my February visit he was reading Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War; the implication of that literary selection was clear.)

“What we can note here and back up with statistical measures is that the level of violence is significantly down,” Petraeus tells me, using a small teaspoon to measure the broad themes in the set of charts stretched out on the tea table. The documents combine U.S. and Iraqi data on military and civilian body counts and weekly attack trends. Tracing the spoon along the downward trajectory of the data, he added, “These are Iraqi figures, which are higher than ones we’ve used in the past. But this is what we are showing Congress.”

He was offering a preview of his April testimony on Capitol Hill. The U.S. typically does not release casualty totals but has reported that the numbers of violent incidents and civilian deaths are down. The limited success of the surge was helped by several key - albeit tenuous - factors, including a cease-fire by the militias’ loyal Shiite cleric Mok­tada al-Sadr and a system of payoffs made to Sunni militias under a broad banner commonly known as the “Awakening.”

Petraeus is cautious about any surge success and avoids the language associated with the U.S. military failures in Vietnam. He candidly says, “There is no light at the end of the tunnel.” But he adds, “I believe these successes can hold,” giving the table’s walnut veneer a rap, “It is going to take a lot of support from the Iraqi government.”

Petraeus knocks on wood or says “touch wood” three more times during the interview. His staff confirms he walks around looking for wood to knock. (Military leaders have relied on luck since ancient Greece; Napoleon famously said it is the preeminent quality he looks for in a general) And while you can hardly blame a guy for knocking on wood in Iraq, it still struck me as a wary gesture for a man in charge of 160,000 U.S. troops fighting a war that had already cost 4,000 American lives, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi lives, and had rung up a bill for U.S. taxpayers projected to be as high as $2 trillion.

“Look here,” he says, pulling out yet another chart. He seems genuinely pleased. “We have stopped the big bombs inside the mar­kets, and civilian deaths are down - touch wood.”

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At 5-foot-9 and 155 pounds, Petraeus, 55, is lean, and his upper torso is stiff and slightly cantered for­ward, like a bird of prey buffeting a headwind. The unusual posture comes in part from two injuries suffered during training exercises. One was a shattered pelvis that happened when his parachute malfunctioned during a skydiving exercise in 2000. The other injury was an M-16 round directly to his chest during a live-fire exercise in 1991 when an army specialist tripped and acci­dentally squeezed off a stray bullet; it nearly killed him. In a legend oft-told around Baghdad, Petraeus later promoted his accidental as­sailant to Ranger School, the army’s most prestigious and grueling physical and psychological challenge. Adding to the legend was Pe­traeus’s urgency to be released from the hospital after the near-fatal injury. Long before doctors thought he was ready to even get out of bed, he convinced physicians to remove tubes attached to his arms, allowing him to drop down and perform 50 push-ups to prove he was fit for duty. He was released shortly thereafter.

Petraeus still tries to remain at peak fitness, running as often as four times a week. If he’s thwarted by the demands of his schedule or some crisis, he’ll nip into the gym for some quick PT - physical training - when he can. For a guy known to schedule his days in efficient five-minute increments, there isn’t much slack for extra PT. Yet he recently did the army 10-mile in less than 64 minutes.

Over the past two years Petraeus’s face, angular and intense, has emerged as the face of the “Long War,” as the post-9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are known at the Pentagon and the State Depart­ment. And his image as a dedicated distance runner - the stamina, the patience - seems fitting for the challenges ahead. Each war has a field general who comes to embody the conflict. In the Civil War it was Grant. In World War II, Patton. In Vietnam, Abrams (after West­moreland was chased away). Now Petraeus has become that face. But what will he be the face of?

