The Fourth Star (46 page)

A few days before the hearing, the Bush administration arranged for several officials well acquainted with congressional hearings and Iraq to come to Petraeus’s house at Fort Myer to fire questions at him in a mock hearing. In Washington, it was known as a “murder board.” The civilians who had been sent to help him prepare told him to start slashing his statement. Petraeus began stripping out paragraphs with his executive officer, Colonel Pete Mansoor, and Captain Liz McNally, a Rhodes scholar who acted as his speechwriter.

The final presentation, which Petraeus delivered in a flat monotone,
still ran a lengthy eighteen minutes. Violence levels were down in eight of the previous twelve weeks, he told the lawmakers. Civilian deaths had fallen by 45 percent. The number of weapons caches discovered was higher, suicide attacks were down, and Iraqi defense spending was increasing. “The military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met,” he concluded. To hold on to the fragile gains, he recommended sustaining the increased troop levels and the fifteen-month tours through the summer of 2008.

A few days after he had returned to Baghdad he met with Prime Minister Maliki, who was ecstatic. “We all thank God for your successful hearings,” he said. “I can now see the beginning of a victory in Iraq.” Petraeus tried to tamp down his confidence. “Obviously we are going to need to see continued security improvements, but we are also going to have to show progress in other areas,” he said. In particular, Petraeus was eager to see the Iraqis hold provincial elections that would allow Sunni tribal leaders who had boycotted earlier balloting to amass some political power. The Iraqis also had to settle on a formula for distributing oil revenues and develop a plan to find permanent jobs for the more than 100,000 Sunnis participating in the Sons of Iraq neighborhood watch program.

Like Casey and Chiarelli in 2006, Petraeus found it almost impossible to pin down Maliki’s real intentions toward Sunnis. A few weeks after his fall testimony he and Ryan Crocker met with the president via a video teleconference link from Baghdad. Maliki had been feuding with his Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, and Bush asked whether the prime minister disliked all Sunnis or just Hashimi. “Maliki is not viscerally anti-Sunni, but he thinks that Hashimi is out to get him and he might be right,” replied Crocker, who had been working closely with the country’s political leaders for almost a year. “This is not a government of national unity,” the ambassador continued. “The only time the Iraqi leaders behave that way is when you hold their head under water for a while and then let them back up.”

The Sunni tribal leaders’ fledgling alliance with the United States, the increase in American troops, and Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy continued to drive down violence. The United States also caught a break when radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who was losing control of his militia,
called for a six-month cease-fire. The sectarian and ethnic tensions that had sparked the civil war in 2006 were still strong but increasingly were being pushed below the surface.

In September 2008 the last of the U.S. reinforcements started heading home. Petraeus was just a couple of weeks away from leaving as well. He’d been chosen to lead U.S. Central Command, replacing Abizaid’s successor, Admiral Fallon, who resigned after a short, rocky tenure. In the United States Petraeus was being hailed as the most influential military officer of his generation. The problem, as he reminded his staff, was that the war wasn’t over. Daily attacks had plummeted to levels not seen since early 2004, when the insurgency was in its infancy. But the relative quiet was still dependent on the presence of U.S. forces and the relationships that they had forged with former Sunni insurgent groups. How dependent? No one actually knew.

In an area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death, the Rakkasans battalion that Petraeus had commanded in the early 1990s was going to find out. Petraeus had visited the battalion more than any other in Iraq, doling out advice on counterinsurgency and just about everything else, including what dance steps to use when the unit went home and partied. “If you want to throw a good welcome-home ball for your troops, you need to learn how to do the electric slide,” Petraeus counseled the battalion commander. “Then you need to get out and do it. Everyone else will follow.” It was pretty good advice if you were commanding the battalion in 1992, joked Lieutenant Colonel Andy Rohling, the current commander.

By 2008, the Rakkasans epitomized Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy. They had been so successful that they were averaging less than one attack a day and were on the verge of turning over their sector, which only a year earlier had been one of the most violent in Iraq, to a company about one-third the battalion’s size. Colonel Rohling called his company commanders together a few weeks before the handover to lay out the plan.

The battalion headquarters was in a half-finished power plant that a Russian construction company had abandoned on the eve of the 2003 invasion. Al Qaeda-affiliated fighters had occupied it for much of 2005 and
2006. American troops had seized the compound in a bloody nighttime raid the following year and had held it ever since. The partially completed steel-and-cement skeleton stood ten stories. Graffiti on its support beams praised Saddam Hussein and listed the names and dates of “martyrs” and their suicide missions. Surrounding it were green pastures, reed-choked irrigation ditches, and dirt-poor farmers.

Rohling and his company commanders crammed into the battalion’s main conference room, which they had fashioned out of plywood sheets on the power plant’s second floor. “This is where we’ve been and what we’re trying to avoid,” Rohling said. He flashed a slide showing Vietnamese civilians scrambling to board a helicopter perched precariously on the roof of the CIA building in Saigon. No one laughed.

Rohling’s best counterinsurgent was Captain Michael Starz. He stood out for his passion, intelligence, and youthful bravado. Under Rohling’s plan, Starz’s ninety-man company was turning its area over to a thirty-soldier platoon. Starz, who had the look of an earnest graduate student in camouflage, had bluntly told his boss a few days earlier that he thought it was a dangerous and dumb idea. The area was too complex. The fledgling relationship he was trying to foster between the local Sunni tribes that had until recently backed the insurgency and the Iraqi army was too strained and fragile.

When Petraeus ventured out into the field—typically twice a week—he made sure that he spent at least an hour with company commanders such as Starz. He’d kick out their bosses, close the door, and ask the young officers what they thought was really happening in their sector. What had they learned? What mistakes had they made? What did they need to win? Petraeus knew that captains such as Starz had the best understanding of the politics and personalities on the ground.

