The Fourth Star (36 page)

Petraeus was about as far from the war as a soldier could get. When he first learned that he had been chosen to head the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was disappointed. He wasn’t entirely sure what his new command even did. Digging into it on the Internet, he learned that he’d have responsibility for running the Army’s nationwide network of training centers and schools. He would also oversee the drafting of Army doctrine. Gradually Petraeus’s enthusiasm built.

Every couple of days Petraeus would regale Colonel J. R. Martin, his former West Point classmate, with some new aspect of the job that had piqued his intellect. Martin had a more immediate worry: “I was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to get promoted out of it,” he recalled.
Even among Petraeus’s clique of supporters, the orders sending him to the Kansas outpost were seen as a sign that the higher brass thought that the ambitious general, after almost thirty months in Iraq, needed a good rest—or that the Army needed a rest from him.

On a crisp October afternoon, Petraeus took command at Fort Leavenworth from Lieutenant General William Wallace. When Wallace had been sent to Kansas in mid-2003, it was widely seen as punishment, meted out by Rumsfeld, after the general confessed to a reporter that the United States hadn’t anticipated the waves of crazed Saddam Fedayeen guerrillas that harassed U.S. troops on their initial drive to Baghdad. “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we war-gamed against,” he’d said. At Leavenworth, Wallace hadn’t made big changes. Petraeus wasted no time in demonstrating that he had an altogether different approach to the job. After an honor guard fired the traditional fifteen-gun salute, a sergeant handed Petraeus a gleaming brass shell casing from the barrage. “I don’t know how you got it polished up so quickly,” he said, fingering the spent cartridge, “but you clearly know how I like to operate.”

Far from the battlefields of Iraq—where the war was going from bad to much worse—the bright and ambitious general began plotting an insurgency of his own, one aimed at changing his service. Like any good guerrilla, Petraeus chose to attack a spot that was poorly defended: the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine. By 2005 the doctrine hadn’t been revised in more than a quarter of a century; it was a dusty document that few even bothered to read.

A year earlier, Wallace, whose first assignment in the Army had been as an advisor to the South Vietnamese army, had assigned a lieutenant colonel who had never laid eyes on Iraq to rewrite the document. The overwhelmed officer labored in almost complete obscurity. In a matter of days, the new commanding general made rewriting the counterinsurgency doctrine his top priority. Doctrine provides an intellectual framework for how to fight different kinds of wars. Often it is written to reflect conventional Army wisdom. In rare instances, new doctrine has driven major changes in the Army. In the early 1980s the Army unveiled the AirLand Battle Doctrine, a recipe for defeating much larger Soviet armor formations. It called on commanders to strike ninety miles behind the front lines with
helicopters and artillery, using speed, cunning, and intuition to surprise the more mechanistic Soviets. The doctrine, which drove the Army for two decades, was an explicit rejection of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s rigid, measurement-focused approach to war.

Petraeus wanted his counterinsurgency doctrine to have the same impact as AirLand Battle. At the time, he had a couple of big strikes against him. One was Fort Leavenworth itself. Even by Army standards, the base is in the middle of nowhere. A nineteenth-century frontier fort located on the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, an hour’s drive from Kansas City, it is probably best known as the site of an old limestone prison. It doesn’t get much attention from Washington except when a high-profile inmate arrives in leg irons. Leavenworth is also home to the Army’s staff college, where young, rising officers learn to do war planning. The post’s red brick houses, lecture halls, and softball fields make it feel more like a tweedy midwestern liberal arts campus than an Army base. Petraeus had spent a year there in 1982—an uneventful sojourn, except that he graduated first in his class. He hadn’t been back since.

The second major handicap Petraeus faced was that doctrine is hardly an exciting topic. He asked Conrad Crane, a classmate of his from West Point who had written extensively about counterinsurgency and taught history at the Army War College, to oversee a large team that was going to rewrite the new doctrine. Petraeus enlisted a number of high-profile Washington figures, both military and civilian. Among those included was Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins professor who had been a critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the war and would go on to serve in the influential position of counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He also called on now Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the Rhodes scholar and Sosh alum whose book on Vietnam and Malaya had made him a minor celebrity, appearing on the cover of the
New York Times Magazine
. In early 2006, Nagl was working in the Pentagon, where he was growing increasingly disillusioned with the war effort.

Finally Petraeus called a friend who had served in the Clinton administration, Sarah Sewall, who was running Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights. He’d met her in the early 1990s when he was doing his research project on the U.S. intervention in Haiti. The center agreed to
cosponsor a Fort Leavenworth conference to provide suggestions for improving the new doctrine’s first draft. Petraeus made sure the conference received the proper attention, flying in congressional staffers, journalists, and a bevy of political scientists, human rights advocates, and military historians.

He held court before them for two days. At a dinner on the first night, he unveiled a recent article he’d written for
Military Review
on the fourteen most important things he’d learned from soldiering in Iraq. The observations weren’t especially novel, but the crowd of counterinsurgency experts and Washington insiders was adoring. The next day the participants set to work on revising the first draft of the doctrine. It was path-breaking.

