The overhyping of David Petraeus.

When announced earlier this year, President Bush's selection of General David Petraeus as senior U.S. commander in Iraq met with something like universal acclaim. Not since 1862, when Abraham Lincoln restored George B. McClellan to command of the Army of the Potomac after Second Bull Run, had the appointment of a senior officer been received with such enthusiasm or created such high expectations. Gushing media reports compared Petraeus to T.E. Lawrence and the biblical King David. The Senate confirmed his promotion and appointment without a dissenting vote. After a long series of frustrating missteps and failures, here, it seemed, was the general who would put things right. The encomiums thrown his way derived from the belief that, in Petraeus, Bush had, at long last, found a general who grasped the actual nature of the Iraq war. (Bush certainly believes so: According to a recent article in The Washington Post, the president has mentioned Petraeus "at least 1 times this year in speeches, interviews, and news conferences.") As commander of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, Petraeus stabilized parts of northern Iraq in the vicinity of Mosul and established a functioning government in that city, while L. Paul Bremer and the CPA floundered in Baghdad. Drawing on his own experiences and on insights from the study of history--his Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton had assessed the lessons of Vietnam--Petraeus had led the way in helping the Army rediscover counterinsurgency doctrine. He had served, in effect, as the author-in-chief of "Field Manual 3-24," the Army's recently published and largely well-received counterinsurgency handbook. In a cover story featuring Petraeus back in July 2004, Newsweek asked: "can this man save iraq?" Eighteen months later, the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon had arrived at a consensus: If any hope of saving Iraq remained, David Petraeus was the man to turn that hope into reality. Yet Iraq has not been kind to the reputation of senior U.S. commanders. For a brief moment in the early '90s, for example, H. Norman Schwarzkopf seemed a likely candidate to join the ranks of history's Great Captains. No more: Schwarzkopf's failure to finish off an adversary of remarkable ineptitude left Saddam Hussein in power, his Republican Guard largely intact, and Iraqi Kurds and Shia under Saddam's boot. One result was a large, permanent, and problematic U.S. military presence to keep Saddam in his "box." Once seen as a stupendous victory, Operation Desert Storm deserves to be enshrined as a giant step down the nation's road to Persian Gulf perdition. In 2003, General Tommy Franks set out to clean up Stormin' Norman's mess. Although Franks has modestly described the ensuing invasion of Iraq as "unequaled in its excellence by anything in the annals of war," future generations are unlikely to sustain that judgment. When it came to leaving a tangle of loose ends, Franks made Schwarzkopf look like a piker. His niche in history willalways be alongside Bremer and George Tenet, fellow recipients of the Medal of Freedom--the Three Stooges who labored mightily to convert a small, unnecessary war into an epic debacle. After Franks came the team of John Abizaid and Ricardo Sanchez (and, later, George Casey). These earnest and no doubt well-meaning men inherited a difficult situation and gave it their all, expending lives and money with abandon. Despite much huffing and puffing about "progress" and "turning points, " they achieved negligible results: Iraq slowly descended toward chaos. Petraeus is now engaged in an effort to slow and reverse that descent. Although the deluded and disingenuous may persist in pretending otherwise, his mission is not to "win" the Iraq war. Coalition forces in Iraq are not fighting to achieve victory. Their purpose is far more modest. According to Petraeus himself, U.S. troops and their allies are "buying time for Iraqis to reconcile. " President Bush and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have explicitly endorsed this new strategy, but history will remember Petraeus as its principal architect. To avoid the fate of his hapless predecessors, Petraeus must show that his strategy of buying-time-to-reconcile can produce tangible results. Yet an exploration of what the buying-time strategy actually means reveals that the prospects of its success are exceedingly slim. The cult of Petraeus exists not because the general has figured out the war but because hiding behind the general allows the Bush administration to postpone the day when it must reckon with the consequences of its abject failure in Iraq. The most fundamental question that should be asked about the strategy is: Exactly how much time does Petraeus need to buy? The answer: a lot. With his frequent references to "the Washington clock" and "the Baghdad clock," Petraeus himself has recognized that "buying time" is by no means a simple proposition. The problem with the two clocks--one driven by domestic politics and the other connected to events in Iraqitself--is that they are wildly out of synch. As Petraeus himself has acknowledged, "The Washington clock is ticking faster than the Baghdad clock." Indeed, the steady erosion of popular and congressional support for the war, lately even among Republicans, suggests that time on the Washington clock has all but expired. To correct this situation, Petraeus speaks of "trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps ... put a little more time on the Washington clock." Yet Petraeus himself must recognize that thisqualifies at best as a long shot. He knows that any counterinsurgency is by definition a protracted project. Success requires not weeks or months of exertions but years. As he told the BBC in a recent interview, "The average counterinsurgency is somewhere around a nine- or a ten- year endeavor." For his strategy to succeed, putting "a little more time" on the Washington clock won't come close to doing the trick. Indeed, unless the Petraeus strategy gains the firm and enthusiastic support of President Bush's successor, it doesn't standa chance of working. Yet, unless John McCain's campaign pulls off a remarkable turnaround--an unlikely event--the president who takes office in January 2009 won't have campaigned on a strategy of "buying time" to prolong the Iraq war. Furthermore, Washington's typically narcissistic preoccupation with the political clock has diverted attention from the fact that the U.S. military's Baghdad clock is also quickly running down. Apart from