When he was appointed to take over in Iraq, the charges most frequently leveled at him were that he was overly ambi­tious, too eager to please, a control freak. None of these stuck (well, besides maybe control freak) because of Petraeus’s considerable skill at handling the press and because he has never been a simple yes-man. He had run up against four-star generals and top members of the Bush administration, and the idea that he was “not singing the same tune” in Iraq, as one insider put it, eventually reached Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Petraeus has been careful to keep his differences of opinion with Rumsfeld off the radar, never discussing them publicly. But several high-ranking officers who have worked alongside him or watched him rise say the differences of opinion between Petraeus and Rumsfeld were signifi­cant. These sources add that when Petraeus was assigned by the army chief of staff to the army colleges at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2005, Rumsfeld was pleased to see the ambitious three-star general, who was clearly not on the same page as he was, sidelined at what was then viewed as a remote posting far from the levels of power in the Pentagon. But how Petraeus rewrote the counterinsurgency manual is a big part of understanding perhaps his most enduring quality: an ability to create change from within.

Still, if things go badly in Iraq now, his will not be the face of a patriot who outlasted Rumsfeld and helped the army get past its con­tempt of Paul Bremer and the rest for botching post-invasion Iraq. If the downward spiral resumes, as many suspect it will, Petraeus could go down as an intellectual gamer who did what his superiors told him to even when so many warned that the surge was too little, too late.

“We did a lot of counterintelligence in Vietnam, but somewhere in the 1980s we threw all those lessons away,” Petraeus told me. “We vowed never to get embroiled like that again. But in fact we did, and we needed to reassess those lessons and remake them into a new doctrine. We are in the process of transforming a team that has been coached to play football into a group of people who also know how to play the game of chess…. They’re still going to have to put their helmets on and play ball, but they have to know chess as well.”

To effect this transformation Petraeus gathered around him a group of chess players known around the Green Zone as the Brain Trust. Virtually all of the officers are armed with Ph.D.s. They are an unorthodox bunch to be running a military campaign: Lieuten­ant Colonel David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist who is an expert on Islamic extremism; Colonel Michael Meese, a West Point economist with a Republican pedigree; Colonel H. R. Mc­Master, who authored the book Dereliction of Duty, about how gen­erals failed to honestly assess Vietnam for political leadership, and who previously commanded the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in northwestern Iraq; and Petraeus’s executive officer, Colonel Peter Mansoor, who holds a doctorate in history from Ohio State Univer­sity and who expects to return from the field of combat to a teach­ing chair there.

The team reflects Petraeus’s intellectual confidence, his ability to encourage competing points of view. Over meat loaf and mashed po­tatoes in the D-FAC (or dining facility) attached to the palace in the Green Zone, the Brain Trust discusses French failures in Algeria and quotes British commander T.E. Lawrence (who led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire), Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh. They know their stuff. And they separate their world into those who “get it” and those who don’t. “It” is the complexity of counterinsurgency that requires no fixed philosophies, like the Powell Doctrine, but an entrepreneurial spirit in which field commanders are trusted to find the best way for­ward. But these men know all too well that even if a commander “gets it,” and even if the trend lines on every chart are in your favor, when political initiative is lost, your counterinsurgency campaign is doomed. The shadow of that doom is what chases them every day.

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The first time I met Petraeus was about six months after the invasion, in the fall of 2003. I was working on a story for the Boston Globe up in the desert wilderness near Mosul, where the ruins of the ancient Roman temples of Hatra lay amid a network of oil pipelines snaking across the landscape. I was writing about the past presence of empires in Iraq, and my story soon evolved into one about whether America was an empire in denial. Petraeus sat down for an interview.

His headquarters overlooked ancient Nineveh. He appreciated the rich history that surrounded him, and he seemed to be gauging his place in it. “I don’t think we are an empire,” he told me. “We don’t have imperial designs. I think we’d be happy to live and let live. We’d like to see certain democratic and economic ideals flour­ish, but not to the point of forcing it on people.

“We want to be seen as an army of liberation and not an army of occupation,” he continued. “But there is a half-life on our role here; you wear out your welcome at some point. It doesn’t matter how helpful you are…. We aren’t here to stay.” With these words he echoed the sentiments of past empires and their generals.

