Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
London Sunday Telegraph
March 23, 2008 By Colin Freeman
'You're sitting where Angelina Jolie sat!" The black sofas in General David Petraeus's Baghdad offices have hosted many of the world's more distinguished backsides in recent months.
Some have been more shapely than others, but all are amply qualified for the red VIP pass that gets them waved through security at Petraeus's HQ, in Saddam Hussein's old presidential palace.
Actress Angelina Jolie, Hollywood's roving conscience-at-large, was here last month in her capacity as a United Nations goodwill ambassador, discussing the plight of Iraqi refugees. Then last week came US Vice-President Dick Cheney and Senator John McCain, the latter breezing into the Petraeus parlour fresh from his nomination as Republican presidential candidate.
From staunch neo-cons through to Hollywood liberals, plus a pageant of world leaders, Iraqi politicians and even the odd insurgent leader, the Supreme Commander of coalition forces in Iraq is a man everyone is happy to be seen with right now. Not bad for someone who, exactly a year ago, was widely tipped to become the next William Westmoreland, the general whose decision to send endless extra units into Vietnam ended in military failure, huge loss of life and a badly wounded sense of American national pride.
Here's why. Next month, Petraeus will report to Congress on the success of his "troop surge", in which nearly 30,000 extra soldiers have spent the past 12 months pulling Iraq back from the brink of all-out civil war. No one knows quite what he will say - to underscore his independence, not even President Bush gets a preview.
But the news is expected to be good - or, at the very least, better than anything else that has come of Iraq in the past five years. Violence overall is down about 60 per cent on last year. Al-Qa'eda is on the run, its former allies among Iraq's Sunni Muslims having turned against it. Iran-backed Shia Muslim militias are on a voluntary ceasefire, thanks to the cowing of their al-Qa'eda enemies. And most importantly, many ordinary Iraqis finally feel like things might be turning the corner.
Similarly upbeat is President Bush, who last week felt sufficiently confident to declare the "high cost in lives and treasure" had all been worth it. In fact, one of the few people not talking things up is Petraeus himself.
"We don't talk turning points, there are no lights at the end of the tunnel, we don't do victory dances, and we've moved the champagne to the back of the fridge," he tells me over a mid-morning coffee, his fourth in a day that typically starts with a five-mile dawn run. Neither he nor his close colleague, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker, are either optimists or pessimists, he says. In a way it makes sense. The former, after all, have tried before out here and failed. The latter, presumably, would never set foot in post-Saddam Iraq in the first place.
That is not to say that Petraeus doesn't have a few good news tales to push. Take the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, both former rebel strongholds in Anbar province west of Baghdad. For most of the past five years, they have symbolised everything that was wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom: both were home to large numbers of Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs, who, disfranchised after his downfall, turned against the occupation and into the embrace of al-Qa'eda.
Fallujah's main drag was where, in March 2004, four US security contractors were mutilated by a mob and hung from a bridge, a televised atrocity that beamed the full venom of the growing insurgency into homes worldwide.
Today, however, having successfully encouraged the local tribes to turn against al-Qa'eda, the self-declared "graveyard of the Americans" jostles with Ramadi as one of the most peaceful cities in Iraq. Discussing them, General Petraeus displays all the fondness of a teacher who has somehow brought two recalcitrant pupils to the top of the class.
"If you walk through markets in Ramadi, surprisingly, you will see that they are absolutely flourishing," he says, sounding like a particularly intrepid Alan Whicker. "You have to push your way through the souks there, it's so crowded. Fallujah, too, has sprung back to life. That is not to say that al-Qa'eda is not trying to go back in there, or that there are not issues of violent criminals, or Mafia-like figures, or extortion artists, or a variety of other challenges, because they are all present."
His fear of being a false prophet is understandable. There have, after all, been numerous premature celebrations since the fall of Saddam's statue on April 9, 2003. The capture of the man himself eight months later, hailed as the final blow to the Ba'athist resistance, proved to be anything but.
