Operation Last Chance

By Joe Klein

The Iraqi men squatting shoulder to shoulder in the blasted, abandoned classroom couldn't tell at first that the American soldier addressing them was a man of real authority. He was slight, taut, with sandy hair and a thin beak of a nose. He didn't sound like a big shot; he didn't bark in a commanding voice. "How many of you are going to make it?" he asked, in sketchy Arabic. Several of the men -- Iraqi police recruits -- looked up, saw the four stars on General David Petraeus' cap and shifted nervously, unsure of what he meant. His interpreter had better success. A scattering of hands were timidly raised. "You're all going to make it!" Petraeus said, giving the Iraqis' response the most benign possible interpretation. "That's good. Are you ready to defend your country?" There was a grudging shout, the Iraqi equivalent of, "Yes, sir!"

It was midafternoon on a blistering June Saturday in Yusufia, just south of Baghdad. The abandoned school was stifling, though more tolerable than the dusty, sun-addled main street of town, which we'd just walked along -- the general on an arid grip-and-grin tour, offering Salaam aleikum, habibi! greetings to the few Iraqis willing to brave the midday heat. Now Petraeus moved from classroom to classroom, cloaked in heavy body armor, sweat trickling down the side of his face. Each room was packed with nonsmiling Iraqi men in deep squat -- 500 in all. Petraeus was exhilarated. They were different from the usual police recruits. These had been selected by local sheiks.

Some were former Sunni insurgents who had just switched sides -- part of a revolt against al-Qaeda that has been gathering force all spring. "This is cause for optimism," Petraeus told me as he watched the recruits being fingerprinted and getting retinal scans for their ID cards. "This is the wave of the future. You've got to work from the bottom up, get the local forces involved." The biometric scans were a major technological advance. The Iraqi police had a reputation for corruption and secret allegiance to the militias, but the allegiances of these men were not going to be secret. If any of those fingerprints turned up on a bomb, the culprit would be identified. "We're beginning to build a fairly significant database," Petraeus said.

This is one of his favorite themes -- how much more knowledgeable the U.S. military is about Iraq now than when he first came over with the Operation Iraqi Freedom invasion force in 2003. Earlier, I sat next to the general at a briefing staged by U.S. officers at Fire Base Yusufia, and he whispered little addendums for my benefit. "See, these guys really get it," he told me as a major explained the nuances of a map showing the various local tribal areas. When the briefer showed a map of joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol bases, Petraeus said, "See, you can't secure a population by commuting to the fight." Another Petraeus theme: in the past, the vast majority of American troops lived on massive forward operating bases. But the counterinsurgency doctrine that Petraeus has sought to apply since becoming the top U.S. commander in Iraq calls for moving units out of their bases and into civilian areas, where they can interact with locals. "You guys have been doing classical work," he told his briefers at the end of the presentation. "But this is the time for you to take risks ... We're inevitably going to reduce this surge. You have to be thinking about what you want to leave behind."

It is, indeed, a moment of truth in Iraq. "This is a decisive phase," a member of Petraeus' staff told me and began to laugh. "That's one of our favorite jokes. It's always a decisive phase. But this time, I guess you'd have to say, it actually is." Operation Phantom Thunder, the nationwide offensive launched by U.S. and Iraqi troops in mid-June, may well be the last major U.S-led offensive of the war. "We couldn't really call it what it is, Operation Last Chance," says a senior military official. There is widespread awareness among the military and diplomatic players in Baghdad that, with patience dwindling in Washington, they have only until September -- when Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are due to give Congress a progress report -- to show significant gains in taming the jihadist insurgency and in arresting the country's descent into civil war. Phantom Thunder is an effort to dislodge al-Qaeda from its bases of operation in the suburban belts north and south of Baghdad, and -- using intelligence from al-Qaeda's former allies in the Sunni insurgency -- to prevent the terrorists from settling in elsewhere in the country. Petraeus says that the entire U.S.-led coalition force, which includes 160,000 American troops, is involved in the operation in one way or another. "We're not doubling down here," he told me. "We're all in."