From April 2003 to early 2004, Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division carried out what was widely seen as the perfect mix of hard and soft power. They killed the enemy, notably Saddam Hussein’s two sons, in wild shootouts. But they also poured resources and sweat into building schools and digging wells. Looking back, one of the reasons Petraeus succeeded in Mosul after the initial invasion was that he was given free rein. He had a dispensation from the flawed de-Baathification law, which fatefully sought to exclude any high-ranking officers from Saddam Hussein’s army. Petraeus rightly saw that as a mistake and ignored it. It was joked that he had his own foreign relations with Turkey and Syria. He was already living out of his future counterinsurgency playbook: “In the absence of orders, determine what they should be and execute.”

Petraeus’s background does not suggest a guy who would rewrite the rules. His father was a Dutch ship captain named Sixtus Petra­eus, who worked for a power company in upstate New York after World War II. David Petraeus came of age in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, a pleasant town just a few miles north of West Point, which he dreamed of attending since boyhood. He entered the acad­emy in 1970 - a year that could be considered the single lowest time in the U.S. military’s history.

At the academy Petraeus was tagged with the nickname Peaches. Some say it was a play on his unusual surname; others say it referred to his boyish face. Halfway through he began dating Holly Knowlton, the daughter of academy superintendent General William A. Knowl­ton, and then married her. He graduated near the top of his class in 1974. After that, he went to Ranger School, where three separate awards for distinction are given to each class. Petraeus took all three.

For the next 25 years he proceeded to serve staff and command assignments under several four-star generals. His tours included peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Haiti. But there was something missing: active combat duty. He hadn’t been “blooded,” as the saying goes. But he would get that chance in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As commander of the 101st A.D., dubbed the Screaming Eagles, Petraeus led his 17,000 men and women across the border from Ku­wait into Iraq on March 25, 2003. Forty Apache gunships thundered forward for a pivotal battle at the Karbala Gap. When all was said and done, Petraeus had led the longest and largest “air assault” of attack helicopters in the U.S. military’s history. In April the division was assigned to Mosul.

Petraeus’s second tour in Iraq came in 2004, to head up the Multi National Security Transition Command: Iraq, which goes by the acronym MNSTCI, or, as it’s pronounced in the military, “minsticky.” Here his command had significantly more mixed results. For one year Petraeus led the effort to train some 135,000 new Iraqi security forces from the ground up at Camp Phoenix in Baghdad. In this command even Petraeus’s admirers say he had limited success, and, in some places, considerable failure. Eventually the forces being trained morphed into sectarian militias that carried out ethnic cleans­ing of rival areas of Baghdad. “Sectarian violence took its toll on everything in Iraq, including the security forces,” Petraeus says.

Jerry Burke, a retired major with the Massachusetts state police, was the senior police adviser to the Baghdad police chief in 2004 and in 2005 served as a national security adviser to the Iraqi Min­istry of Interior. He says Petraeus was responsible for “a failure of oversight” and that he was “just a little too willing to go along” with what Washington wanted to happen and on the timetable they wanted. But Burke hastens to add that he believes Petraeus learned from the mistakes. Min­istry of Interior. He says Petraeus was responsible for “a failure of oversight” and that he was “just a little too willing to go along” with what Washington wanted to happen and on the timetable they wanted. But Burke hastens to add that he believes Petraeus learned from the mistakes.

—-

Petraeus turned and gave me a wan smile. this was back on November 14, 2006, during my second interview with the general. A TV was tuned to CNN; Donald Rumsfeld was fielding ques­tions about his resignation. The Republicans had just lost control of both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, defeats chalked up to voter discontent. Now Rums­feld was out. Petraeus refused to comment for the record. Still, the back story between Petraeus and Rumsfeld’s Pentagon hung silently in the room.

In 2004, Petraeus was adamant that the resis­tance in Iraq was a classic insurgency at a time when Rumsfeld literally wouldn’t hear the word. Petraeus favored a surge strategy along with his mentor, retired four-star general Jack Keane, who built the theoretical architecture of the surge. This school of thought countered Rumsfeld’s stealth approach. Astute Pentagon insiders say Rumsfeld was growing fed up with Petraeus, a three-star whose face was now appearing on magazines and whose bold ideas were gaining follow­ers. Some observers say Rumsfeld even edited Petraeus’s name out of memos and speeches that circulated in the White House.

