PDA

View Full Version : The Gamble: General Petraeus and the Untold Story of the American Surge in Iraq, 2006



thedrifter
02-14-09, 08:17 AM
February 12, 2009
The Gamble: General Petraeus and the Untold Story of the American Surge in Iraq, 2006-2008

by Thomas E.Ricks

The Times review by Allan Mallinson

In his briefings to members of Congress visiting Iraq, General David Petraeus was fond of using Frederic Remington's 1908 painting The Stampede, which depicts a cowboy riding for his life as a herd of cattle panics under a breaking thunderstorm. The cowboy's pony is wild-eyed with fear, galloping hard, all four hooves off the ground. The cattle, horns down, are driving away from the storm, which is already beginning to douse them with sheets of rain. A long white streak of lightning in the black sky is striking near another cowboy and the animals in the misty distance - a murky, green-and-black haze of rain and storm.

Everything about the painting conveys the threat of chaotic danger. If the rider's pony trips and throws him to the stony ground, the man will be ripped by horns or pulped by pounding hooves. The image “is a metaphor really of the need to be comfortable with slightly chaotic circumstances”, Petraeus would tell his visitors (that “slightly” is telling). And he would go on to deconstruct the painting, calling it The Mesopotamian Stampede, explaining what perils the lightning might represent - improvised explosive devices, say - who the rustlers are (they don't appear in the painting), and so on. He didn't show the image to Iraqis; he said it was more useful to Americans. “We're just trying to get the cattle to Cheyenne.”

Thomas Ricks, the senior Pentagon correspondent at The Washington Post, tells this story to shine a light through the veil of inscrutability that masks this singular US general, the pivot on which the book turns but by no means the only actor in the story of “the Surge”. Ricks's first book, Fiasco (2006), told how the US Army came to the brink of defeat in Iraq without recognising it. Scarcely could he have imagined the twist the story would then take; how “almost at the last minute, and over the objections of nearly all relevant leaders of the US military establishment, a few insiders...managed to persuade President Bush to adopt a new, more effective strategy built around protecting the Iraq people”. It would make a great film.

Here's how bad things were before the change of strategy. At about 7.15am on November 19, 2005, in the town of Haditha - on the Euphrates, 150 miles northwest of Baghdad - a roadside bomb blew apart a 20-year-old US Marines corporal and wounded two others. A white Opel sedan approached the shaken patrol. The Marines signalled it to halt and five young Iraqi men got out. “They didn't even try to run away,” an Iraqi NCO later told the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Some had their hands in the air when the Marines began to shoot them. Then an NCO urinated on the bodies.

The Marines began “running and gunning” towards nearby houses in the standard follow-up sweep. In the second house they killed seven of the family of eight, including a five- and a three-year-old. The sole survivor - a girl aged 13 who played dead - told the investigators: “The American fired and killed everybody.” The follow-up continued for some hours until the Marines called for a truck to come and pick up the bodies; 24 in all. Had there been a photographer it would have looked like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

What troubled the general commanding day-to-day operations in Iraq at that time, Lieutenant-General Peter Chiarelli, was not merely what had happened but that no one in the chain of command seemed to think that it was unusual. It was not a breakdown in discipline in the shock of the explosion, it was war, they seemed to be saying. A corporal told investigators: “While in the house which I identified as House No 2, I did identify some targets as children before I fired my weapon killing them. My reason for this is that House No 1 was declared hostile. While in House No 1 I was told that someone ran to House No 2 making it hostile... While in House No 2 Staff-Sergeant Wuterich fired shots into the room. This again made me think the house was hostile. I went to assist him and saw that children were in the room kneeling... My training told me that they were hostile due to Sgt Wuterich firing at them ... I am trained to shoot two shots to the chest and two shots to the head and I followed my training.”

The chain of command agreed that the Marines had followed their training. “No bells and whistles went off,” said Major-General Richard Huck, their divisional commander. It was, says Hicks, “the disturbing but logical culmination of the short-sighted and misguided approach the US military took in invading and occupying Iraq from 2003 through 2006: protect yourself at all costs, focus on attacking the enemy and treat the Iraqi civilians as the playing field on which the contest occurs.”