The elections of 2005, welcomed by President Bush as the "Purple Revolution", simply enshrined sectarianism as religious parties filled the vacuum left by 25 years of one-man rule. And the killing in 2006 of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qa'eda leader hell-bent on fomenting civil war, came too late to stop the momentum of the sectarian death squads.
Today, those highs and lows are marked on graphs in Petraeus's files, charting the rise and fall of daily attacks. A fan of statistics and a veteran of presentations to sceptical Washington audiences, he can analyse the death and destruction with all the deftness of a rep at a sales meeting.
There are the grim peaks that followed the al-Qa'eda bombing of the holy Shia shrine at Samarra in February 2006, when the monthly death toll reached 3,000. And here is the current "trough", which, according to the Associated Press news agency, translated into 739 deaths among Iraqi security forces and civilians this February. By any normal standards, they are dreadful figures. But out here, it's better than anybody dared hope.
"The attack levels have gone to a level not consistently seen like this since 2005," says Petraeus. "That is not satisfactory but it is significantly better than a year or so ago."
So what is the secret of the man who has achieved the seemingly impossible? At first glance, he doesn't show any obvious Hannibal or Henry V tendencies. The handshake is mercifully easier on the fingers than those of some of his colleagues and the manner is relaxed and friendly. But ask his soldiers about him and one often hears the kind of hyperbolic language more commonly reserved by Iraqis for praising revered Muslim imams.
"He is an amazingly dynamic and diverse thinker who transformed our efforts here in Iraq," said one US officer, who is not normally a man given to praising HQ. "He has changed the conditions in Iraq to such a degree that the people have started to believe in the future."
The adulation diminishes little among America's non-uniformed population, among whom Petraeus enjoys a kind of rock-star status. He seems at ease as a role model and is full of praise for what he sees as the "greatest generation" of young soldiers cutting their teeth out here. Petraeus's own CV shows him destined from an early age to become one of the top brass's brightest buttons.
Born to Dutch-American parents in Cornwall, New York, he graduated at the top of his class at West Point Military Academy in 1974. In 1991, he nearly died without ever setting foot on a battlefield, after being shot in the chest in a training exercise. Tales of his subsequent recovery hint at his alpha-male qualities: friends say he persuaded the doctors to let him leave hospital early after getting them to pull the tubes out of his arm and performing 50 press-ups in front of them.
Today, aged 55, he is still a fitness fanatic, despite another near-fatal accident in 2000, in which he fractured his pelvis in a skydiving jump, after his parachute collapsed 60ft above the ground. Ambitious young officers who work with him are expected to participate in his early morning runs and, while it isn't officially a race, coming second is frowned upon. "The guy is real competitive," says one former colleague, who has sweated it out in many a sweltering Baghdad summer morning. "He will do everything he can to beat you."
Yet for all that, there is as much of the college professor about him as the football coach, hence his nickname, the "Warrior Monk". The holder of a PhD in international relations, he is the co-author of the US military's counterinsurgency field manual, which reveals him as much more of a "hearts and minds" adherent than many of his US colleagues.
As commander of the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion, he was known for asking embedded reporters "Tell me how this ends?", a catchphrase that suggested he was more aware than most of the problems that might lie ahead.
Based in the northern city of Mosul after the war, his troops built schools, water and sewage works, held local elections, and pumped money into their surroundings. It served as a model of how the occupation should have worked - until late 2004, six months after their departure, when al-Qa'eda militants stormed the city. The Iraqi policemen whom Petraeus had trained melted away, along with most of the nation-building framework he had hoped to leave.
The way in which Iraq could confound even the most agile military minds was frequently cited two years later, as America debated what to do about the civil war. The country was such a basket case, went one argument, that it was no longer worth keeping a single American soldier there, never mind putting yet more in.
At a Pentagon meeting in December 2006, when President Bush tested support for a surge, his joint chiefs of staff were unanimous in believing it wouldn't work. Petraeus believed otherwise, but when he arrived in Baghdad in February 2007 and toured Ghazaliya, a once-affluent western suburb turned sectarian battleground, he began to wonder if his critics were right.