Petraeus has been careful about claiming success, or even optimism, in the nearly five months since he returned to Baghdad. He has said a military victory isn't possible, that Iraq can be stabilized only through a political solution that honors all sides in the conflict -- Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. But his own staff is skeptical that a political deal is still possible. "This is going to be the first Shi'ite-dominated Arab government. Period," a senior military official told me. "And the Shi'ites are not inclined to be generous toward the Sunnis." The fact is, most of the important decisions in Iraq are now beyond American control.

Petraeus is not your old-fashioned, gung-ho, blood-and-guts sort of commander. He's an intellectual, a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton. His record in Iraq has been mixed. He succeeded, for a time, in applying his counterinsurgency tactics in Mosul during the first year of the war, but his highly publicized effort to train the new Iraqi army in 2004 can only be considered a failure. He has successfully led soldiers in combat. And he does have his macho moments, famously challenging his soldiers to push-up contests. But he made his reputation more as a communicator and motivator than as a warrior. "He is very much a seize-the-moment sort of general," says Lieut. General Graeme Lamb, the senior British military commander in Iraq, who served with Petraeus' predecessor, General George Casey. Lamb describes Casey as "more stoic," which is British for "less dynamic."

The Sunni Strategy

Unlike Casey, Petraeus seems to have had a moment to seize. A good chunk of the Sunni insurgency has turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq, the fringe group -- it comprises no more than 5% of the insurgency, according to U.S. intelligence estimates -- that is responsible for the most spectacular bombings. The anti-Qaeda rebellion began in Anbar, formerly the most dangerous province in the country, an area famously described as "lost" to the terrorists in a Marine intelligence report leaked to the press in 2006. "Actually, the first tentative steps in Anbar were taken in 2005," Petraeus told me over dinner one evening. "The Abu Mahal tribe out by the Syrian border turned against al-Qaeda and fought hard -- but pretty soon there were five or six dead sheiks." Not just dead, apparently -- beheaded and left in the street. "Over time, the word began to get around among the other tribes that al-Qaeda was not only brutal, it didn't even respect traditional burial practices."

Some al-Qaeda elements overplayed their hand in other ways as well, demanding marriage to the daughters of local sheiks, forcibly recruiting teenagers as suicide bombers and imposing Shari'a law -- including a ban on Western dress and smoking. "Last fall Army Colonel Sean MacFarland, the brigade commander in Ramadi, was approached by Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi," Petraeus said. "Several of the sheik's relatives had been killed by al-Qaeda. The story is, MacFarland guaranteed Abdul Sattar's security by putting an M1 tank section in [his] front yard and [a] police station across the street." By mid-March, tribal elements were helping clear al-Qaeda from the provincial capital of Ramadi. "Pretty soon, there were Sunnis in other parts of the country who wanted the same deal," the general said.

The current operation, Phantom Thunder, was made possible by the tribal flip. It is not classic counterinsurgency warfare. It is not about protecting a population but about attacking a historically elusive enemy. This is not so easily done in Iraq. On the second day of Phantom Thunder, I flew into Baqubah with Lieut. General Ray Odierno -- a massive man, decidedly more blood-and-guts than Petraeus -- to check the progress of what was supposed to be the most intense, and symbolic, battle of the offensive. In 2006 al-Qaeda's leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi proclaimed Baqubah the capital of the new Islamic State of Iraq. About 500 al-Qaeda fighters were said to be in the city, hunkered down, ready for a fight.

But now Baqubah was strangely quiet as we flashed into town, an otherworldly convoy of dust-colored Stryker vehicles, bristling with gunners. Only a few small explosions could be heard in the distance; there was no small-arms fire. We stopped at a bombed-out medical clinic for a briefing, with operation maps leaned against a white ceramic tile wall, Odierno and his commanders sitting on boxes and camouflage-fabric campaign chairs in a tight semicircle. The news was good. The enemy was said to be caught in a tightening cordon. Local Sunni insurgents -- they claimed to be members of the 1920 Revolution Brigades -- had helped to clear the Buhritz neighborhood. After the briefing, Lieut. Colonel Bruce Antonia told me, "Usually everybody's shooting at us. This is the first time we've had any of them on our side."