the doughty warriors at the American Enterprise Institute, most informed observers understand that, with the ongoing surge, America's land forces have shot their wad. The current commitment of 160,000 troops to Iraq is unsustainable beyond early next year, absent draconian measures like extending yet again the combat tours of soldiers who have already seen their deployments go from twelve to 15 months in duration. If the wizards who concocted President Bush's Long War had decided back in 2002 or 2003 to increase the Army's size, options for maintaining a large force in Iraq might exist. But Petraeus will find little consolation in such might- have-beens. "Buying time" in Baghdad requires the ability to sustain a very robust U.S. troop presence for years to come, and that's simply not in the cards. Then there is the question of whether the actions of coalition forces, now engaged in the so-called "surge," are actually conducive to putting time back on the clock. Right now, it appears the opposite is true: Instead of putting more time on the Washington clock, the surge is actually causing it to run down more quickly. Observers may argue about whether or not the surge is achieving Petraeus's "progress on the ground," selectively citing whatever arcane (and frequently dubious) statistics happen to support their preconceived view. But such arguments are beside the point. Politically speaking, only one statistic matters: the number of Americans being killed. Since the surge began, that number has risen sharply: Over 100 U.S. troops died in April, May, and again in June--the first time since the war began that American deaths reached triple digits for three consecutive months. July is on its way to being a comparably bloody month. From his comfortable command post at the American Enterprise Institute, Frederick Kagan may find "every reason to believe" that operations devised by Petraeus will eventually "reduce the level of violence in Baghdad." In the meantime, however, the toll suffered by U.S. troops grows ever greater. That trend, if it continues, will itself doom Petraeus's hopes of buying more time. Even in the short run, moreover, it's difficult to see how the Petraeus strategy will promote the much hoped for, but never explicitly defined, "reconciliation" among Iraqi sects, tribes, and ethnic groups. Indeed, at least one recent component of that strategy--U.S. forces collaborating with Sunni militants who have turned against Al Qaeda--seems likely to make any eventual reconciliation even more improbable. However useful these partnerships may be tactically, U.S. assistance to the Islamic Army and 1920 Revolution Brigade necessarily strengthens and legitimizes such groups. Whether intended or not, one result is to undermine the claims of Iraqi authorities in Baghdad to represent the nation's sole, rightful government. It's the equivalent of the police arming the Crips to take on the Bloods. Here and there, gang violence might briefly subside, but the rule of law is unlikely to benefit. And, sooner or later, the Crips will turn their guns on the cops. Making common cause with Sunni insurgents will reduce further the already iffy prospects for progress on the political front. As such, the policy actually increases the overall amount of time that Petraeus needs to buy. Along with any number of other American generals, Petraeus has stated categorically that there is "no military solution" to Iraq. The best the United States can do, he says, is to "provide a window of opportunity and time and space that will allow Iraqi leaders to resolve" their own problems. Setting aside the very large question of whether rival Iraqi leaders are actually interested in resolving their differences (or have the capacity to do so), the buy-time-to-reconcile strategy assumes that American power adroitly employed can somehow prop open that window of opportunity. In this narrower sense, Petraeus still clings to the hope of engineering a de facto military solution. His approach takes it as a given that properly configured U.S. forces guided by sound counterinsurgency doctrine will nurture the conditions from which an Iraqi-engineered political settlement will emerge. Had the United States taken thisapproach back in the weeks and months immediately following the fall of Baghdad, it might have borne fruit. But 2007 is not 2003. Given the passage of time--and given the innumerable blunders perpetrated by generals and civilianpolicymakers alike during those years--U.S. forces have become part of the problem rather than part of any prospective solution. Petraeus, who cultivates the image of a sage warrior-intellectual, knows this. Among his favorite axioms is this: "Any army of liberation has a certain half-life before it becomes an army of occupation." Petraeus made this comment repeatedly to reporters in 2003 and 2004. He reiterated the point in a 2006 article summarizing his own lessons from Iraq. The point is not without wisdom. It also possesses immediate relevance to matters at hand. Somewhat coyly, Petraeus has never specified the duration of this half-life. Yet this much is certain: The moment when Americans might have persuaded Iraqis to embrace them as liberators has long since passed. We have failed to make good on too many promises. In our heavy-handed efforts to root out insurgents, we have too frequently mistaken the innocent for the guilty. However inadvertently, we have killed and maimed too many civilians. Sadly, in places like Abu Ghraib and Haditha, we have committed too many crimes. We have just plain screwed up too many times. As a consequence, we have squandered too much time--over four years. Not even the most enlightened generalship combined with all the good will in the world can restore that time. Last year, Petraeus observed that any conquering army, once having swept aside the old order, faces a "race against the clock to achieve as quickly as possible the expectations of those liberated." Well into the fifth year of the Iraq war, the United States has lost that race. In June, Petraeus issued to all members of his command his personal "Counterinsurgency Guidance"--ten key points to guide their actions. In point nine in this decalogue, the commander charges his troops to "Be first with the truth." The guidance is something that Petraeus himself should take to heart. For the truth is that the time to implement the strategy that he has devised does not exist. Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the editor of The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy Since World War II.

By Andrew J. Bacevich