"It set in upon us as we patrolled that this was going to be extraordinarily difficult," he says. "Ghazaliya, a community that was fairly upper-middle-class, literally looked like a movie version of a Wild West town, with tumbleweed blowing down the streets, houses clearly unoccupied, and enormous scarring from battles. The damage was stark, it was obvious and very, very real." Did he ever think he shouldn't have taken the mission on? "About once an hour."
His response was to dominate the ground, taking US troops out of big barracks and moving them into small, makeshift bases in derelict offices and shopping malls, where they worked alongside Iraqi army and police units. A military version of bobbies-on-the-beat, the scheme benefited from the fact that many of the surge troops were no longer Iraq rookies but old hands on their third tour in four years, for whom the once alien landscape and its people were now as familiar as Texas.
There was also a subtle shift in attitude towards the opposition, at least in the language, and towards recognition that not all of them were evil. Whereas coalition commanders once talked about "good guys v bad guys", now there were "reconcilable" insurgents who could be persuaded to lay down their weapons, and "irreconcilables" such as al-Qa'eda, to whom the only answer was force.
Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Shi'ite Mehdi Army, found himself being addressed by US military spokesmen as "Sayed" Moqtada al-Sadr, a religious honorific in recognition of his militia's ceasefire. Previously, they had used a rather less respectful term: "murderer". Petraeus also did his best to get the warring sides to make peace among themselves, enlisting Britain's General Graeme Lamb, a veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process, to help form a special "reconciliation cell" that held secret meetings with insurgent leaders in hotels in neighbouring Jordan.
"A great man, he gave some wonderful insights as we were establishing this intellectual construct that talked about reconcilables and irreconcilables," says Petraeus. "The counterinsurgency manual discusses this, but we were really applying it. You cannot kill your way out of an insurgency of this magnitude, you have to get as many people as possible to become part of the solution, rather than part of the problem."
That may also prove to be his Achilles' heel. The most prominent of Petraeus's "reconcilables" so far have been the units of "concerned local citizens" (CLCs), the euphemism for the former Sunni militiamen whom the US has recruited as poachers-turned-gamekeepers against al-Qa'eda. The official version of events is that they represent the "honourable" resistance, whose main concern previously was to defend their own communities from Shia militants and who had no interest in al-Qa'eda's extremist agendas. But while working with them has led to a dramatic reduction in attacks, many fear it is a pact with the devil.
"The guys in the CLC units are the same guys who were in al-Qa'eda," says one Iraqi. "Before, they were using the knife to cut people's throats; now they are taking the gun and getting paid by the Americans."
It is a criticism made also by the Shia-dominated Iraqi government, which fears the CLCs will simply become new and more organised Sunni militias, willing to grant the Americans short-term peace in order to start the "real" civil war once they pull out.
"It is clear that there are some concerns from the government of Iraq, understandable ones, and we have concerns too - some of these individuals undoubtedly have blood on their hands," admits Petraeus. So what would he say to someone who saw a former al-Qa'eda man now dressed in a policeman's uniform? "You would have to ask them what was the situation before and what is the situation now. Would they rather have individuals still killing and adding fuel to the sectarian fires that almost consumed Baghdad? Iraq was clearly on the brink of civil war and it has come back from that, and part of the process is just to get people to stop shooting."
So to borrow his own phrase, how does this all end? That is, for now at least, a question he prefers to ask rather than answer. When will US troops finally leave, I inquire. And was Britain really right to scale down its presence in Basra? In response to both questions, there is a long, detailed analysis, one that would take an Iraqi interpreter hours to translate at any Green Zone press conference, but which boils down effectively to just two words: "No comment."
Petraeus is, like all generals at his level, a politician as much as a warrior, although contrary to reports - and, it would seem, the express wishes of some of the American public - he has no wish to run for president when his work in Iraq is over.
Pressed hard, he does finally crack on one question. Who would play him in any future movie? He laughs and blushes. "There have been book offers and other things, and obviously I am not thinking about any of those at the moment. But I am hopeful - joking, of course - that Harrison Ford is in good shape."
You heard it here first. How the East Was Won, starring Harrison Ford as General David Petraeus, coming to a cinema near you, maybe sooner, maybe later. Right now, though, it's still very much a working title.
