Hiding Behind the General

By JOE KLEIN

California Senator Barbara Boxer almost asked a good question at the Petraeus-Crocker festivities on Capitol Hill this week. She was reminiscing, as most of her colleagues did, about time spent on the ground in Iraq with General David Petraeus, but it was not a recent visit. It was back in 2005, when Petraeus was in charge of training the new Iraqi army. An aide pulled out a blown-up photograph of the Senator and the general. "You were so upbeat, General," Boxer said. "You said, 'You're about to see some terrific troops.'" There were 100,000 of them "ready to go ... You were as optimistic as anyone I've seen on the planet ... and I believed you!" The stage was set for Boxer to point out that the Petraeus effort to train the Iraqi army had failed and to ask, "So why should we believe your optimism now?" But she wandered off into an antiwar diatribe and never got around to asking it.

The unasked question was so profound that Petraeus, a proud man, chose to answer it anyway. "I believe that my optimism back when I showed those very fine Iraqi forces to Senator Boxer was justified," he said. The good work was undone, though, in 2006, when Shi'ite militias "hijacked" whole units of the Iraqi military. But, he insisted, we are back on the right track now. Petraeus may well be right--or maybe not. The nature of military leadership is congenital optimism; officers are trained to complete the mission, to refuse to countenance the possibility of failure. That focus is essential when you go to war, but it lacks perspective. That's why civilian leaders--the Commander in Chief--are there to set the mission, to change or abort it when necessary. The trouble is, George W. Bush's credibility on Iraq is nonexistent. And so he has placed David Petraeus, an excellent soldier, in a position way above his pay grade. He has made Petraeus not just the arbiter of Iraq strategy but also, by default, the man who sets U.S. policy for the entire so-called war on terrorism.

The cleverness of Bush's strategy was apparent when Senator Russ Feingold asked Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker a very important question: Which should have the higher priority in the war against al-Qaeda, Iraq or the rebuilt al-Qaeda leadership and terrorist camps, festering on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border? Feingold had forced Crocker, the elusive former ambassador to Pakistan, into a corner and then, inexplicably, let him off the hook and turned to Petraeus, who rightly claimed a lack of knowledge or authority to answer that question. The nonanswer stood as the Bush Administration's response to an essential strategic issue.

It seems clear the President has won this round. An optimistic general will trump a skeptical politician anytime. Even when Petraeus gave sketchy, disingenuous answers--expressing hope about the three-way Shi'ite gang war in the oil-rich port city of Basra--not even the most knowledgeable Senators had the facts to dispute him. The general was armed with the modern military's deadliest weapon, the PowerPoint-presentation-serried ranks of bar charts marching toward victory, which provided camouflage for the gaping holes and contradictions in the Petraeus-Crocker story. Crocker, for example, seemed particularly insistent on roping Iran into the scenario. "The Iranian President has already announced that Iran will fill any vacuum in Iraq," the ambassador testified. But Crocker also testified that the Iraqi Shi'ites were Arabs who had fought fiercely against the Iranians in the eight-year war and were very unlikely to cede control to their Persian neighbor without a fight. Petraeus described al-Qaeda in Iraq both as the greatest threat to stability and as the greatest loser in the struggle, its brand of Islamic extremism decisively rejected by the Sunni tribes.

No doubt Crocker and Petraeus believe they were merely stating the complexities of a difficult situation. But in a war, there is a need for executive decision making when it comes to priorities and contradictions: With al-Qaeda in Iraq on the run and, as Petraeus insisted, no need for American forces to resolve the Shi'ite chaos in the south, what was the rationale for keeping so many troops in Iraq? Why wasn't there a clearly defined strategic path for dealing with the country's political collapse? Those issues--the strategic ones--were beyond the reach of Petraeus and Crocker. And the Senators were left with bland assurances that the two patriots would continue to do their considerable best to work really, really hard on the situation.

That's not nearly enough, of course. There was an important follow-up that Boxer didn't ask either: Without a strong, credible central government, for whom exactly is the re-retrained Iraqi army fighting? How can any Iraqi be loyal to a government that doesn't exist? And, finally, now that the Sunnis have decisively rejected the extremists, why should any American trooper sacrifice even a pinkie in this sectarian catastrophe?