The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (37 page)

The protocols sounded almost more sociological than military, the product of a university rather than of a battlefield. They ranged from entering previous no-go zones to more widely dispersing troops in Iraqi neighborhoods. In addition, the president formally announced that General Petraeus would succeed General George Casey as commanding general of multinational forces in Iraq. In general, Bush’s announcement was greeted by disdain. Senator Joe Biden a week later introduced a Senate resolution opposing the surge. Senator Obama added another, calling for a mandatory phased troop withdrawal. Yet among a small number of analysts and officers, and the shrinking number of war supporters, the news of a surge at last brought relief—and even greater hope that the taciturn Petraeus would be at last given a chance to win the peace.
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By June 2007, all five new brigades were in Iraq. With some 150,000 aggregate ground troops at his disposal, Petraeus was at last fully implementing the long-promised strategy. He tasked them with securing Baghdad, the surrounding Sunni areas in Anbar Province, and the mixed Sunni-Shiite Diyala Province. Quite abruptly, counterinsurgency strategy became the new American gospel throughout Iraq. Past tribal violence and anti-American terrorism were no longer to be consistently considered proof of lasting enmity. Instead, once-hostile civilians were invited back into the government. Insurgents were coaxed to either lay down their arms or, better yet, switch sides, through a variety of financial inducements and political strategies. The message went out that Americans were not going to leave according to predetermined and political timetables, but only when the new Iraq democratic state was secure and free of its enemies.

In these first few months of the surge, both American and Iraqi casualties skyrocketed. That was not surprising as high-profile patrols increased and coalition forces went into previously no-go insurgent strongholds. Back in Washington, even though the surge was just weeks old, nervous members of the administration began worrying about the political fallout over possible failure. Republican senators and congressional representatives, still smarting from the 2006 midterm rebuke, pressured for some sort of political settlement—even without progress on the battlefield. The new CENTCOM commander in the Middle East, Admiral William J. Fallon—before his removal a year later—did little to facilitate the strategy or the sending of more troops into Iraq, perhaps reflecting the resentment of the Joint Chiefs, who, after all, had suffered an end run by surge proponents.

Yet for all the politicking, by midyear 2007 there was some sense that the surge was gaining momentum in securing the country. The additional numbers of American troops had helped, but the change of tactics was even more important as Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, commander of Multi-National Force–Iraq, began reassigning even pre-surge troops out of their forward operating bases and into smaller outposts inside Baghdad’s neighborhoods. In the past such a conspicuous presence was seen as needlessly provoking Iraqi sensitivities; now ubiquitous Americans (with their Iraqi counterparts alongside) on the streets and sidewalks were intended to reassure civilians that they would be safe when they either joined Americans or fed them intelligence about insurgents and terrorists in their midst.
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Baghdad was not only Iraq’s largest city and capital, but symbolic of the entire country. With new surge troops, General Odierno soon began to ring the city. Five brigades through much of 2007 were monitoring entry and exit, hunting down bomb factories and weapons caches, and organizing small urban renewal projects. But these preventive measures did not mean that the Americans did not seek to kill the enemy. In fact, while the media focused on stepped-up efforts at providing security and nation building, Odierno and Petraeus ordered a new all-out assault on terrorist enclaves. The names of the operations—Phantom Thunder, Phantom Strike, Lightning Hammer, Arrowhead Ripper—were reminiscent of General Matthew Ridgway’s own similarly branded offensives in 1951 to counterattack the Chinese and regain respect for American lethality. At the end of 2007, in Anbar Province, at the center of the violence, nearly seven thousand weapons caches were confiscated and thousands of terrorists killed. The Sons of Iraq, a popular Sunni movement to expel al-Qaeda, had helped to enlist over a hundred thousand militiamen—including thousands of Shiites—to join in operations with Americans against the terrorists. These new allies were an unexpected boon for Petraeus, even if their support was sometimes fraught with controversy, given that many of the Sons of Iraq had American blood on their hands as former insurgent terrorists—and were now receiving up to $300 a month as paid constabularies.

