The Fourth Star Part 4

His team, which consisted of the division lawyer and a lieutenant who had worked for him in Bosnia, had trouble keeping track of the constantly expanding cast of characters. The roster from the April 30 meeting listed some of the members simply as "Iraqi expatriate from Jabouri tribe," "Unidentified engineer," "Yusef judge?" and "General D?" There had been lots of fighting about who would get chairs at the main table and who would sit in the lesser seats along the wall. The bickering, which the Iraqis resolved among themselves, proved to be an unexpected blessing. It was the only way Petraeus had to figure out who was really important.

No one was quite sure how to run the gatherings, so Petraeus presided as if he were leading a staff meeting at Fort Campbell. His lieutenant pa.s.sed out an agenda. The first item was always "old business." The night before the meeting there had been a hail of celebratory fire commemorating Saddam Hussein's birthday. Some of the demonstrators shot at U.S. troops, who returned fire, killing three Iraqis. Petraeus said he hoped the killings would send "a clear message" to those who were trying to disrupt their efforts to build a new Mosul. He then laid out what the group had agreed to during a marathon session a day earlier: a caucus of 213 delegates representing the region's tribes, ethnic groups, and political parties would select a provincial council and a governor, with each group allotted representatives based on their approximate population.

Almost immediately the arguments began. The Kurds and Arab tribes both insisted that they hadn't been given enough delegates. One partic.i.p.ant argued that the entire process was invalid. Before the 101st arrived, 4,000 prominent locals in Mosul had held their own election and picked fifty delegates who deserved seats in any new government. "We voted in this very building," he shouted, and threatened to leave. Others maintained that Petraeus was allowing too many former Baath Party members who had supported Saddam Hussein to dominate the negotiations. "Any election held at this time will only benefit the old regime," a Kurdish leader insisted.

In earlier meetings Petraeus had tried to calm arguments with lectures on the democratic process. "The beauty of this system is that everyone is ent.i.tled to their own opinion," he told them. Now he was sick of the interminable debates and recriminations. If the Iraqis believed that they could roll over him and renegotiate every decision, they would never get anywhere. "Stop!" he yelled. "We are not going to begin each morning by renegotiating what we agreed to the night before. This will not happen, and if it does I will leave this room right now and we will cease this entire process." He gathered up his papers as if preparing to storm out. Iraqis rushed over to him, promising not to revisit the previous day's disputes. The proceedings still lasted six hours.

"An incredibly fascinating day," Colonel Richard Hatch, the division lawyer, wrote that evening in the journal he kept on his laptop. He'd wedged his cot in the airport bathroom, which reeked of urine but was at least quiet. Petraeus was relying on Hatch's legal training to help broker agreements between the feuding tribes. It was heady stuff for Hatch, who in his role as a military attorney was accustomed to playing second fiddle to swaggering combat officers. Still, he wondered if Petraeus's energy and determination would be enough to keep the power-sharing deals from exploding on them. "The irony of us dictating to a group what they will do to achieve a democratic government was not lost on me," he wrote.

The negotiations over the elections continued for nearly a week. Removed from the debates in Baghdad and Was.h.i.+ngton over which Baath Party members should be barred from the new government, Petraeus set his own policy. "Frankly, I would like to see discussion here of individuals rather than whole levels being excluded or included," he told the Kurds who wanted to ban all Baathists. "If we draw the line too low, there will be nothing left in government." More sheikhs trickled in and new arguments erupted. "Since n.o.body emerged completely happy we probably got it pretty close to fair," Colonel Hatch wrote in his journal on May 3.

Two days later the delegates gathered in the former Baath Party reception hall to elect a new government. A schedule guided the proceedings down to the minute, mystifying the more laissez-faire Iraqis. At 9:59 a.m. Petraeus stood on a plywood stage at the front of the reception hall. "By being here today you are partic.i.p.ating in the birth of the democratic process in Iraq," he told the group. "This is a historic occasion and an important step forward for Mosul and Iraq." A Saddam-era judge who was there to certify the results read a script explaining the caucus procedures. He was followed by a bearded imam who offered a blessing. Then Petraeus took the microphone.

"At this time would the Shabaks please move to their delegation room," he announced, his voice echoing over the sound system. "At this time would the Yezidis please move to their delegation room... At this time would the Turkmen please move to their delegation room; Turkmen only."

After caucusing, delegates dropped their ballots in plywood boxes built by Petraeus's engineers. The new council had been selected by noon. By 3:00 p.m. there was a governor: Ghanim al-Ba.s.so, a retired major general, who stood next to Petraeus on the wooden stage behind the ballot boxes, an Iraqi flag, and a spray of purple plastic flowers. He was a thin man with sagging eyes, rosy cheeks, and a gray mustache. During the Iran-Iraq War, Ba.s.so had been celebrated for his battlefield heroism, but he had fallen out of favor with the regime in 1993 after his brother was accused of backing a failed coup. His brother was killed, and Ba.s.so was forced into retirement. Now back in power, the new governor raised his hands over his head and in a short speech promised to be a "soldier for all of Mosul." Some delegates feared that Ba.s.so had remained a Baathist even after he left the military and had continued to profit from his ties to Saddam. He was an unacceptable candidate who would have to be replaced, they vowed. But for now at least the choice stood.