Petraeus didn’t have any objection to how the war began, just to what happened after Baghdad fell. “Major combat operations went well,” he said, but “the failure to adequately plan for the transition was the problem. The strategy didn’t match policy goals and objectives.”

As always, Petraeus steered the conversation to what he wanted to talk about: his draft of a new counterinsurgency (COIN) manual. It was his attempt to learn from the mistakes in Iraq and to codify the successes, making the most of his time on the Missouri River.

“No one has seized the post of Leavenworth and made it a center of power and an agent of change the way Petraeus did,” said Colonel Conrad Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, who helped Petraeus research and write the counterinsurgency man­ual along with Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis.

The manual had not been rewritten in 20 years, but that alone does not explain why Petraeus’s revision represented a radical shift. The new manual’s lessons were grounded in historic examples and emphasize balancing military might with ground-level smarts. The gist: It does no good to take territory but lose the support of the people who live there. Commanders must pursue not just military victory, but “moral legitimacy.”

It is a blueprint for a battle to win “hearts and minds,” but as Petraeus is quick - and uncharacteristically crude - to point out, it is also a document that underscores the importance of “not shying away from the need to kill the enemy.”

“The words ‘kill’ and ‘capture’ are on every page,” he said, leafing through the draft. In the manual Petraeus describes counterinsurgency warfare as “war at the graduate level,” where a unit commander must be a kind of “strategic lieutenant,” care­fully calibrating a balance between a soldier’s killing power and the exercise of restraint that can turn potential enemies into allies. Woven throughout the document is the history of insurgency and counterinsurgency, from the French struggle in Algeria in the 1960s to the 1993 U.S. military disaster in Somalia.

After our interview in Leavenworth, with Rumsfeld entirely out of the picture, Petraeus was appointed commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. The surge, Crane confirmed, gave Petraeus the opportunity to put his ideas and theories into action.

—-

When I visit him this February, Petraeus has already endured a hell of a year. The first three months of the surge had been the war’s deadliest. Then came the al-Sadr cease-fire, stipends for thousands of new Iraqi patrol­men, and relative stability. All along, he’d been drafting what he calls “white lines in the road,” new parameters for his field commanders. He showed me a draft with notes on the side in the dense scrawl that is his penmanship.

“Secure and serve the population.”

“Live among the people.”

“Promote reconciliation.”

“Walk.”

“I love that last one for its simplicity,” he says, reading his writing.

“Move mounted, work dismounted. Situ­ational awareness can only be achieved by operating face-to-face, not separated by bal­listic glass.”

One battalion commander who seems to embody the leadership style that Petraeus has sought to codify is Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Frank. Forty years old, Frank had served in the 101st A.D. under Petraeus in the initial invasion in 2003. Petraeus’s staff had set me up with an embed with Frank’s unit, the Black Lions, in Rashid, which was one of the first units into the surge and the district that Pe­traeus had first visited.

The Black Lions suffered 10 combat deaths and more than 100 wounded. All summer they were up against the Shia militia, the Mahdi Army, which had morphed into a criminal enterprise. And they took the fight to Sunni insurgent elements who proclaimed themselves “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” (The insur­gents were inspired by but not directly linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.) Caught between the firefights was a population that was being displaced.

“The successes in Rashid are real. What they were able to do is get people to stop shooting long enough to talk,” explains Frank. But I had spent enough time in Rashid to hear doubts about whether those successes could in fact last. Sunni and Shia leaders in Rashid had made it clear that if the U.S. forces were to leave, the district would collapse back into sectarian violence. They said that the Iraqi military was not yet ready, or trusted enough, to take control.

