The Fourth Star (20 page)

Petraeus took a seat in a passenger lounge where a couple of lieutenant colonels gave him an update. There was skirmishing in Arab neighborhoods on the city’s west side. The city jail had been looted and all of the police cars had been stolen or destroyed. Electricity had been out for two weeks, the hospitals were all closed, and government workers and the police were afraid to return to their jobs.

Over the next few days, about 5,000 soldiers, an advance guard from the 101st, poured into Mosul in a massive show of force. Dozens of Apache attack helicopters buzzed overhead. “We had, in a real sense, almost a degree of omnipotence, and you had to exploit that,” Petraeus recalled. He set up a temporary command post in the airport terminal and began to scratch out the closest thing that anyone had to a postwar plan. He didn’t know anything about Mosul. The division didn’t even have maps of the area. He was working mostly on instincts honed during his years in Haiti and a tour in Bosnia. At a minimum he decided that he needed money to pay civil service workers, buy police uniforms, and repair medical clinics, the radio station, the city jail, the bank, and the court system. He also wanted to hold elections quickly to choose a new Iraqi government for the north. Whoever was selected could at least help him figure out the basics: how to fix the power, the water, and the telephones.

He wasn’t waiting for instructions or permission—or, at this early stage, help. Before the invasion, he and his fellow division commanders had been promised that the Pentagon-funded Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) would handle rebuilding the country. “Just get us to Baghdad and we’ll take care of it,” the head of the organization promised. In reality, ORHA was a joke. Its office in northern Iraq consisted of six civilians, one satellite phone that was incapable of receiving calls, and a Hotmail account that no one checked. Less than a week after arriving Petraeus stood in a former Baath Party reception hall, in front of a gaggle of tribal sheikhs in gold-fringed robes, ethnic Kurds in baggy pants, former generals, and businessmen in shiny suits. Behind them were the smaller tribes and ethnic groups—Turkmen and wispy-bearded Yezidis and Shabaks from outside the city. Petraeus had organized a meeting of about two dozen Iraqis to hammer out an agreement on holding elections.

His team, which consisted of the division lawyer and a lieutenant who had worked for him in Bosnia, had trouble keeping track of the constantly expanding cast of characters. The roster from the April 30 meeting listed some of the members simply as “Iraqi expatriate from Jabouri tribe,” “Unidentified engineer,” “Yusef judge?” and “General D?” There had been lots of fighting about who would get chairs at the main table and who would sit in the lesser seats along the wall. The bickering, which the Iraqis resolved among themselves, proved to be an unexpected blessing. It was the only way Petraeus had to figure out who was really important.

No one was quite sure how to run the gatherings, so Petraeus presided as if he were leading a staff meeting at Fort Campbell. His lieutenant passed out an agenda. The first item was always “old business.” The night before the meeting there had been a hail of celebratory fire commemorating Saddam Hussein’s birthday. Some of the demonstrators shot at U.S. troops, who returned fire, killing three Iraqis. Petraeus said he hoped the killings would send “a clear message” to those who were trying to disrupt their efforts to build a new Mosul. He then laid out what the group had agreed to during a marathon session a day earlier: a caucus of 213 delegates representing the region’s tribes, ethnic groups, and political parties would select a provincial council and a governor, with each group allotted representatives based on their approximate population.

Almost immediately the arguments began. The Kurds and Arab tribes both insisted that they hadn’t been given enough delegates. One participant argued that the entire process was invalid. Before the 101st arrived,
4,000 prominent locals in Mosul had held their own election and picked fifty delegates who deserved seats in any new government. “We voted in this very building,” he shouted, and threatened to leave. Others maintained that Petraeus was allowing too many former Baath Party members who had supported Saddam Hussein to dominate the negotiations. “Any election held at this time will only benefit the old regime,” a Kurdish leader insisted.