In fairness, the men at the top, the Coalition Forces Commander US General George W.Casey - and Chiarelli, his No 2 - had been trying to instil a new approach, setting up an in-theatre counterinsurgency school, but the overall “strategy” was to withdraw into larger, secure bases and operate from there, while handing responsibility to Iraqi security forces as fast as possible. It was an exit plan rather than a strategy to defeat the insurgency. Almost everyone in the political-military establishment saw it as the only course.

Almost, but not everyone. Three very senior officers, one of them retired, dissented, as well as a number of colonels who had seen for themselves that the alternative approach - getting closer to the Iraqi population rather than ratcheting up force protection - could work. Hicks's account of how these dissidents prevailed is plausible, though it depends largely on what he says people have told him. It could scarcely be otherwise without quoting Pentagon files, although he does include some illuminating documents. What is certain, however, is that a fourth senior commander, the Commander-in-Chief, President George W. Bush, made a U-turn. And if the outcome a few years hence is anything like a moderately peaceful Iraq, it will be well to recall that the decision to change strategy was his alone.

The filmic quality of the story comes as much from the character, appearance and situation of the three key actors as much as from events. All happen to be New Yorkers, which Ricks reckons is unusual: New York isn't known as a general-producing state. Retired General Jack Keane is a big old-fashioned-looking man who “bears a passing resemblance to the corrupt police captain shot by Michael Corleone in an Italian restaurant in The Godfather”. In his “den” in the Virginia suburb of Maclean, the former Vice-Chief of Army Staff conceives of the need to change course in Iraq, and that nothing will change unless he changes it. General Keane goes to Washington.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant-General David Petraeus, not long back from the No 2 command in Iraq, is heading to Fort Leavenworth to take over the army's doctrine and training schools, listening to recordings of his predecessor's end-of-command report as he drives alone across the prairie to Kansas. At Leavenworth he will assemble an unconventional team of academics and military to devise a new counter-insurgency doctrine, which the army's Chief of Staff has tasked him to write. Petraeus is a friend - protégé - of Keane's. Indeed, he probably owes his life to Keane after being accidentally shot during a training exercise when a colonel. Not only is Petraeus from New York, he is only 5ft 9in (1.52m), with a slightly awkward gait as a result of a parachuting accident; he bears, Ricks says, a passing resemblance to a chipmunk. But Petraeus is the only officer to have passed out top of both his Ranger course and the command and staff college - the embodiment of Mars and Minerva.

The third New Yorker is the 6ft6in Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno, who as a West Point cadet pitched against the greats of the New York Mets and as the general recently commanding the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq had come in for criticism for his troops' heavy-handedness. Odierno would be sent back to Iraq at the end of 2006 to Petraeus's old job, but before returning he would have a Damascene conversion, which even Ricks is unable entirely to explain. Odierno concludes for himself that the “strategy of exit” is wrong, that the army needs to get back among the Iraqi people and protect them from al-Qaeda and the militias - and that he needs more men.

It will prove a perfect triangulation of effort to turn round the US strategy in Iraq. Keane kicks open doors in Washington. Petraeus writes an imaginative new doctrine in which “the population...becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy”, and which the Army and Marine Corps take up with surprising alacrity and effectiveness. And the unimagined surge in troop numbers, which Keane and Odierno somehow manage to engineer, begins to make a difference on the ground. To cap it all, Petraeus returns on promotion as the Coalition commander in Baghdad, Odierno now his deputy. Hicks's account of this strategic heist is compelling, troubling, but ultimately inspiring.

“How does this end?” Petraeus had asked a journalist in the aftermath of the invasion, when he was commanding his airborne division in the northwest of Iraq. That, of course, remains the question. But the answer is not what it was in 2005, or even as the Democrats believed it to be in September 2007, when Petraeus gave his famous testimony to the congressional committees, when Senator Obama rambled and Senator Hillary Clinton bristled. The three New Yorkers, if Ricks is to be believed, lengthened the war for the US in Iraq, but they may have shortened the greater conflict. There again, at the congressional hearings Petraeus was unsure: when Senator John Warner of Virginia asked if the campaign in Iraq made Americans any safer, the general replied: “Sir, I don't know, actually.”

The Gamble: General Petraeus and the Untold Story of the American Surge in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas E.Ricks
Allen Lane, £25 Buy the book

Ellie