March 23, 2008 By Colin Freeman
'You're sitting where Angelina Jolie sat!" The black sofas in General David Petraeus's Baghdad offices have hosted many of the world's more distinguished backsides in recent months.
Some have been more shapely than others, but all are amply qualified for the red VIP pass that gets them waved through security at Petraeus's HQ, in Saddam Hussein's old presidential palace.
Actress Angelina Jolie, Hollywood's roving conscience-at-large, was here last month in her capacity as a United Nations goodwill ambassador, discussing the plight of Iraqi refugees. Then last week came US Vice-President Dick Cheney and Senator John McCain, the latter breezing into the Petraeus parlour fresh from his nomination as Republican presidential candidate.
From staunch neo-cons through to Hollywood liberals, plus a pageant of world leaders, Iraqi politicians and even the odd insurgent leader, the Supreme Commander of coalition forces in Iraq is a man everyone is happy to be seen with right now. Not bad for someone who, exactly a year ago, was widely tipped to become the next William Westmoreland, the general whose decision to send endless extra units into Vietnam ended in military failure, huge loss of life and a badly wounded sense of American national pride.
Here's why. Next month, Petraeus will report to Congress on the success of his "troop surge", in which nearly 30,000 extra soldiers have spent the past 12 months pulling Iraq back from the brink of all-out civil war. No one knows quite what he will say - to underscore his independence, not even President Bush gets a preview.
But the news is expected to be good - or, at the very least, better than anything else that has come of Iraq in the past five years. Violence overall is down about 60 per cent on last year. Al-Qa'eda is on the run, its former allies among Iraq's Sunni Muslims having turned against it. Iran-backed Shia Muslim militias are on a voluntary ceasefire, thanks to the cowing of their al-Qa'eda enemies. And most importantly, many ordinary Iraqis finally feel like things might be turning the corner.
Similarly upbeat is President Bush, who last week felt sufficiently confident to declare the "high cost in lives and treasure" had all been worth it. In fact, one of the few people not talking things up is Petraeus himself.
"We don't talk turning points, there are no lights at the end of the tunnel, we don't do victory dances, and we've moved the champagne to the back of the fridge," he tells me over a mid-morning coffee, his fourth in a day that typically starts with a five-mile dawn run. Neither he nor his close colleague, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker, are either optimists or pessimists, he says. In a way it makes sense. The former, after all, have tried before out here and failed. The latter, presumably, would never set foot in post-Saddam Iraq in the first place.
That is not to say that Petraeus doesn't have a few good news tales to push. Take the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, both former rebel strongholds in Anbar province west of Baghdad. For most of the past five years, they have symbolised everything that was wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom: both were home to large numbers of Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs, who, disfranchised after his downfall, turned against the occupation and into the embrace of al-Qa'eda.
Fallujah's main drag was where, in March 2004, four US security contractors were mutilated by a mob and hung from a bridge, a televised atrocity that beamed the full venom of the growing insurgency into homes worldwide.
Today, however, having successfully encouraged the local tribes to turn against al-Qa'eda, the self-declared "graveyard of the Americans" jostles with Ramadi as one of the most peaceful cities in Iraq. Discussing them, General Petraeus displays all the fondness of a teacher who has somehow brought two recalcitrant pupils to the top of the class.
"If you walk through markets in Ramadi, surprisingly, you will see that they are absolutely flourishing," he says, sounding like a particularly intrepid Alan Whicker. "You have to push your way through the souks there, it's so crowded. Fallujah, too, has sprung back to life. That is not to say that al-Qa'eda is not trying to go back in there, or that there are not issues of violent criminals, or Mafia-like figures, or extortion artists, or a variety of other challenges, because they are all present."
His fear of being a false prophet is understandable. There have, after all, been numerous premature celebrations since the fall of Saddam's statue on April 9, 2003. The capture of the man himself eight months later, hailed as the final blow to the Ba'athist resistance, proved to be anything but.
The elections of 2005, welcomed by President Bush as the "Purple Revolution", simply enshrined sectarianism as religious parties filled the vacuum left by 25 years of one-man rule. And the killing in 2006 of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qa'eda leader hell-bent on fomenting civil war, came too late to stop the momentum of the sectarian death squads.