A second briefing, in a joint U.S.-Iraqi command post in the middle of Baqubah, was less optimistic. An Iraqi general said that he was pretty certain that the al-Qaeda leadership had slipped away, north to Tikrit and Samarra, and that many of the fighters were burying their equipment before they left town, hoping to return -- as always -- when the Americans left. In the days that followed, it became clear that almost all of al-Qaeda's fighters had gotten out. In a guerrilla war, only the stupidest guerrillas allow themselves to be lured into set-piece battles against a superior force.

"If you put your foot in a puddle, the water splashes out," Petraeus' chief counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen said. "The important thing is to secure the neighborhoods they've left." But the puddle analogy wasn't quite right. This puddle had evaporated and would undoubtedly condense somewhere else in Iraq. There simply aren't enough troops to police the entire country.

The Muqtada Factor

If you fly over Baghdad in a helicopter, as Petraeus sometimes does when the sun is setting over the sepia-toned city, all seems peaceful. There are crowded markets, kids playing soccer on large dirt fields; downtown Baghdad hasn't been reduced to rubble, as Beirut was in the Lebanese civil war. The increased number of U.S. troops has made many neighborhoods safer, but the relative quiet can convey the false impression of progress. During my week in Iraq -- including three days in combat zones -- I heard only occasional explosions, mostly in the Green Zone, which is shelled by Shi'ite militias nearly every night, and saw no pitched battles ... and yet the casualties piled up: 36 Americans were killed. There was a spike in Iraqi casualties as well because of horrific bombings at the Mansour Hotel, where al-Qaeda targeted some of the Sunni sheiks who had been cooperating with Petraeus, and at a Shi'ite mosque in downtown Baghdad. The number of daily enemy attacks has more than doubled in the past two years.

The violence is abetted by the political vacuum in Baghdad. The Iraqi government is irresolute to the point of near collapse. It is nowhere near to figuring out how to make a political deal amongst the contending parties that might lead to stability. "All this attention on benchmarks has actually been bad for the process," Ambassador Crocker says. "We've wasted so much time and energy on getting a hydrocarbon law" -- that is, a law to divide oil profits amongst the ethnic and religious parties, likely to be approved soon -- "but it has very little to do with getting a functioning government in place." The truth is, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government is puttering along, happily dependent on the U.S. "There are no consequences for them when they screw up," Crocker says. "Whatever's wrong, we take care of it."

The Bush Administration fantasy -- a democratic Iraq that fairly represents the interests of Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds -- is almost an impediment to the real horse-trading that must take place. Two families -- the al-Sadrs and the al-Hakims -- dominate Iraqi Shi'ite politics, and the issue of who leads Iraq may ultimately be decided between them. Each has a young leader. "The question is, Does either of these guys have the capacity to move from Prince Hal to King Henry?" said a senior U.S. military official. The Hakim family has traditionally been more aloof -- and pro-Iranian -- than the Sadrs. The current al-Hakim patriarch is suffering from lung cancer but has designated his son Amal to be the leader of his group, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. "Unlike his father, Amal smiles," a U.S. diplomat told me. "He gave a good speech in Najaf last week. He might actually be a real leader."

But the most important man in Iraq is the other Shi'ite prince, Muqtada al-Sadr, who is 33 and the nominal leader of the most powerful militia in the country, the Mahdi Army. Al-Sadr is often called mercurial -- he's supposedly a fervent video-game player -- but the evidence says otherwise. He has been a devoted follower of the populist, nationalist, outsider style of his father, the Grand Ayatullah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, which has great appeal for Iraqi Shi'ites. Unlike his father, however, Muqtada has accepted significant support from the Iranians -- and fled to Iran for a time, allegedly, after the surge began.

