Deconstructing Petraeus
A critic and a champion review the general's Capitol Hill testimony.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Dan Ephron
Newsweek
Updated: 2:33 p.m. ET Sept 11, 2007

Sept. 11, 2007 - Did Gen. David Petraeus win hearts and minds in Congress yesterday with his boyish straight talk and his polychrome data sheets? Or was it political kabuki? For divergent views, NEWSWEEK’s Dan Ephron spoke with the Brookings Institute’s Michael O’Hanlon, who wrote in July that Petraeus was turning Iraq around, and with military historian Richard Kohn of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who thinks the general has a credibility problem. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Gentlemen, what was the most compelling point Gen. Petraeus made in the hearing?
Michael O’Hanlon: I didn’t hear a lot of radically new information, and I think the main importance of the hearing was to get beyond some of the fairly silly attacks on his credibility that I think have been unfortunate. At one level, generals don’t deserve any immunity, and there are generals in the past I would be critical of for their roles in certain debates. But I don’t believe that’s the right way to interpret Gen. Petraeus’s role. And I think it was apparent to most people listening that he’s a fairly straight shooter and he wasn’t trying to sell an overly rosy picture of Iraq.… I think the most obvious factual thing I learned from him is his plan for drawing down forces together with his assertion that [Centcom Commander] Admiral [William] Fallon fully supports that plan along with the rest of the Joint Chiefs.

The plan calls for a drawdown of 30,000 troops by next summer. Was that a surprise to you?
O’Hanlon: I think it was more specific than I expected. I thought he would give an indication of how many forces he might hope to start reducing by the spring, and I thought the number would be a little less. It was just more specific and maybe a slightly deeper reduction than I expected.

Professor Kohn, what in your mind did Gen. Petraeus omit, if anything, and what about the issue of the withdrawal?
Richard Kohn: Well, I was also surprised by the specificity of his remarks and the fact that he would project that he could essentially remove all of the soldiers and marines of the surge by the summer. What he does by that is make a projection that the security situation, as he defines it, will continue to improve. I think what he omits … is that the security situation is purely a tactical or operational goal, that the real issue is the ability of the Iraqis to come together on some fundamental agreement on what kind of society they want to have. Gen. Petraeus says the most important thing is the attacks on Al Qaeda by Sunni groups that are now aligned with us, but the true source of instability and military danger to Iraq is sectarian violence. And while that appears in his statistics to have declined, it’s by no means clear it’s not simply being suppressed by the increased American presence. There’s no indication, really, that the sectarian divide has some solution in the foreseeable future.


You’re saying, in other words, that Gen. Petraeus largely ignored the benchmarks--those yardsticks that were supposed to measure, among other things, conciliation between Sunnis and Shiites.
Kohn: I think that’s right. And I want to respond to one point that Dr. O’Hanlon makes about the general’s credibility. Any credibility problems that Gen. Petraeus has are partly his own making--because he allowed himself to be pushed forward by the administration as kind of a front person for them and has been engaged in a constant dialogue with the press since he went to Baghdad. Had he been much more quiet, got on with fighting the war and told people to wait for his report to Congress, it would have been less likely that he would have had to suffer these attacks in the press and from Democratic support groups.

So, Dr. O’Hanlon, did the administration set up Gen. Petraeus to be the lightning rod, and did he play into it by continuously putting himself out there?
O’Hanlon: I don’t agree. Gen. Petraeus was in the public eye and put himself there because he knows in this sort of operation American support for what we’re doing is critical and the American public deserves information. If anything, I think they waited too long to put out information about various trend lines and in some sense put too much pressure on this one appearance instead of providing us information more steadily. I was struck when I was in Iraq in July by how much information was whispered in my ear or given to me in classified meetings--information I thought should have been public. If anything, I thought Petraeus should have been out there briefing more. I think the attacks on him have been unfounded, and frankly the reason is because he has become the face of this mission, a mission that is very unpopular, that’s become highly politicized in the United States. Gen. Petraeus is trying to serve his country at a time when he happens to work for a very unpopular president who I don’t much like either. But I don’t blame Petraeus for Bush’s mistakes.

What about the issue of political progress, or the benchmarks? Professor Kohn makes the point that Petraeus sidesteps the fact that there’s no political movement, which in the end will make or break Iraq.
O’Hanlon: In the parts that I heard, I do recall Gen. Petraeus mentioning several times the daunting challenges that remain and the terrible things that have happened to that country. I’m not so sure he’s selectively choosing the facts. But I do agree we have a huge substantive challenge before us in figuring out a way these indicators can add up to a general momentum. I don’t think we have an answer yet. There is not yet a compelling theory by which you take these positive trend lines and turn them into a general improvement in Iraq’s stability. The best I can do is to say that it’s a theory of hopefulness. If you are improving the political environment at the local level and the security environment generally, there is at least reason to hope people will gain back some of the trust they had in years past and potentially be able turn over a new leaf.


Professor Kohn, one of the things people accuse Gen. Petraeus of doing is cherry-picking the data. Unless you’re an expert on these things, it’s very hard to comb through the numbers and get a sense of what’s accurate. Did you feel there were moments he was cherry-picking or even being deceptive with the numbers?
Kohn: No, I didn’t. I think it would have been unwise of him to do any such thing because of course he’s being studied and picked over. He did point out that at least two of his methodologies were substantiated by American intelligence agencies. I don’t think it serves a useful purpose to haggle over the statistics.