Petraeus spoke last and garnered the loudest applause. "Having walked the streets of this city, the second largest in Iraq, and having gotten to know the friendly nature of its citizens, I am beginning to feel like a Moslawi," he proclaimed. Some in the audience were no doubt grateful to him for pulling off the first free elections in their city in decades, maybe ever. Others realized that despite the day's events this American officer was in charge and would be for several more months, maybe years. He had money, attack helicopters, and big guns. They didn't want to get on his bad side.

"Have you done anything like this before?" a CNN reporter asked Petraeus as the new council posed for a group picture.

"No. Never," he replied with an excited, almost surprised lilt to his voice.

He had been in Mosul for only two weeks, but he had created the first representative government in liberated Iraq. Was it perfect? Hardly. But it was a start.

Petraeus and Hatch a.s.sumed that at least one of the other five Army divisions in Iraq would want to conduct their own elections, so they drafted a nine-page PowerPoint briefing on how they had done it, and shared it with neighboring units. But the other divisions had other priorities. A few weeks later the Bush administration barred further elections in the country out of fear that fundamentalists, who were organizing through the mosques, would win. The most telling slide in the 101st's election briefing was one labeled "Commanding General Involvement." More than any other doc.u.ment, it captured Petraeus's philosophy in Mosul as he tried to rebuild a broken society and beat back an insurgency. "Must continuously suggest direction and priority ... patience & repet.i.tion ... Don't let up, must outlast them and outwork them."

The "them" wasn't the enemy, of course. It was the Iraqis who had agreed to cooperate with Petraeus. He sympathized with Abizaid's argument that foreign troops would produce resistance and resentment. "Try as we will to be an army of liberation, over time they will take you for granted," he liked to say. But he differed from Abizaid in that he didn't let it constrain him. He didn't just want to stabilize northern Iraq. He wanted to transform the place. "The biggest idea was that we were going to do nation building and we weren't going to hold it at arm's length. We were an occupying army, and we had enormous responsibilities for the people," he recalled.

The day after the elections President Bush named former diplomat and counterterrorism expert L. Paul Bremer III to head the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. Bremer arrived with two orders-both hatched in the Pentagon-that upended Abizaid and Petraeus's plans. The first was a sweeping de-Baathification edict that banned as many as 50,000 former Baath party members from ever serving in government. A second decree disbanded the army.

The reaction to both was swift and violent. In June a mob of former soldiers, furious at the loss of their pensions, converged on the Mosul city hall, prompting the panicked police there to open fire. One protester was killed, and in the melee two Humvees were torched. Petraeus, who was inside the building, grabbed a bullhorn and rushed outside to calm the crowd and invite the ringleaders to meet with him and the governor. That evening he warned his superiors in Baghdad that the furious former soldiers were on the wall of the government building. "Next time they are going to be over it," he told his bosses. He and Governor Ba.s.so, who had been on the job for less than a month, quickly banned all public demonstrations in Mosul. Technically, Ba.s.so was a Baathist and should have been fired under the terms of Bremer's order. Fortunately for Petraeus, who was growing to respect the Iraqi, officials in Baghdad were preoccupied with other problems.

He was proud of his elections and the work his division was doing in Mosul. Both achievements, however, took a backseat to a prize he considered more meaningful-a combat patch on his right shoulder, signifying that he'd finally seen battle. As soon as the division got formal approval to wear them, Command Sergeant Major Marvin Hill, the division's senior enlisted soldier, snuck into Petraeus's room at the airport, grabbed three of his uniforms, and took them to a tailor he'd found in Mosul. Later that afternoon, he returned with the camouflage top, bearing a new Screaming Eagles patch. "Do you know how huge it is to have a combat patch?" Petraeus had asked weeks earlier when his troops first came under fire. Now he was speechless. He pulled on the fatigues and embraced Hill.

Camp Asaliyah, Qatar June 2003 In the first two months after the invasion, Abizaid made weekly trips to Iraq. He didn't like what he was seeing. Insurgent attacks were rising. So were checkpoint shootings in which U.S. soldiers mistakenly opened fire on drivers who ignored or misunderstood orders to halt. Whenever he returned to Qatar from one of his Iraq trips, Abizaid would sit down with his chief planner, Colonel Mike Fitzgerald, and a few other officers to brainstorm. Usually the meetings came at the end of the day, after the larger staff updates and video briefings with Bush administration officials. "We have got about a year to make a difference in Iraq and then we have got to think about getting out," he said to Fitzgerald one evening in June after returning from Iraq. After a year, he said, the United States would hit a point of diminis.h.i.+ng returns. The population would begin to turn on them.

