The Fourth Star (43 page)

The daily briefing began when Petraeus strode into the palace’s first-floor amphitheater. Several dozen officers, sitting behind long tables and slender microphones, sprang to their feet.

“Good morning,” Petraeus mumbled as he took his seat before the wall of screens displaying PowerPoint slides and images of colleagues connected via secure video from other spots around Baghdad. He uncoiled his microphone, and his aide rushed over with hot coffee in a black 101st Airborne Division travel mug.

“Okay, let’s go, please,” he said, and the briefing began.

Most generals used their morning briefing to stay abreast of the previous day’s attacks, raids, arrests, and reconstruction projects. Petraeus explained that his morning update was going to be different. Part of what made commanding in Iraq so hard was that the disputes driving the killing varied from city to city and even neighborhood to neighborhood. He knew he couldn’t dictate solutions to his battalion and company commanders. But he also couldn’t just allow everyone to stumble across their own answers. The morning briefing, he said, was going to be his mechanism for imposing his vision on a force of 170,000 troops sprawled across more than 120 combat outposts.

The way Petraeus operated was nothing like the conventional portrait of a wartime general. It wasn’t Patton, riding crop clutched tightly in his left hand, exhorting his soldiers from the top of a tank. Rather, it was the slight and scholarly Petraeus swirling his emerald-green laser pointer over pie charts and columns full of data. “I am going to manage you by slides,” he told his troops.

Orchestrating the briefing was an art, Petraeus believed, one he had perfected over years of command. When he was running it, his voice deepened and his back, normally pitched slightly forward, straightened a bit. On a typical day Petraeus covered forty-five to sixty slides, each of which would first be briefed to him by a colonel or a major. Intelligence, enemy attacks, Iraq’s sclerotic electricity output, and press coverage merited daily attention. Other areas of interest to Petraeus, including bridge and road reconstruction, chlorine supplies at water-treatment plants, oil exports, Iraqi politics, and even chicken embryo imports, were covered weekly. Most subjects that Petraeus added after he took over from Casey weren’t military problems. They were generally considered State Department or civilian problems that senior military officers, with the exception of generals such as Chiarelli, had explicitly avoided during the first four years of the war. Petraeus was now making them military problems.

In his baritone, Petraeus regularly asked incredibly detailed questions. A report about a bank branch that Finance Minister Bayan Jabr had shuttered in a Sunni neighborhood in west Baghdad prompted queries that lasted for weeks. The closing of the bank was a small piece of a broader effort by the Shiite-dominated government to starve Sunni neighborhoods of essential services. Petraeus wanted to know: Why had the Shiite finance minister closed the bank? How quickly could the local manager reopen it? How many guards did the bank need and what was the plan to train them?

Every morning Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Miller, a longtime Petraeus acolyte and Sosh refugee, would capture the queries and send them out to various combat units around the country. For all of his power, Petraeus was rarely in a position to dictate solutions. But by asking questions he could nudge his troops to search for answers.

The broken-down electricity grid got the same treatment as the Baghdad bank. In four years the United States had pumped more than $4 billion
into the electrical system, yet somehow daily output had fallen. Many Iraqis were livid. Petraeus didn’t know a lot of Arabic, but the words
maku karaba
, “no electricity,” were burned into his brain. In early March Petraeus latched onto a single electrical transmission tower southwest of Baghdad that was known as Tower 57. Insurgents had toppled it with a bomb more than a year earlier. Morning after morning for months Petraeus leaned into his microphone and, with all of Al Faw Palace and much of the Green Zone listening, he badgered Major General David Fastabend, the senior operations officer on his staff, about fixing Tower 57. Fastabend knew what Petraeus was doing. “It wasn’t just the tower to him,” Fastabend recalled. “The tower became a symbol of things that were broken in Iraq and never got fixed.” It was an emblem of the Army’s exhaustion and frustration.

The daily grilling about Tower 57 was humiliating for Fastabend. At times he doubted that Petraeus understood the magnitude of the electricity problem, which included a corrupt, incompetent ministry, surging demand, and regular insurgent attacks. “This is the most intractable damn thing in the world,” Fastabend groused. Petraeus didn’t seem to care. With Petraeus breathing down his neck, Fastabend hatched myriad schemes to fix the tower. Contractors were hired, paid, and then fired for refusing to finish the work in what was still insurgent-controlled territory. About thirty Iraqi soldiers then escorted government repairmen to the site, but the workers were spooked by snipers and fled. Finally the fed-up electricity minister refused to send another repair team until the United States guaranteed the area was secure. Petraeus sent a letter to Prime Minister Maliki complaining about the electricity minister’s foot-dragging. He also harangued the U.S. Army unit responsible for the insurgent-controlled area around the tower, known as the Triangle of Death. “You need to figure out what it is going to take to get the tower fixed,” Petraeus said. He didn’t care if the division moved its entire headquarters to the site of the toppled tower.

The operation to fix the tower was a massive military assault. More than 400 Iraqi soldiers, four Apache helicopters, and a U.S. team equipped with special vehicles to clear roadside bombs were mustered to protect a ten-man repair crew for a week. The Iraqis took eleven casualties.

Fixing Tower 57, which was just one small piece of a dilapidated 400-kilowatt line, hardly fixed the electricity problems. In fact, engineers had already figured out a way to make do without the tower, routing power into Baghdad via another line. Nor would fixing it stop insurgents from toppling another tower elsewhere. The big steel pillars were easy pickings. Still, Petraeus believed that fixing the tower sent a message to the enemy about U.S. resolve. It also sent a message to his men. “If the commander day after day is asking about Tower 57, then you probably take a look in your own area of responsibility and ask, ‘Are there other Tower 57s in our area? What are we doing about them?’” Petraeus recalled.