In earlier meetings Petraeus had tried to calm arguments with lectures on the democratic process. “The beauty of this system is that everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” he told them. Now he was sick of the interminable debates and recriminations. If the Iraqis believed that they could roll over him and renegotiate every decision, they would never get anywhere. “Stop!” he yelled. “We are not going to begin each morning by renegotiating what we agreed to the night before. This will not happen, and if it does I will leave this room right now and we will cease this entire process.” He gathered up his papers as if preparing to storm out. Iraqis rushed over to him, promising not to revisit the previous day’s disputes. The proceedings still lasted six hours.

“An incredibly fascinating day,” Colonel Richard Hatch, the division lawyer, wrote that evening in the journal he kept on his laptop. He’d wedged his cot in the airport bathroom, which reeked of urine but was at least quiet. Petraeus was relying on Hatch’s legal training to help broker agreements between the feuding tribes. It was heady stuff for Hatch, who in his role as a military attorney was accustomed to playing second fiddle to swaggering combat officers. Still, he wondered if Petraeus’s energy and determination would be enough to keep the power-sharing deals from exploding on them. “The irony of us dictating to a group what they will do to achieve a democratic government was not lost on me,” he wrote.

The negotiations over the elections continued for nearly a week. Removed from the debates in Baghdad and Washington over which Baath Party members should be barred from the new government, Petraeus set his own policy. “Frankly, I would like to see discussion here of individuals rather than whole levels being excluded or included,” he told the Kurds who wanted to ban all Baathists. “If we draw the line too low, there will be nothing left in government.” More sheikhs trickled in and new arguments
erupted. “Since nobody emerged completely happy we probably got it pretty close to fair,” Colonel Hatch wrote in his journal on May 3.

Two days later the delegates gathered in the former Baath Party reception hall to elect a new government. A schedule guided the proceedings down to the minute, mystifying the more laissez-faire Iraqis. At 9:59 a.m. Petraeus stood on a plywood stage at the front of the reception hall. “By being here today you are participating in the birth of the democratic process in Iraq,” he told the group. “This is a historic occasion and an important step forward for Mosul and Iraq.” A Saddam-era judge who was there to certify the results read a script explaining the caucus procedures. He was followed by a bearded imam who offered a blessing. Then Petraeus took the microphone.

“At this time would the Shabaks please move to their delegation room,” he announced, his voice echoing over the sound system. “At this time would the Yezidis please move to their delegation room… At this time would the Turkmen please move to their delegation room; Turkmen only.”

After caucusing, delegates dropped their ballots in plywood boxes built by Petraeus’s engineers. The new council had been selected by noon. By 3:00 p.m. there was a governor: Ghanim al-Basso, a retired major general, who stood next to Petraeus on the wooden stage behind the ballot boxes, an Iraqi flag, and a spray of purple plastic flowers. He was a thin man with sagging eyes, rosy cheeks, and a gray mustache. During the Iran-Iraq War, Basso had been celebrated for his battlefield heroism, but he had fallen out of favor with the regime in 1993 after his brother was accused of backing a failed coup. His brother was killed, and Basso was forced into retirement. Now back in power, the new governor raised his hands over his head and in a short speech promised to be a “soldier for all of Mosul.” Some delegates feared that Basso had remained a Baathist even after he left the military and had continued to profit from his ties to Saddam. He was an unacceptable candidate who would have to be replaced, they vowed. But for now at least the choice stood.

Petraeus spoke last and garnered the loudest applause. “Having walked the streets of this city, the second largest in Iraq, and having gotten to know the friendly nature of its citizens, I am beginning to feel like a
Moslawi,” he proclaimed. Some in the audience were no doubt grateful to him for pulling off the first free elections in their city in decades, maybe ever. Others realized that despite the day’s events this American officer was in charge and would be for several more months, maybe years. He had money, attack helicopters, and big guns. They didn’t want to get on his bad side.

“Have you done anything like this before?” a CNN reporter asked Petraeus as the new council posed for a group picture.

“No. Never,” he replied with an excited, almost surprised lilt to his voice.

