The Fourth Star (22 page)

In the summer of 2003, the 101st Airborne Division stood out as the rare American success in Iraq. Congressional delegations, eager for good news, flocked to Mosul. And Petraeus didn’t disappoint. He bombarded them with PowerPoint slides cataloging the division’s accomplishments: the police force was growing, roads were being paved, the telephones worked, wheat was being harvested, and insurgents were being arrested. The VIPs stayed in the Ninewah Hotel, a formerly state-owned business that Petraeus had badgered the reluctant provincial governing council into privatizing. They met with Governor Basso.

Before leaving, they sat through a crisply produced twelve-minute video showing 101st soldiers arresting insurgents and fixing up Mosul. It ended with a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace” and Petraeus’s voice from a 101st Airborne Division memorial ceremony. “There is nothing tougher than the loss of a brother in arms,” he intoned. “We want to find meaning and purpose in such a loss. Above all we want to answer the question: What good will come from this?” As if to answer the question, a World War II black-and-white photo of exhausted 101st soldiers holding a Nazi flag morphed into a shot of three soldiers clutching an Iraqi flag in a bombed-out building. The final image was, of course, Petraeus’s idea, a way of harking back to the days of glory when the 101st had parachuted into the Normandy invasion and fought its way into Germany.

Petraeus believed in mythmaking. His peers referred to him somewhat derisively as “King David.” Even Petraeus would admit the nickname carried a grain of truth. “I don’t know where the King David thing actually came from, but you had to play that role a little bit,” he conceded. Iraqis craved strong leadership far more than abstract concepts such as democracy, and he was more than happy to provide it.

He had put his headquarters in Saddam’s northernmost palace, a fortresslike complex surrounded by man-made lakes and decorated with murals celebrating Mesopotamian warriors. He received visitors in his second-floor office, a large room with marble floors, a view of the Tigris River, and a latticework ceiling made to look like the drooping folds of a Bedouin sheikh’s tent. His days began at 5:15 a.m. with twenty minutes of answering e-mails. By six o’clock he and his aide had begun a blistering five-mile dash around the palace complex that took him past the Freedom Barbershop, the Freedom Shopette, and the Freedom Laundry Service. Then he took his morning briefing in a cavernous room with tiered stadium seating for his staff and two projection screens. The briefings always began the same way: “This is Eagle Six,” Petraeus would say, using his 101st Airborne Division call sign. “It’s another beautiful morning in the Tigris River Valley.”

He didn’t worry so much about what his brigade commanders were doing as long as they were spending money, which he used as the best measure of whether they were winning over Iraqis. “I noticed Third Brigade is ahead on projects this month. First and Second brigades, do you need some suggestions or some help keeping up?” he’d ask on the morning calls. Worried that the flood of reconstruction money would spur inflation, he decided to open the border to trade with Syria. Boosting the supply of goods, Petraeus reasoned, would offset the increased demand from the extra cash and keep prices low. One evening around eleven he told Colonel Hatch, his division lawyer, to draft the order and have it in his in-box by the next morning. Hatch wasn’t sure that he had the authority to open the border, so he crafted a vaguely worded “emergency” measure that would remain in effect “until revoked by a higher authority.” To justify it, he cited a speech from General Franks declaring an end to illegal roadblocks and checkpoints. “It was kind of a stretch,” he admitted later.

A couple of days later Petraeus and Basso flew to Rabiya, a dusty town
on the Syrian border, to sign the order and declare the crossing open. He loved to fly; the altitude gave him a perfect perch from which to inventory the 101st’s accomplishments for the
Washington Post
reporter traveling with him. He pointed out a caravan of fuel tankers ferrying gasoline into Mosul from Turkey. He and the military attaché in Ankara had worked with the Turks to make sure the fuel kept flowing. Mosul’s Olympic-sized swimming pool gleamed in the sun. Soldiers from the 101st had fixed it just a week earlier. A bit farther out combines harvested wheat. Petraeus set the prices over the objections of the CPA, which had initially demanded a free-market approach. He wanted to make sure farmers got at least 10 percent more for their crop than Saddam paid.