Starz’s sector, which included the cities of Mohmudiyah and Yusufiyah, had been among the most violent and unforgiving in Iraq. Over the years insurgents had inflicted heavy casualties on U.S. troops in the area, and in brazen attacks twice kidnapped U.S. soldiers off checkpoints, torturing and killing them. It also was the place where four angry, drunk soldiers raped a young girl and murdered her and her family. By mid-2008, several thousand of the area’s young men had been organized into Sons of Iraq
groups and were being paid $400 a month to guard street corners. “We pretty much employ all the extremists in my area,” Starz said. He said it without pride or outrage; this was how the war was being won.

A few weeks before he turned over his sector, he grabbed a briefcase packed with crisp $100 bills and paid a visit to the Owesat tribe. The first time that Starz had driven down the dirt road that leads into the tribe’s village, insurgents had seeded it with more than twenty roadside bombs, one of which killed Lieutenant Tracy Alger, a thirty-year-old officer from rural Wisconsin. “The people who killed Tracy were all from this tribe that we are going to pay,” he said. “To tell you the truth, it doesn’t bother me that we are paying them. I am very detached from it. I don’t hold any anger in my heart.” As Starz entered the village, barefoot tribal elders all rushed to greet him, and the tribe’s preeminent sheikh welcomed him with kisses on each cheek. Sheikh Musahim al-Owesat led him past a cluster of boxy one-story cement houses to the tribe’s diwan, a large room with benches and pillows lining the walls and a wheezing air conditioner connected to a clanking electric generator. Soon the men of the tribe were lining up to collect their $100 bills from one of Starz’s lieutenants.

“How old are you?” Starz asked one boy, no more than fourteen. The United States wasn’t supposed to pay anyone younger than eighteen. Before the boy could answer, the sheikh barked at him to take his money and leave. “His father was killed in the fighting and his family needs the money to survive,” Sheikh Musahim explained. Starz crossed his name off the list for the next payday but let him keep the money. “I guess he’ll be our target audience in a couple of years,” he said philosophically. Tables full of cash were replaced by a feast of eggs, watermelon, bread, yogurt, and tomatoes. It was Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the day, but few seemed reluctant to eat. Starz was fasting to see what it was like to go without food or water in 120-degree heat. Once the meal was done, Starz said goodbye to Sheikh Musahim, who lavished him with praise. “I respect you and love you as a human,” the sheikh told him.

Soon his convoy was back on the road, rumbling past new, U.S.-funded poultry farms. The area south of Baghdad had raised most of the chickens for Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in power. Now Starz’s unit
was trying to relaunch the industry. His brigade commander had spent about $1 million to import 95,000 chicken embryos from the Netherlands, which were of hardier stock than the scrawny, disease-prone local chickens. Petraeus loved the project and demanded regular updates on its progress in the morning briefing.

The chicken-farming initiative might have been borrowed right from one of Petraeus’s favorite novels,
The Centurions
, the 1960 book that follows French paratroopers as they fight insurgencies in Vietnam and Algeria. In one of the novel’s more memorable passages a French officer in Vietnam explains to another, more conventionally minded colleague how his unit had changed its approach, abandoning firepower-intensive attacks for a strategy that focused on winning over the locals and even helping them raise pigs. “We no longer wage the same war as you, Colonel,” the officer says. “Nowadays it’s a mixture of everything, a regular witches’ brew … of politics and sentiment, the human soul, religion and the best way of cultivating rice, yes, everything, including even the breeding of black pigs. I knew an officer in Cochin-China who by breeding black pigs, completely restored a situation which all of us regarded as lost.”

The chicken farming initiative in Starz’s sector wasn’t producing the same stirring results that pig farming did in Lartéguy’s novel. It was turning out to be far cheaper to import whole frozen chickens from big industrial poultry farms in Brazil than it was to raise and slaughter fresh ones south of Baghdad.

Starz’s most prized project was to rebuild the ancient Sayeed Abdullah shrine, which honored a Shiite saint and had been leveled by Sunnis when Iraq was melting down in a civil war. He had convinced the Iraqi commander he was partnered with to use some of his reconstruction money to contract with a local Sunni tribe to rebuild it. Whatever their sect, most people in his sector were eager to make peace with the United States. They were less willing to forgive each other, and Starz saw the contract as a step toward a sturdier peace. On his way to the shrine, he stopped by the office of Captain Mohammed Amjen, the Shiite commander of the local unit. Loose hand grenades were scattered across Amjen’s desk. On the wall hung a picture of his predecessor, who had been killed four months earlier
by a female suicide bomber. Amjen passed on some rumors about Al Qaeda fighters moving back into the area. A few minutes later the two officers headed out to the shrine.

There they struck up a conversation with the construction foreman, a Sunni tribesman clad in a dirty dishdasha. His face was covered by a few days’ worth of stubble. “Al Qaeda destroyed everything in this area,” the foreman said, shaking his head.

“Tell the truth,” Amjen replied, angrily waving a finger. “Your tribe was Al Qaeda. And they didn’t destroy everything. They didn’t touch the Sunni mosques. They just killed the Shiites.”

The foreman, not wanting to alienate his patron, quickly changed the subject. “Without Captain Starz and Captain Amjen none of this would have happened. You both are kind and generous. May God bless you and make you undefeated in all your battles.”

Petraeus had pushed young officers to seek out local leaders, many of whom had supported the insurgency. His “bottom-up” reconciliation strategy required meticulous intelligence work and a deep understanding of local politics. It also demanded a mind-set shift. In Petraeus’s Iraq there were very few good guys or bad guys, and certainly no “anti-Iraqi forces,” the Orwellian term that Rumsfeld had once coined to describe the enemy when he decided that
insurgent
was too flattering.