The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (33 page)

In late 2007, Senator Hillary Clinton in most polls led all her Democratic rivals for the 2008 party nomination. After Petraeus finished his testimony, she grilled the general and essentially called him untrustworthy: “I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief. Any of the metrics that have been referenced in your many hours of testimony, any fair reading of the advantages and disadvantages accruing post-surge, in my view, end up on the down side.”

It was hard to tell whether Clinton was accusing Petraeus of deliberately distorting data, or simply offering a disingenuous and false analysis of the otherwise reliable information that he had supplied to Congress. She seemed to be worried that her chief Democratic rival, Barack Obama—who was not a senator in October 2002 when Congress
(including Senator Clinton) had authorized the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein—had emphasized his far earlier antiwar pedigree. In any case, she had been on record by early 2007 as wanting a unilateral American withdrawal from Iraq: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em. It is my judgment that it is time for us to disengage from Iraq.”
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Most presidential hopefuls did not bother much with questioning Petraeus or Crocker at all. Senator Obama, for example, lectured both witnesses for seven minutes without pausing for a reaction from either—or posing a question. He concluded, “We have now set the bar so low that modest improvement in what was a completely chaotic situation, to the point where now we just have the levels of intolerable violence that existed in June of 2006 is considered success, and it’s not. This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake.”

In fact, candidate Obama’s present assessment was rather mild compared to his earlier negative assertions. But it fairly represented a growing American weariness with the five-year-old war. He had greeted the announcement of the Petraeus surge in January 2007 with an especially pessimistic forecast: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” If there was any doubt of Senator Obama’s contention that the surge was not only not working, but making things worse, he had made his views even clearer four days later following the hearings: “I don’t know any expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.” In January 2007 he had already called for all American combat forces to be completely withdrawn from Iraq by March 31, 2008—with the departure of troops to start before the surge had even begun. Even as the surge had proceeded, Obama persisted in declaring the troop increase a failure—to the approbation of both a growing antiwar base and a majority of Americans. While campaigning in New Hampshire on July 20, 2007, for example, Obama had stated as fact the surge’s failure: “Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked.”
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By the time of the hearings it was clearly advantageous for candidate Obama’s budding foreign policy reputation to remind the country that he had long predicted the present failure. Now on national television, he, like other senators, was not prepared to let General Petraeus get away with what he felt was a false impression that the surge was working or that his own earlier prognostications were flawed.

A more seasoned presidential contender, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joe Biden—who had visited Iraq frequently—on the day before the hearings had preempted Senator Clinton’s dismissal of Petraeus’s testimony by assuring the country that Petraeus was “dead flat wrong.” The next day, during the actual proceedings, Senator Biden questioned the general’s statistics, provided his own anecdotes about the impossibility of traveling in Iraq, and tutored Petraeus on the senator’s own partition plan to set up contiguous independent Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni enclaves—a trisection proposal that he would soon push through the Senate on a nonbinding resolution that was to be largely forgotten as the violence subsided.
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The influential Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, while not a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had already gone further than any congressional critic of the war. In April 2007—five months before the hearings—Reid had proclaimed that “this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” Not much later, Reid, like others, once again questioned Petraeus’s optimism on the surge: “He’s made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual.” Meanwhile, outside the hearing, committee member and presidential candidate Senator Dodd scoffed that Petraeus was engaging in “happy talk.”
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The senatorial consensus was that General Petraeus was not telling the truth, even under oath—an appraisal shared by many liberal House members as well. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Lantos of California, blasted Petraeus and Crocker with more euphemisms for dishonesty: “We can no longer take their assertions on Iraq at face value.” Petraeus and the surge were a political hot potato as public opinion continued to swing sharply against the war. The general was in danger of being reduced to a partisan defender of an unpopular administration rather than a military officer trying to win a lost war for his country.

Some of the popular reaction was just as harsh about Petraeus himself. Perhaps the nadir came on the very first day of his testimony. On September 10, 2007, the
New York Times
ran a
MoveOn.org
ad—at a generous discount of less than half the normal advertising rate and contrary to its own policies of not accepting ad hominem ads—with the provocative headline GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US? The ad went on to suggest that the general was a liar and perhaps even traitorous: Petraeus was supposedly a commander “constantly at war with the facts,” in “an unwinnable religious civil war.” The ad further predicted
that “Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.”

Few senators, and fewer even in the media, could appreciate that in fact the surge was already starting to bring some calm to Iraq, despite the increase in violence for the twelve-month period following mid-2006. Indeed, though 2007 would prove to be the costliest year since the start of the war in terms of lost American lives, combat fatalities nonetheless would be more than halved in 2008—and then halved again in 2009. Even more telling, by the time of the September congressional hearings, Iraq civilian deaths had, as Petraeus pointed out, already dramatically plummeted in just a year, from 3,389 in September 2006 to 752 in September 2007. These figures did not necessarily suggest that the insurgents were losing the struggle—only that the American military had a chance to gain more time to stabilize the country.