How to handle al-Sadr is the single most important decision to be made by Petraeus and Crocker in the coming months: Is he friend or foe? There are those on the general's staff who believe al-Sadr will be the inevitable winner of the Iraqi power struggle and must be accommodated. Others believe he is an irreconcilable thug. Either way, his strength among the Shi'ite masses is obvious. On Sunday I walked through the Shorja market, the site of John McCain's infamous tour last April. (I, too, was accompanied by a fierce-looking squad of troops in up-armored humvees; the troops teased me about the absence of protective helicopters.) Unlike McCain, I asked the local vendors some political questions. Those I met -- and most of the others at Shorja, my Army chaperones later conceded -- were al-Sadr supporters. "This is the worst government ever," a cell-phone shopkeeper named Fadhil Taher told me, referring to the Maliki regime. When I asked about al-Sadr, he said, "He's a good leader. You tell America. He's good, good, good. He's a man of peace."

Two Clocks

Soon after arriving in Iraq, Petraeus invented a formulation that has since become a cliche: the disparity between the two "clocks" -- Washington and Baghdad time -- for ending the war. The Washington clock is "late fourth quarter, we're down a touchdown, and the other team has the ball," a senior Administration official told me. Petraeus knows that the American public is tired of the war -- tired of not winning it, at least -- and that a significant chunk of the Republicans in Congress may be about to abandon President Bush, as the respected Senator Richard Lugar did on June 26. The general would love to see "a couple of weeks without explosions" before September to reinforce his probable plea for patience. But insurgent forces responded to Phantom Thunder with high-profile bombings in recent days, and they are probably saving their best shots for the weeks before Petraeus leaves for Washington. The terrorists are lobbying Congress too.

There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters -- but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false.

According to the Broken Army clock, troop levels will begin to wane in March 2008, no matter what Congress decides in September; the current 20 brigade combat teams will be reduced to 15 by August 2008. There is growing speculation in the military that Bush will try to pre-empt the Petraeus testimony by announcing a gradual drawdown from 20 to 15 combat brigades later this summer. "As if that isn't going to happen anyway," a senior officer told me. "But it may give us some political breathing space" -- that is, it may subvert the Democrats' calls for a more rapid withdrawal -- "if the President makes a big deal of announcing we're drawing down."

Petraeus won't talk about his September testimony, and he won't talk about the details of the inevitable U.S. withdrawal. But it is clear that he and his aides are preparing for the endgame. In Baqubah, General Odierno had told the Iraqis, "It's up to you to make sure [al-Qaeda] doesn't come back." One could only wonder about the fate of Sunni insurgents who had turned against the jihadis. Soon they would be facing a new foe, an Iraqi army and local police that have been notoriously awful in Diyala province -- riddled with Shi'ite death squads, incompetence and corruption. Petraeus' "all in" bet relies on the police recruits squatting sullenly in Yusufia, indulging his cheerleading -- "Are you ready to fight for your country?" Certainly, they were ready to fight for their families, their tribes, their mosques ... but for a Shi'ite Iraq? Probably not.

"The vision thing is really important," Petraeus told his commanders in Yusufia. "You have to visualize what security here should look like when you're gone." Petraeus was among the first to have the vision thing in Iraq, in Mosul in 2003, but the experiment was abandoned -- there was a lack of sufficient troops -- after he left. McCain and others believe, with some justification, that if the Petraeus counterinsurgency tactics had been adopted three years ago, the U.S.-led coalition might have had a shot. But now it seems likely that Petraeus will suffer the same fate in Baghdad as he did in Mosul. The various clocks are very much on his mind, but so are the daily sacrifices, the brilliant improvisations and occasional neighborhood victories of the troops he leads. "He doesn't want to be the fall guy," an aide said. And he doesn't deserve to be. It is hard to imagine, though, how this can turn out any other way.