His helicopter landed at the border, kicking up a giant plume of sand, and hundreds of tribal dignitaries in robelike dishdashas rushed out to greet him. He gave a short speech on the benefits of trade with Syria and then, in accordance with local custom, sat down to consume a massive feast of goat and rice with his hands. Long after he was full, the grateful sheikhs continued to pile food on his plate. The CPA prohibited the Iraqis from levying tariffs at the crossing, but Petraeus arranged an “administrative fee” of $10 for a small truck and $20 for a big truck. Some of the money went to repair the border facilities and the rest went to enrich the tribes in the area. This was how business had been done for centuries, even under Saddam.

As he lifted off in his Black Hawk, Petraeus looked down on the throng of sheikhs below waving and cheering next to brightly colored tents. A bit farther out a long ribbon of trucks was streaming across the border. “Amazing, isn’t it?” he told the reporter with him. “It’s a combination of being the President and the Pope.” He caught a lot of flak for the quote from fellow officers who had long believed that the general’s ego and ambition were out of control. Years later he would still wish he had never said it. The truth was it captured a bit of how he felt.

Exasperated CPA officials complained that Petraeus’s quick elections had empowered too many Baathists and religious zealots. There were at least three or four provincial council members, including Governor Basso, who the CPA representative in Mosul said should be fired. Petraeus ignored her, maneuvering around Bremer’s de-Baathification decree wherever possible. At Mosul University the edict would have forced him to
relieve most of the school’s faculty. He handed the problem to Hatch, who unearthed a provision in the Geneva Conventions that required occupying powers to ensure the “proper working of all institutions devoted to the care and education of children.” Petraeus forwarded Hatch’s brief to Baghdad, arguing that he couldn’t sack the professors without violating the conventions. Bremer agreed to let him fire and then temporarily rehire teachers through the end of the school year.

“Petraeus was very clever but extremely egotistical,” said Dick Nabb, the senior CPA official in the Kurdish-dominated northern territories. “He wanted everyone to know there was a new king in the area.” Petraeus insisted that the Kurds fly the official Iraqi flag along with the Kurdish flag over their government buildings. It was his way of making clear that they were now part of the new Iraq, though it infuriated the Kurds, who had operated their own autonomous region for more than a decade. “What you are doing is like asking the Jews in Germany to serve under the swastika,” Nabb objected. The Kurds humored Petraeus, flying the Iraqi colors when he visited and promptly taking it down as soon as he left. “You need to remind him that we are not your enemies,” Massoud Barzani, who led one of the Kurds’ two major political parties, implored Nabb after Petraeus’s initial visit.

A man whose talents and energy had sometimes seemed too big for the Army now had a vast canvas on which to paint. Critics had to concede that he got things done. He dealt with Iraq’s chronic electricity shortages by cutting a deal with a rotund Turkish millionaire to ship heavy oil across the border in return for electric power from his privately owned plants. Neither Petraeus nor anyone on his staff knew the first thing about trading oil for kilowatts. So Petraeus gathered together a few officers and the former head of northern Iraq’s state-owned oil company. “You need to know enough so we don’t get swindled,” he instructed.

A few weeks later his oil task force began negotiating a similar deal with surly Syrian oil officials who had flown from the border to Mosul on one of his Black Hawks. The Syrians refused to even address their Iraqi counterparts. “You have been conquered and are in a subjugated state,” they insisted. So Petraeus’s team handled the deliberations. By day seven they
thought they were close to signing a deal, and the two delegations moved to a restaurant on the Tigris River. Several hours later Petraeus radioed Brigadier General Frank Helmick, who was leading the 101st team, to find out what was happening. “Well, we think we got it, but it’s not quite there,” Helmick told him.