There was still no indication in September that in just a few weeks’ time, American casualties would abruptly drop to twenty-three dead in the month of December 2007. That would be the lowest monthly figure since early 2004, when the violence had erupted into open warfare. The more Petraeus attempted to convince Congress by his own preliminary data that the incipient surge was beginning to work in calming Iraq, the more his inquisitors ignored his testimony and played to the general public anger.
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The entire mood of the country—and well beyond America’s shores as well—had been polarized since before the war began, in a fashion not seen since the Vietnam War years or perhaps the pre–Civil War era. Michael Moore, the controversial documentary filmmaker, had seemingly wished for an insurgent victory—comparing the insurgents in Iraq to Americans’ revolutionary forefathers. Apparently, Moore envisioned American casualties as a sort of penance for our unwise and immoral involvement: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush? . . . I’m sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe—just maybe—God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.”

Even greater anger against the war had emerged in a variety of venues. A 2004 novel by Nicholson Baker,
Checkpoint,
contemplated the assassination
of the wartime commander in chief George W. Bush—a topic again taken up in a later film shown at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, the International Critics Prize–winning “mockumentary,” Gabriel Range’s
Death of a President.
In a 2004 op-ed in the British
Guardian,
one Charles Brooker had wished out loud for a return of John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald (“Where are you when we need you?”). This global animus toward George W. Bush seemed to rub off on any civilian or military official who agreed that the controversial decision to go into Iraq did not necessarily need to end in the loss of the country to insurgency and an abject American withdrawal. Many officers privately no doubt objected to the strategic rationale of going into Iraq in the first place, but still felt that the only thing worse than fighting a poorly conceived war was losing it.
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But how exactly had a previously little-known and apolitical General David Petraeus ended up in this maelstrom of trying to save an orphaned war—one authorized by both houses of Congress, once supported by 70 percent of the American people, and just a few years earlier seen as the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s successful efforts to destroy the nexus between Middle East authoritarians and international terrorism?

There was a variety of reasons, some understandable and others less so, why the public welcomed this second, and clearly more controversial, post-9/11 war. As a practical matter, the prior Afghanistan intervention—begun eighteen months earlier, on October 7, 2001—had seemingly gone brilliantly, with 88 percent of the public voicing support even as experts warned that the country was “the graveyard of empires” and could never be kept free of the Taliban. Yet the last cadres of the ruling Taliban were expelled from most of the cities of Afghanistan by December 17, 2001, just nine weeks after the invasion—at a cost of only twelve American dead. By January, Afghan tribal elders were meeting in Europe to form a quasi-constitutional state. In 2001, the notion that Taliban diehards would still be killing Americans a decade later seemed remote.

The United Nations had sanctioned the occupation of Afghanistan. European members of NATO, as they had in the Korean War, pledged to send peacekeeping troops to oversee what appeared to be an amazingly
abrupt transition from theocracy to some sort of democracy. If Afghanistan had been liberated in less than nine weeks, with a consensual government in place in four months, then Saddam’s Iraq—which the U.S. military had already defeated easily in 1991—in such a comparative calculus might be overrun in a three-or-four-week “cakewalk,” followed by an interim government within a year. At least that was the thinking among some of the more optimistic proponents of the war and perhaps the public at large.
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On October 11, 2002, the U.S. Congress approved, by wide margins in both houses, a joint resolution authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein. In some sense, this act was merely a restatement of a prior 1998 congressional authorization for “regime change” in Iraq, supported and signed by Bill Clinton. Apparently a majority in Congress felt that after twelve years of a cold war with Saddam Hussein, characterized by constant patrolling of Iraqi airspace, it was time to confront the regime—especially given Saddam’s occasional support for terrorists of various sorts in a post–September 11 climate. At the time, many of America’s traditional allies—the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Poland, Australia, and others—accepted that the American decision to force Saddam Hussein to comply with UN resolutions was the right one, even if the UN Security Council finally balked at authorizing a war to remove the Iraqi regime, and there were loud NATO dissenters such as France and Russia.
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The U.S. Congress accordingly cited twenty-three causes for war. Almost every writ imaginable was included in the resolution for the use of armed force. The congressional checklist ranged from Saddam’s genocidal practices (“by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace and security in the region”) and his subsidies to terrorists of all stripes (“to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations”) to his trying to kill former president Bush and opposing the enforcement of UN resolutions (“attempting in 1993 to assassinate former president Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council”).
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Most of these congressional authorizations were strangely ignored by the Bush administration over the next five months, at least in a general debate over the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein. Instead, the administration would commit what turned out to be the most grievous error of its eight-year tenure, by focusing on only one theme of the wide-ranging
twenty-three congressional proclamations: the danger of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Apparently administration planners thought that an existential danger might rally the public to war in a way that Saddam’s prior acts of genocide, attempts to kill a U.S. president, cash subsidies to Palestinian suicide bombers, or sanctuaries for wanted international terrorists would not. The result was that in the short term, most Americans believed that their government was moving to obliterate supposedly vast WMD stockpiles in Iraq.

The WMD argument was compelling, but the administration had in effect put all their eggs in one basket. The war was sold on an effort to strip Saddam of his WMD arsenal—a dubious proposition given the inadequate intelligence surrounding the closed Baathist police state. Despite a growing antiwar movement, and the failure to prove a connection between Saddam and the 9/11 terrorists, the public was convinced by the Bush administration’s insistence on the dangers of WMDs that the war was necessary. It also trusted that it would be no more difficult than had been the removal of the Taliban, with a consensual government rapidly installed in Saddam Hussein’s place. Worse still, when WMDs were not found as anticipated, the administration did not rely on the other writs of the congressional decrees, but instead post facto changed the reason for the war to a new emphasis not approved by Congress—namely, spreading freedom and liberty in the Middle East.