For decades, the American way of war had been to bludgeon the enemy so thoroughly with heavy firepower that he would realize he had no chance and submit quickly. In this way, the Army hoped to avoid drawn-out conflicts like Vietnam that sapped both the military’s willingness to fight and the support of the public at home. This approach was the essence of the so-called Powell Doctrine, named after General Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the 1991 Gulf War. As he first had done twenty years earlier in his dissertation, Petraeus took direct aim at Powell’s tenet that the country could simply choose not to fight in messy guerrilla wars. “Most enemies of the United States … know they cannot compete with U.S. forces” in a conventional war, the 453-page manual began. “Instead they try to exhaust U.S. national will, aiming to win by undermining and outlasting public support.”

The most radical aspect of the manual was its insistence that the primary focus in counterinsurgency wars should be on protecting the civilian population and not on killing the enemy. It made this point in a series of Zen-like warnings dubbed the “paradoxes of counterinsurgency.”

“Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is,” one of the Powell Doctrine-defying precepts maintained. And so it went, point after point: “Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction.” “Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot.”

Petraeus’s manual also attacked an idea that had become gospel in the Army during the 1990s peacekeeping missions—that protecting the force
was of paramount importance in low-intensity wars. The manual insisted that in counterinsurgency wars soldiers had to assume greater risks in order to distinguish the enemy from the innocents, safeguard the population, and in the end achieve greater safety. “The more you protect the force, the less secure you may be,” the doctrine warned.

The new manual received lavish press coverage engineered by Petraeus, who acted as his own publicist. Most generals keep journalists at arm’s length, believing the surest way to stunt their careers is to appear to be grandstanding in the press. Petraeus was different. He courted journalists with the same intensity he brought to every task, remembering their names and returning their e-mails at all hours. Thanks to Petraeus’s finely tuned public relations sense, stories about his new doctrine and the brain trust that developed it were featured on the front pages of the
Wall Street Journal
, the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and the
Washington Post
. The doctrine’s authors even made an appearance on
Charlie Rose
, and Lieutenant Colonel Nagl had a seven-minute sit-down with comedian Jon Stewart on
The Daily Show
. In the history of Army manuals, there had been nothing like it. In its first week, the manual was downloaded more than 1.5 million times. It was later reprinted by the University of Chicago Press as a paperback, and reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review
.

The manual helped the exhausted Army feel as if it had expertise in the type of warfare it was facing in Iraq, and it positioned Petraeus as the most cogent thinker about the deepest strategic and tactical questions the country was facing. Anybody could see he wanted to get back to the war. In his second-floor office at Leavenworth, he would obsessively log on to the classified computer network used by commanders in the war, tracking operations, movements of units, and casualties as they unfolded four thousand miles away.

As Petraeus plotted his return, Pete Chiarelli was already on his way back to Iraq. In December 2005, the White House had nominated him for a third star and appointed him to serve under Casey as the commander in charge of daily military operations for a force that now numbered 160,000
U.S. troops along with 23,000 more from Britain and a smattering from other countries. Chiarelli was ecstatic.

He had only been back from his first tour since March, but it had been a restless few months. After returning to Fort Hood and spending a few weeks with his family, he had headed for Washington to deliver briefings at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, and at some foreign policy think tanks about his year in Iraq. The road show, as he called his presentation, was a hit. What 1st Cav and USAID had accomplished in Sadr City was a blueprint, he argued, for the unconventional approach the U.S. government, both military and civilians, needed to try throughout Iraq. He talked about the April firefight in Sadr City with a passion that few other generals could duplicate. As he spoke, an aide would unveil a chart that showed attacks concentrated in areas with the worst government services. It was followed by another chart that showed violence dropping off almost entirely after the money started flowing and the jobs programs got under way.

At a time when there was little good news from Iraq, Chiarelli was one senior officer who exuded confidence. Chiarelli’s ideas also had some appeal to the Bush administration. He wasn’t insisting that the answer was more troops, a prerequisite for any general who hoped to earn Rumsfeld’s nod.

For once his timing was perfect. Major General John Batiste, who had been chosen as Casey’s deputy, suddenly retired out of frustration with Rumsfeld and the way the war was being fought. Rumsfeld needed a bright former division commander, preferably with Iraq experience, to take Batiste’s place. The assignment went to Chiarelli.

The nationwide elections that month came off even better than expected. Nearly three-quarters of Iraq’s registered voters cast ballots on a day that was largely free of attacks. As expected, the clear victors were the Shiite parties, known as the United Iraqi Coalition, which won 128 seats. But Sunnis, who had largely boycotted the previous votes, turned out in much higher numbers, and the four main Sunni blocs won 59 seats in the 275-member parliament, up from 17.

Ever the optimist, Chiarelli hoped Iraq had turned a corner. The victorious parties still needed to choose a prime minister and form a government, a process that would grind on for several months. But maybe,
Chiarelli told himself, the next government would be less treacherous than Jaafari’s crowd. He took over as Casey’s deputy on January 17, moving into his own lakeside villa at Camp Victory, two houses down from his boss’s quarters. Now that he had responsibility for the entire country, Chiarelli was brimming with ideas. His new civilian aide, Celeste Ward, suggested mapping out the still-to-be-named prime minister’s first 100 days in office. Maybe the new leader could visit all eighteen provinces, including Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, where voter turnout had been poor. At each stop he’d present a check for a new reconstruction project, such as a water-treatment plant or a school, as a visible sign of national reconciliation.