As a result of their movement into Iraqi communities, for the first time in the war, the number of American dead exceeded one hundred over three consecutive months, from April through June, 2007. Iraqi civilian losses stabilized and then fell to levels not seen since the insurgency and Shiite-Sunni strife had begun in earnest in 2006. To uninformed observers, getting out of the safe compounds seemed to translate into getting more Americans killed. Pressure mounted back home. In June, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) warned President Bush that the Petraeus half-year-old surge had already failed: “As many had foreseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results . . . The increase in US forces has had little impact in curbing the violence or fostering political reconciliation.” Almost immediately, the Democratically controlled House of Representatives went on record opposing the surge in a February 16, 2007, House Concurrent Resolution. Only a filibuster by a minority of senators prevented passage of the nonbinding resolution. Senator Barack Obama had a few days earlier called the surge a “reckless escalation” and had gone further
still by introducing legislation to remove all U.S. combat troops by March 2008.
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Then quite abruptly the violence began to taper off. American fatalities in July fell below a hundred. They would never exceed that monthly number again for the duration of the war. By fall 2007, Iraqi losses tapered off as well. Insurgents were increasingly hunted down and killed or captured, thanks to new cooperation from war-weary civilian informants. Although few prominent leaders in Congress had believed Petraeus’s September 2007 assurances that promised benchmarks—reduced levels of violence, more government services, and fewer American losses—were being met, it was clear by year’s end that almost all were exceeded in fact. In late December 2007, the well-regarded Brookings Institution scholars Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy senior fellow, and Jason H. Campbell, a senior research assistant, returned from Iraq to report to often stunned audiences that violence had dropped to 2004 levels and that the Petraeus pacification policy was in many areas already working.
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Iraqi government officials cited their own reduced casualties and the extension of government control over formerly insurgent territory. It was difficult to tell whether the so-called Anbar Awakening that had begun in spring 2006—in which Sunni tribal leaders turned against both al-Qaeda terrorists and ex-Baathists in their midst—was independent from, or fueled by, the subsequent American change in tactics and determination to stay and pacify Iraq. In June 2006, Army Colonel Sean MacFarland, along with Marine officers, had first met with Sunni tribal leaders in Ramadi and promised them aid. The subsequent surge incorporated the Awakening under Sheik Sattar, as well as the so-called Sons of Iraq—most prominently both by supplying them with money, and through biometric data distinguishing them from current terrorists and killers in their neighborhoods.

Tribal leaders had also by mid-2006 developed a healthy—and cumulative—respect for U.S. military lethality. Most were sick and tired of gratuitous al-Qaeda cruelty and extortion. Some were even eager for the American military to advocate their own seemingly neglected interests with the new Shiite-dominated Maliki government in Baghdad. Petraeus’s subordinates, laden with cash and reinforcements, tried to exploit all those fissures in isolating the terrorists—well before the president authorized greater troop levels. The emergence of Iraqi counterinsurgent forces would soon coincide with the arrival of more Americans.
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The second year of the surge, 2008, proved even more successful. In
July 2008, only thirteen American soldiers were lost. Baghdad turned mostly quiet—just thirteen months after the deployment of more American troops. Media accounts conceded that most political and economic benchmarks promised by Petraeus—under dispute throughout 2007—were being met and passed by late 2008. Oil production exceeded 2 million barrels per day. Rates of increases in Iraq’s GDP reached 7 percent per annum. Sunnis returned to parliament; former Baathists vowed to reenter politics. Almost all public criticism of Petraeus vanished. Indeed, the anti–Iraq War protests themselves dried up, which might have suggested to the enemy that there was no longer any chance that domestic opposition would result in a sudden withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Suddenly, by midsummer 2008, Iraq was no longer a key issue in the presidential race. It disappeared from the front pages of most newspapers and was no longer the lead story on the evening network news channels. Calls on the Democratic side for an immediate withdrawal were quietly dropped; campaign websites were scrubbed of their antiwar platforms. Even the acrimonious charges of the September 2007 hearings were forgotten. A new fallback antiwar position spread that Iraq was no longer “lost,” but that the current quiet had come too late and cost far too much—and could not be sustained. The evaluation of the surge quickly found itself embedded in election-year partisan politics. War critics insisted that it had not worked soon enough; supporters argued that Bush’s gamble redeemed the entire occupation. Such squabbling would go on until mid-2008, when the radical downturn in violence was then beyond dispute.
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Political bickering remained not over whether Iraq had drastically improved—it most unmistakably had—but whether such unforeseen success could really be attributed to General Petraeus and/or his surge. All sorts of alternate exegeses were advanced—some in part quite true, some transparently partisan revisionism: The U.S. announcement of not giving up had ipso facto convinced allied Iraqis to regain their confidence and the insurgents to lose their own. The early 2006 “Arab Awakening,” which saw thousands of former terrorists join the Americans in Anbar Province, almost alone had tipped the scales in reducing violence before the arrival of American reinforcements. The Iraqi hatred of al-Qaeda was such that by 2007 open civil war had erupted throughout Iraq, and the Americans simply piggybacked onto antiterrorist sentiment.