He had been in Mosul for only two weeks, but he had created the first representative government in liberated Iraq. Was it perfect? Hardly. But it was a start.

Petraeus and Hatch assumed that at least one of the other five Army divisions in Iraq would want to conduct their own elections, so they drafted a nine-page PowerPoint briefing on how they had done it, and shared it with neighboring units. But the other divisions had other priorities. A few weeks later the Bush administration barred further elections in the country out of fear that fundamentalists, who were organizing through the mosques, would win. The most telling slide in the 101st’s election briefing was one labeled “Commanding General Involvement.” More than any other document, it captured Petraeus’s philosophy in Mosul as he tried to rebuild a broken society and beat back an insurgency. “Must continuously suggest direction and priority … patience & repetition … Don’t let up, must outlast them and outwork them.”

The “them” wasn’t the enemy, of course. It was the Iraqis who had agreed to cooperate with Petraeus. He sympathized with Abizaid’s argument that foreign troops would produce resistance and resentment. “Try as we will to be an army of liberation, over time they will take you for granted,” he liked to say. But he differed from Abizaid in that he didn’t let it constrain him. He didn’t just want to stabilize northern Iraq. He wanted to transform the place. “The biggest idea was that we were going to do nation building and we weren’t going to hold it at arm’s length. We were an occupying army, and we had enormous responsibilities for the people,” he recalled.

The day after the elections President Bush named former diplomat and counterterrorism expert L. Paul Bremer III to head the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. Bremer arrived with two orders—both hatched in the Pentagon—that upended Abizaid and Petraeus’s plans. The first was a sweeping de-Baathification edict that banned as many as 50,000 former Baath party members from ever serving in government. A second decree disbanded the army.

The reaction to both was swift and violent. In June a mob of former soldiers, furious at the loss of their pensions, converged on the Mosul city hall, prompting the panicked police there to open fire. One protester was killed, and in the melee two Humvees were torched. Petraeus, who was inside the building, grabbed a bullhorn and rushed outside to calm the crowd and invite the ringleaders to meet with him and the governor. That evening he warned his superiors in Baghdad that the furious former soldiers were on the wall of the government building. “Next time they are going to be over it,” he told his bosses. He and Governor Basso, who had been on the job for less than a month, quickly banned all public demonstrations in Mosul. Technically, Basso was a Baathist and should have been fired under the terms of Bremer’s order. Fortunately for Petraeus, who was growing to respect the Iraqi, officials in Baghdad were preoccupied with other problems.

He was proud of his elections and the work his division was doing in Mosul. Both achievements, however, took a backseat to a prize he considered more meaningful—a combat patch on his right shoulder, signifying that he’d finally seen battle. As soon as the division got formal approval to wear them, Command Sergeant Major Marvin Hill, the division’s senior enlisted soldier, snuck into Petraeus’s room at the airport, grabbed three of his uniforms, and took them to a tailor he’d found in Mosul. Later that afternoon, he returned with the camouflage top, bearing a new Screaming Eagles patch. “Do you know how huge it is to have a combat patch?” Petraeus had asked weeks earlier when his troops first came under fire. Now he was speechless. He pulled on the fatigues and embraced Hill.

In the first two months after the invasion, Abizaid made weekly trips to Iraq. He didn’t like what he was seeing. Insurgent attacks were rising. So were checkpoint shootings in which U.S. soldiers mistakenly opened fire on drivers who ignored or misunderstood orders to halt. Whenever he returned to Qatar from one of his Iraq trips, Abizaid would sit down with his chief planner, Colonel Mike Fitzgerald, and a few other officers to brainstorm. Usually the meetings came at the end of the day, after the larger staff updates and video briefings with Bush administration officials. “We have got about a year to make a difference in Iraq and then we have got to think about getting out,” he said to Fitzgerald one evening in June after returning from Iraq. After a year, he said, the United States would hit a point of diminishing returns. The population would begin to turn on them.