Today, those highs and lows are marked on graphs in Petraeus's files, charting the rise and fall of daily attacks. A fan of statistics and a veteran of presentations to sceptical Washington audiences, he can analyse the death and destruction with all the deftness of a rep at a sales meeting.
There are the grim peaks that followed the al-Qa'eda bombing of the holy Shia shrine at Samarra in February 2006, when the monthly death toll reached 3,000. And here is the current "trough", which, according to the Associated Press news agency, translated into 739 deaths among Iraqi security forces and civilians this February. By any normal standards, they are dreadful figures. But out here, it's better than anybody dared hope.
"The attack levels have gone to a level not consistently seen like this since 2005," says Petraeus. "That is not satisfactory but it is significantly better than a year or so ago."
So what is the secret of the man who has achieved the seemingly impossible? At first glance, he doesn't show any obvious Hannibal or Henry V tendencies. The handshake is mercifully easier on the fingers than those of some of his colleagues and the manner is relaxed and friendly. But ask his soldiers about him and one often hears the kind of hyperbolic language more commonly reserved by Iraqis for praising revered Muslim imams.
"He is an amazingly dynamic and diverse thinker who transformed our efforts here in Iraq," said one US officer, who is not normally a man given to praising HQ. "He has changed the conditions in Iraq to such a degree that the people have started to believe in the future."
The adulation diminishes little among America's non-uniformed population, among whom Petraeus enjoys a kind of rock-star status. He seems at ease as a role model and is full of praise for what he sees as the "greatest generation" of young soldiers cutting their teeth out here. Petraeus's own CV shows him destined from an early age to become one of the top brass's brightest buttons.
Born to Dutch-American parents in Cornwall, New York, he graduated at the top of his class at West Point Military Academy in 1974. In 1991, he nearly died without ever setting foot on a battlefield, after being shot in the chest in a training exercise. Tales of his subsequent recovery hint at his alpha-male qualities: friends say he persuaded the doctors to let him leave hospital early after getting them to pull the tubes out of his arm and performing 50 press-ups in front of them.
Today, aged 55, he is still a fitness fanatic, despite another near-fatal accident in 2000, in which he fractured his pelvis in a skydiving jump, after his parachute collapsed 60ft above the ground. Ambitious young officers who work with him are expected to participate in his early morning runs and, while it isn't officially a race, coming second is frowned upon. "The guy is real competitive," says one former colleague, who has sweated it out in many a sweltering Baghdad summer morning. "He will do everything he can to beat you."
Yet for all that, there is as much of the college professor about him as the football coach, hence his nickname, the "Warrior Monk". The holder of a PhD in international relations, he is the co-author of the US military's counterinsurgency field manual, which reveals him as much more of a "hearts and minds" adherent than many of his US colleagues.
As commander of the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion, he was known for asking embedded reporters "Tell me how this ends?", a catchphrase that suggested he was more aware than most of the problems that might lie ahead.
Based in the northern city of Mosul after the war, his troops built schools, water and sewage works, held local elections, and pumped money into their surroundings. It served as a model of how the occupation should have worked - until late 2004, six months after their departure, when al-Qa'eda militants stormed the city. The Iraqi policemen whom Petraeus had trained melted away, along with most of the nation-building framework he had hoped to leave.
The way in which Iraq could confound even the most agile military minds was frequently cited two years later, as America debated what to do about the civil war. The country was such a basket case, went one argument, that it was no longer worth keeping a single American soldier there, never mind putting yet more in.
At a Pentagon meeting in December 2006, when President Bush tested support for a surge, his joint chiefs of staff were unanimous in believing it wouldn't work. Petraeus believed otherwise, but when he arrived in Baghdad in February 2007 and toured Ghazaliya, a once-affluent western suburb turned sectarian battleground, he began to wonder if his critics were right.