One of the things your colleague, Professor Andrew Bacevich, wrote recently about Petraeus was that he needs to be “first with the truth,” paraphrasing a line from the counterinsurgency doctrine. Here he’s hoping to persuade Congress to let him keep his troop levels up. Was he being fully candid about the level of despair in Iraq?
Kohn: I think that goes to the heart of my mild disagreement with Dr. O’Hanlon on Gen. Petraeus’s modus operandi. It’s really not his job, in my judgment, to become the mouthpiece for the administration’s strategy and, really, the administration’s insistence on staying in Iraq indefinitely. And from that standpoint it seems to me he was trying to convince Congress to give American forces almost an indefinite time frame. He held out the promise at some further point to drop the American presence down dramatically. But that can work only … if you have a viable civic society and government behind your security forces that can bring the violence and the insurgency to heel. There are really no indicators for reversing the uptrend in sectarian hatred that burst forward with the Samara bombing in the spring of 2006. From all the reporting I read it has become more seriously embedded, and in fact hardened. I sensed no indication that Gen. Petraeus wasn’t telling the truth, but I did sense a certain spinning of his report to support the administration’s strategy and policy. And I think it’s really improper to put a military person in this situation. It’s not his function to sell the war. His function is to report on military developments.

Dr. O’Hanlon, you’ve written about timetables. Aren’t we talking about just 18 months that the U.S. has to improve the situation? Or can you imagine a new administration in ’09 continuing to wage this war?
O’Hanlon: That’s a good question, and let me note here that what I’m saying today is not a defense of President Bush, because he squandered four years. I’m extremely critical of him in the sense that this should have been our strategy all along. Today of all days, Donald Rumsfeld comes out with an interview in GQ magazine in which he’s saying that the reason Iraq is not working is because Iraqi politicians didn’t do their job. He will go down in my view as one of our worst secretaries of defense, because he deliberately threw away a very strong war plan that he inherited from Secretary [William] Cohen [President Clinton’s defense secretary] and General [Anthony] Zinni [former commander in chief of Centcom] and he went with something that caused us most of the problems we had. This Petraeus plan is four years too late, which is the main challenge.

Kohn: And I’d say, Dr. O’Hanlon, it’s too little, too. It’s a small surge in many ways.


O’Hanlon: It may be too little, but I was struck in Iraq that the current partnership, I think, is working fairly well in that we are now able to go to most parts of the country, including the most extreme safe havens. But I’m most distressed about the four years of chaos that led to the sectarian bitterness that you described so accurately, and it’s going to be extremely hard to redress in any viable time frame. In terms of our future, we could wind up with two choices next year at this time, one of them being the logic of the surge but at smaller force levels as the Iraqis are able to do more themselves. This would probably come from the Republican candidate, along with a promise to get troop numbers to under a hundred thousand within the first year but unfortunately to keep most of our troops in the most difficult places in the cities, where they’re doing a lot of fighting. This is a strategy that would keep U.S. casualties fairly high, about 30, 50, 70 a month. By contrast, another position, perhaps the Democratic position, might be to say we’re going to reduce our forces to the point where they’re primarily in the Green Zone, doing primarily counterterrorism missions to the extent we could get intelligence on Al Qaeda and perhaps a bit along Iraq’s borders to prevent a regional war.

Professor Kohn, do you want to respond to that?
Kohn: I think no matter who the nominees are they’re going to be under intense pressure to make promises and to be specific, and the Democratic candidate will push specific promises on the Republican. I think there’s a narrow set of choices for either one. It will all depend on the political progress in Iraq and the progress of the Iraqi security forces. Neither side will want a precipitous withdrawal, because the possibility of a massive bloodletting and radical Islam seizing a base in Iraq are simply too great. But I think the choice will be a speedier versus a slower withdrawal. And there are likely to be great arguments over what victory and defeat mean.

A last question, first to you, Dr. O’Hanlon: This testimony has been much anticipated, but does it really make a difference in terms of the freedom the administration will have tomorrow morning in prosecuting the war? Or is it mainly a few hours of good political theater?
O’Hanlon: It’s not theater. But I don’t think it’s going to matter that much in the short term for policy. I think it gets into the question of next year’s presidential race and how people begin to think through options for that. I think that Congress is almost certain to approve funding. They made it clear they don’t want a fight with the president over resources, so I think in the short-to-medium term we’ll feel this week was anticlimactic when all is said and done.

Anticlimactic, Professor Kohn?
Kohn: Yes, it is. But I would vote for a little more theater, perhaps, than Michael. I think this was inflated beyond historical precedent into something quite extraordinary by the desperation of the Bush administration to head off precipitate action in the Congress, and because of the Bush administration’s lack of support for its strategy. And I would return to the point that I think Gen. Petraeus himself encouraged the theater by continuing to communicate. It wasn’t his job to communicate progress, in my judgment. It was his job to fight the war and make an assessment when the time came. So the politicization and the theater was heightened by behavior on all sides, and it won’t decline between now and November 2008.

Ellie