Still other critics of the surge argued that by 2007 the Americans had cumulatively killed so many insurgents and terrorists that there was
bound to be a turn of the tide, one that only happened to dovetail with the appointment of General Petraeus. Just as importantly, the Iraqi Security Forces, years in the making, finally reached critical mass in 2007 and were able to shoulder far more of the war effort. The world spike in oil prices sent extra billions into the Iraq economy that improved daily life. Diplomatic outreach and tough negotiations convinced Iran, Syria, and the Gulf monarchies to stop funding their respective terrorist appendages at previous levels of support. In short, reasons to account for the turnaround without necessarily directly crediting Petraeus or the strategy that sent him there seemed endless.
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Although traditional military analysts sometimes claimed that Petraeus had not taken the war to the enemy, in truth he and General Odierno killed and captured more enemy insurgents than at any other period of the conflict. It was largely seen as politically suicidal to boast of enemy losses—due to the memory of inflated body counts in Vietnam and sensitivity to newly allied and formerly hostile Iraqis. But one unemphasized feature of Petraeus’s public focus on nonkinetic operations and civilian outreach was a new latitude given to hunting down and killing al-Qaeda–related terrorists. By the end of 2008, American forces had killed or captured tens of thousands of them—there were soon twenty-four thousand prisoners in Camp Bucca alone—in addition to inflicting well over a hundred thousand casualties since the beginning of the war. Or, as one counterinsurgency officer later reminded Petraeus, “There was a lot of killing for the first six months of the surge in Iraq—you could call it compellence theory.” Was it incidental or integral to COIN strategy that public attention on social and economic reconstruction deflected focus away from more controversial increased killing of the “irreconcilable” enemy troops who had no intention of quitting—which in turn was essential in reassuring civilians to step up and participate in the new democracy? The question of what tactic actually brought the peace was never really answered; but it remained undeniable that the U.S. military had killed more insurgents than ever before—at a time when public attention was focused on the arguably less important aspects of nation building and winning hearts and minds.
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David Petraeus was an unlikely American warrior, and an even more improbable partisan lightning rod. He was at once bookish, academic,
and athletic, but of unassuming size and sometimes appearing tired and stooped. Petraeus had graduated forty-third in his class—in the top fifth percentile—at West Point in 1974, and then somewhat controversially two months later married his girlfriend, Holly Knowlton, the daughter of the superintendent, General William A. Knowlton, herself equally intellectual and a gifted graduate of Dickinson College. General Knowlton was a highly decorated combat veteran and polymath. He spoke several languages and was widely read among the officer corps—a role model who stressed to his new son-in-law the importance of combining academic training with military service. Whether or not Petraeus knew it at the time, he was already being pushed into an untraditional military that emphasized academic training rather than just armor, artillery, and traditional infantry combat experience while gaining a reputation for careerist savvy that would grow more controversial in later years.
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