Petraeus’s first few months were brutal. As U.S. troops pushed into neighborhoods they hadn’t previously occupied, Sunni and Shiite extremists counterattacked, blowing up bridges, destroying mosques, and leveling markets. The U.S. death toll was especially heavy. More soldiers and Marines died during the spring of 2007 than during any previous period of the war. Insurgent bombs were growing larger and more lethal—big enough to flip a thirty-five-ton Bradley fighting vehicle and kill the six soldiers and the interpreter inside. Attacks, such as the May kidnapping and mutilation of three U.S. soldiers just a few miles from Tower 57, had become increasingly sophisticated and grisly.

Petraeus knew that sooner or later troops would hit their limit. The fighting and casualties didn’t harden soldiers. It broke them. Eventually discipline problems and suicides, which had risen with each year of the war, would spike. Reenlistments would plummet, just as they had during the latter days of the Vietnam War. “I’ve occasionally wondered if there’s some sort of bad-news limit,” Petraeus confessed in mid-May after eleven soldiers and Marines were killed in a day. “How much tragic news can you take in one lifetime?” The Army seemed well on its way to finding out.

In May 131 soldiers were killed, the second-highest total of the war. Some Republicans were openly talking about supporting legislation to change the strategy in Iraq and start bringing soldiers home. Petraeus was running out of time. On June 3 he attended the weekly meeting that Prime Minister Maliki held with his generals and senior ministers in the presidential
palace in the Green Zone. The Iraqis took their seats around a conference table. Petraeus grabbed a chair away from the fray, near a massive mural of broad-backed workers toiling in factories and on farms—a relic of Saddam’s Stalin fixation. While the Iraqis argued in Arabic, he read through a draft of his weekly letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The letters were a Sunday afternoon ritual. Without Gates’s support, Petraeus knew, he’d have little chance of sustaining his current strategy. In contrast to Rumsfeld, who’d deluged Casey with irrelevant snowflakes, Gates worked to build a consensus among moderates in Congress for a long-term commitment to Iraq. He also pushed the military to spend more money on weapons and equipment of immediate use in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus’s letters shaped the secretary’s understanding of the war. He also used them to organize his own thoughts.

“It’s been a difficult week to characterize,” Petraeus began in the June 3 letter, rattling off the week’s death and destruction. Three mosques had been destroyed in a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in southwest Baghdad, sectarian murders were up over the previous week, five British contractors had been kidnapped, and two helicopters had crashed. He saved one intriguing development for the end: “For the first time we saw the Sunni population in Baghdad start to fight back against Al Qaeda in Ameriyah,” he noted. It was too early to tell if the small group of fighters in the west Baghdad neighborhood was connected to the tribal revolt against Al Qaeda-affiliated groups that was sweeping through Anbar Province. “But nonetheless it is another data point that suggests that average Iraqis don’t want what Al Qaeda is offering,” Petraeus continued. “We helped the element and we’ll see how it evolves. I suspect the Iraqi government will have significant qualms.”

Petraeus didn’t describe the fighting, which unfolded only a few miles from Al Faw Palace. Days earlier Lieutenant Colonel Dale Kuehl, the battalion commander in charge of the area, had received a call from the Firdas mosque, located in the west Baghdad neighborhood. “We are going after Al Qaeda,” Sheikh Khaled, a prominent Sunni imam, told him. “What we want you to do is stay out of the way.”

“Sheikh, I can’t do that,” Kuehl replied. He spent twenty minutes trying to convince Khaled to work with his troops to kill the Al Qaeda fighters.
But Khaled wouldn’t budge. On May 30, mosque loudspeakers throughout Ameriyah broadcast a call to war. Dozens of young men armed with Kalashnikovs, pistols, and hand grenades swarmed into the streets and attacked the extremists, who launched their own brutal counterattack the next day. Khaled barricaded inside the Firdas mosque and, surrounded by dead bodies, called Kuehl again, begging for help. The forty-one-year-old commander rushed two platoons of troops in armored vehicles to drive off the enemy.

As Petraeus was writing to Gates, Kuehl was meeting for the first time with the military leader of the Ameriyah fighters, who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Abed. A short, chubby man in his late twenties with a wispy goatee, he appeared to be in charge of about a dozen men. The meeting, which took place in the battered mosque, didn’t go well. Exhausted from two days of nonstop fighting, Abu Abed insisted that his men take over security for all of Ameriyah. He was suspicious of U.S. forces and feared the Shiite-dominated army units in his neighborhood. Kuehl countered that he wanted the right to approve any moves by the fighters.

The two men eventually agreed to conduct a trial mission together on June 4. It was an alliance of desperation. The Americans were Abu Abed’s last hope. Sunni religious extremists were determined to kill him; if they didn’t succeed, Abu Abed feared, the Shiite-dominated army would arrest him for his past ties to the insurgency. Kuehl, meanwhile, was still reeling from the worst month of his tour. He had lost fourteen soldiers in the previous thirty days. He was ready to take a risk.

The fledgling alliance in Ameriyah was just the sort of opportunity that Petraeus had been hoping for. His counterinsurgency manual placed a heavy emphasis on co-opting locals. “These traditional authority figures often wield enough power to single-handedly drive an insurgency,” the manual states. Casey had made some effort to talk with insurgent leaders, but he had been limited by the Bush administration’s reluctance to negotiate with the enemy. Petraeus had a freer hand, and he used it.