As tenuous as they are, improvements in security, Petraeus says, will allow the U.S. to draw down troop levels to close to the pre-surge number of 130,000 by the end of July. That will be done by not replacing the brigades that cycle out of the surge as they finish their 12-to-15-month tours of duty. The security pressure will be kept up in Baghdad neighbor­hoods, Petraeus adds, by replacing U.S. troops with more than 100,000 Iraqi troops that have been retrained and more closely vetted than in earlier training sessions, and a “pause” on any further troop withdrawal. The perimeters of the large U.S. military bases will be shrunk, and experienced field commanders will be asked to stay on for the transition from U.S. to Iraqi troops.

Petraeus has always maintained that there is no military victory in Iraq, that there is only a political solution. It is what he told Congress before the surge began, and he continues to maintain that for the surge to have lasting impact, the Iraqi government will have to step up and lead.

In quiet moments Petraeus’s inner circle will dare to express confidence that they are on the edge of succeeding in Iraq, and they will tell you they believe Petraeus will have a place in the history books for leading the turnaround. One of them tells me, “I truly believe there will be plaques in Baghdad some­day saying petraeus was here.”

Outside the Green Zone there is impa­tience with such lionization. Barry Posen, now the director of the security studies pro­gram at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology, in Cambridge, taught Petraeus in the mid-1980s when Petraeus was a Ph.D. can­didate at Princeton. Last year, Posen taught Petraeus’s only son, now a junior at MIT. Posen knows the general and is an admirer of the man and his leadership skills. But he believes there will be no halos bestowed on him for his accomplishments in Iraq.

“Did they put up plaques for General Creighton Abrams in Vietnam? He had suc­cesses there, right?” asks Posen, referring to the commander who implemented Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” which reduced the U.S. troop presence from 530,000 to fewer than 50,000.

“My point is, if the overall enterprise is flawed and doomed, as I believe it is, then Petraeus will be remembered as an effective general who was handed a mission that came way too late to have any effect in a war that was already lost,” says Posen.

“He took over a situation where we were flat-out losing and he transformed it into a stalemate,” says Andrew J. Bacevich, a gradu­ate of West Point and a Vietnam War veteran. Bacevich is now a professor of international relations at Boston University. His son was killed in Iraq, and Petraeus wrote him a letter thanking him for his son’s service. Bacevich respects Petraeus’s abilities, but he has grave doubts about what happens next.

“I would have to say he is disingenuous about what is ahead in this fight, the amount of time it takes to fight a counterinsurgency,” Bacevich said in March. “We are talking about a decade. And I think he knows there is not the political will to fight that long.”

As Petraeus’s executive officer, Colonel Mansoor, the Ohio State Ph.D., is more op­timistic. He says that when historians step back, they will see that Petraeus was a “warrior scholar” who “came in at a very critical time, when the war was all but lost, and then by force of his energy, his will, and his intellect, he turned it around.”

I ask Mansoor how history will judge Petraeus if, in the end, the war is a failure. “He is going to come out great!” he replies. “I can say that, because I am going to write the history.”

—-

Petraeus can’t know how he will be perceived in the future, but he is certainly aware of how pivotal his role is now. Soon after he appeared before Congress in September ‘07, I met with him again in Washington, DC. He was lined up to do a seemingly endless series of interviews with the nation’s instant histo­rians, the major television networks and news­papers at the National Press Building.

As he sat in a barber’s chair a woman dabbed makeup on him for his next television interview. It was the same week that Moveon.org had run its “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” attack ads.

Petraeus said he could handle the personal attacks; still, he’d taken heart in a supportive e-mail from his hometown that included a poem by Rudyard Kipling. Speaking with his characteristic intensity and irony (he hadn’t failed to notice that the Kipling poem was about the British struggle to maintain its em­pire), with his eyes closed as the makeup art­ist dabbed away at his face, he gave an improv performance I’ll never forget. He tried his best to recite the poem from memory, and he very nearly did it:

“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue / Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch / If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much / If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run / Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it / And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!”

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This article originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Men’s Journal. 

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