Around 3:00 p.m. he radioed again. The Syrians were refusing to sign anything until they returned to Damascus and received formal government approval. “Don’t let them leave,” Petraeus ordered. When he arrived at the restaurant the delegations had retreated to separate rooms. Petraeus pulled aside the lone CPA representative on the U.S. team; the 101st had flown him up from Baghdad a few days earlier to help with the deal. “Can I just fly out to the border and throw open the valve without signing a formal contract?” Petraeus asked. Once the oil and the electricity were flowing, he figured, it would be too hard for the Syrians or the civilians in Baghdad to stop. The CPA representative, an Army lieutenant colonel, said okay. He wasn’t going to tell a two-star general no. Next Petraeus sat down with the Syrians. “Okay, it is now or never,” he finally said. They could open the valve that afternoon and sign the formal agreement sometime later or just forget about the deal.

The Syrians agreed to open it and the two delegations quickly hustled onto five helicopters. As the sun set, the Black Hawks touched down at a cluster of cinder-block and mud shacks a few miles from the border. A small band, hastily assembled for the ceremony, played an Iraqi tune. Petraeus, the senior Syrian official, and the former head of the northern Iraqi oil office turned the valve, sending oil flowing west. The Iraqis then pulled out a knife and slit the throat of a lamb, which gurgled and thrashed. Petraeus, the Syrians, and the Iraqis dipped their hands in the oozing blood and laid them on the pipeline.

The deal surprised Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was trying to freeze out Damascus, but no one countermanded it, and the oil continued to flow. The joke in the 101st was that Petraeus now ran the only division in the Army with its own foreign policy.

In August 2003 Abizaid arrived in Mosul, where Petraeus presented him with a list of everything he couldn’t get from Baghdad. The biggest shortfall was money; the division had reconstruction projects costing tens of millions of dollars that it wanted to do and a microloan initiative that needed funds as well. Petraeus also wanted more latitude to work with former Baathists. Too many of these people were being frozen out.

Abizaid agreed to help. But he had different reasons for coming to Mosul. He wanted to see the city and walk a patrol. He trusted his sense of the Arab world more than any intelligence report. Petraeus, meanwhile, was determined to make sure nothing happened to his four-star boss, and organized a massive security detail to go out with him. U.S. troops stood guard on almost every block and Apache helicopters cut tight circles overhead. As Abizaid’s convoy snaked through the city, hundreds of young men, drawn by the hubbub, rushed out of their homes to see what was happening. “Did you see the look on their faces?” Abizaid asked Brigadier General John Custer, his top intelligence officer, after returning to the palace. He was referring to young Arab men they had seen on the patrol. “A lot of those guys were wearing military uniforms a few months ago. They don’t see us as their liberators or their friends.”

Instead of the 101st Airborne acting as an all-powerful occupation force, what were needed were Muslim troops who could patrol alongside American soldiers and blunt the extremists’ message that the troops were anti-Islam, Abizaid insisted. A few weeks earlier he put together a list of potential allies he thought could help: Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Tunisia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. His best bet was to bring in the Turks. Before arriving in Mosul, he’d been in Ankara, where Turkish officials offered to send several thousand soldiers. Abizaid thought they should go to turbulent Anbar Province in western Iraq. The biggest hitch was the Kurds, who had their own centuries-old feud with Turkey and were likely to fight the deployment. Abizaid and Petraeus received the leaders of the two main Kurdish political parties, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, in Petraeus’s second-floor office. Abizaid knew both men from his 1992 relief mission in northern Iraq. Together he and Talabani had tried to calm the crowd that blocked his battalion from leaving.

Carrying themselves like Ottoman pashas, the Kurdish leaders took
seats on the overstuffed chairs in Petraeus’s office. “If the Turks move into Anbar, will you let them establish routes through your territory to supply their troops?” Abizaid asked. The Kurds grudgingly agreed to give the Turks safe passage.