"It set in upon us as we patrolled that this was going to be extraordinarily difficult," he says. "Ghazaliya, a community that was fairly upper-middle-class, literally looked like a movie version of a Wild West town, with tumbleweed blowing down the streets, houses clearly unoccupied, and enormous scarring from battles. The damage was stark, it was obvious and very, very real." Did he ever think he shouldn't have taken the mission on? "About once an hour."
His response was to dominate the ground, taking US troops out of big barracks and moving them into small, makeshift bases in derelict offices and shopping malls, where they worked alongside Iraqi army and police units. A military version of bobbies-on-the-beat, the scheme benefited from the fact that many of the surge troops were no longer Iraq rookies but old hands on their third tour in four years, for whom the once alien landscape and its people were now as familiar as Texas.
There was also a subtle shift in attitude towards the opposition, at least in the language, and towards recognition that not all of them were evil. Whereas coalition commanders once talked about "good guys v bad guys", now there were "reconcilable" insurgents who could be persuaded to lay down their weapons, and "irreconcilables" such as al-Qa'eda, to whom the only answer was force.
Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Shi'ite Mehdi Army, found himself being addressed by US military spokesmen as "Sayed" Moqtada al-Sadr, a religious honorific in recognition of his militia's ceasefire. Previously, they had used a rather less respectful term: "murderer". Petraeus also did his best to get the warring sides to make peace among themselves, enlisting Britain's General Graeme Lamb, a veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process, to help form a special "reconciliation cell" that held secret meetings with insurgent leaders in hotels in neighbouring Jordan.
"A great man, he gave some wonderful insights as we were establishing this intellectual construct that talked about reconcilables and irreconcilables," says Petraeus. "The counterinsurgency manual discusses this, but we were really applying it. You cannot kill your way out of an insurgency of this magnitude, you have to get as many people as possible to become part of the solution, rather than part of the problem."
That may also prove to be his Achilles' heel. The most prominent of Petraeus's "reconcilables" so far have been the units of "concerned local citizens" (CLCs), the euphemism for the former Sunni militiamen whom the US has recruited as poachers-turned-gamekeepers against al-Qa'eda. The official version of events is that they represent the "honourable" resistance, whose main concern previously was to defend their own communities from Shia militants and who had no interest in al-Qa'eda's extremist agendas. But while working with them has led to a dramatic reduction in attacks, many fear it is a pact with the devil.
"The guys in the CLC units are the same guys who were in al-Qa'eda," says one Iraqi. "Before, they were using the knife to cut people's throats; now they are taking the gun and getting paid by the Americans."
It is a criticism made also by the Shia-dominated Iraqi government, which fears the CLCs will simply become new and more organised Sunni militias, willing to grant the Americans short-term peace in order to start the "real" civil war once they pull out.
"It is clear that there are some concerns from the government of Iraq, understandable ones, and we have concerns too - some of these individuals undoubtedly have blood on their hands," admits Petraeus. So what would he say to someone who saw a former al-Qa'eda man now dressed in a policeman's uniform? "You would have to ask them what was the situation before and what is the situation now. Would they rather have individuals still killing and adding fuel to the sectarian fires that almost consumed Baghdad? Iraq was clearly on the brink of civil war and it has come back from that, and part of the process is just to get people to stop shooting."
So to borrow his own phrase, how does this all end? That is, for now at least, a question he prefers to ask rather than answer. When will US troops finally leave, I inquire. And was Britain really right to scale down its presence in Basra? In response to both questions, there is a long, detailed analysis, one that would take an Iraqi interpreter hours to translate at any Green Zone press conference, but which boils down effectively to just two words: "No comment."
Petraeus is, like all generals at his level, a politician as much as a warrior, although contrary to reports - and, it would seem, the express wishes of some of the American public - he has no wish to run for president when his work in Iraq is over.
Pressed hard, he does finally crack on one question. Who would play him in any future movie? He laughs and blushes. "There have been book offers and other things, and obviously I am not thinking about any of those at the moment. But I am hopeful - joking, of course - that Harrison Ford is in good shape."
You heard it here first. How the East Was Won, starring Harrison Ford as General David Petraeus, coming to a cinema near you, maybe sooner, maybe later. Right now, though, it's still very much a working title.