Fitzgerald wrote a note to himself that he'd need to move with greater urgency to rebuild the Iraqi army and police in particular. Like Abizaid, he wasn't sure how to do it without running afoul of Bremer and Pentagon policy makers.

Fitzgerald and his fellow planners could see Abizaid's frustration building with each pa.s.sing day. The CPA order disbanding the army and purging Baath Party members from the government had infuriated him. He'd slashed through both with a red pen and scribbled in the margins. "By the time Abizaid was finished, they looked as though someone had spilled a can of tomato soup on them," Fitzgerald recalled. He had pa.s.sed them on to General Franks, the head of Central Command, who was the top commander in the Middle East and the senior officer overseeing the war effort. Abizaid was Franks's three-star deputy and didn't have a direct line to Rumsfeld or President Bush. There was little he could do beyond register his disapproval and move on.

Although Franks was set to retire and his job was coming open, it wasn't clear that Abizaid would be staying in the Middle East. Rumsfeld had wanted to make him Army chief of staff. Even though the job would mean a fourth star, Abizaid wasn't interested. He couldn't stand the thought of being stuck in the Pentagon fighting over the defense budget while real wars were going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. He'd never particularly liked serving in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Before he turned down the chief of staff job, he called his friend Major General Karl Eikenberry, who was running the training mission in Afghanistan. Eikenberry and Abizaid had been roommates at West Point, trading a.s.signments with other cadets so they could stay together. After West Point the two officers had led remarkably similar careers, alternating a.s.signments in the Rangers with sojourns that took them far away from the military mainstream. While Abizaid was studying at the University of Jordan, Eikenberry had mastered Mandarin Chinese at Nanjing University. In the mid-1980s they overlapped at Harvard. If anyone would understand his desire to stay in the Middle East, it would be Eikenberry.

Over a static-filled satellite phone line, Abizaid said he was struggling to figure out where he could have the most impact. Eikenberry advised taking the chief of staff job. Iraq had become so politicized that it would be almost impossible for him to succeed. "Tommy Franks got to host the banquet in Iraq, and you are going to be the one who is going to have to clean it up," he said. "It is going to be messy and you are going to get an enormous amount of unwanted help. Knowing the personalities in Was.h.i.+ngton, wouldn't you be better off as chief of staff?"

Abizaid had always had deep doubts about invading Iraq. The first time he had heard a senior Bush administration official raise the possibility was the day after the September 11 terrorist attacks. He was flying back from Europe with Doug Feith, the senior policy official in the Pentagon. Abizaid, a general on the Pentagon's Joint Staff at the time, had been visiting his counterparts in Ukraine. Feith and a handful of other senior Bush administration officials were returning from Russia. With U.S. airs.p.a.ce still closed to commercial traffic, the head of European Command had arranged for them to fly back in a KC-135 Air Force tanker.

In the hour or so before boarding the plane, Abizaid had made repeated calls to Was.h.i.+ngton to check on Eikenberry, whose office was in the section of the Pentagon that had been struck by the hijacked pa.s.senger jet. The last word he got as he took off was that his best friend was still missing.

Huddling in the tanker's dimly lit cargo area, the group of senior officers and Defense Department officials began discussing the response to the attacks. There was agreement on the need to strike hard where Al Qaeda had been able to establish nodes or safe havens. The discussion then turned to other targets, and Feith raised the possibility of toppling Saddam Hussein, a course he and his fellow neoconservatives had been advocating for years. Abizaid cut him off. "Not Iraq. There is not a connection with Al Qaeda," he said. Feith refused to let it go. Abizaid wouldn't back down, either. "I never thought Iraq was at the center of the problem. I didn't see it as a threat to the vital security of the United States," he said later.

As the six-hour flight dragged on, Abizaid sat by himself and started composing the eulogy he planned to deliver for Eikenberry. The plane flew over the remains of the World Trade Center towers on its way to Was.h.i.+ngton, and Abizaid lay on his stomach looking out a small window in the tail at the smoking ruins. As soon as the plane had landed, he called the Pentagon to ask about his friend and was told Eikenberry had narrowly escaped. He tore up the unfinished eulogy.

Back in the Pentagon he was shocked at how quickly the administration s.h.i.+fted from Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq. "I thought there would be a lot more debate about it. All the reasons that we didn't go into Iraq in 1991 still prevailed," he recalled. But almost no one discussed them. In the fall of 2002 Abizaid pushed to a.s.sign a separate military headquarters staff, augmented by large numbers of State Department experts, to focus exclusively on planning the occupation of Iraq, which he warned was going to be a mess. "Iraq has three very distinct minority groups that will be at each other's throats immediately," he told Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith. Abizaid had seen the country's problems up close just ten years earlier in northern Iraq. The response he got from senior Bush administration officials was that the postwar planning was under control. There was a group of exiles ready to parachute into a liberated Iraq and run the country, and there was going to be no long-term occupation. Abizaid was incensed. "I have had enough of Was.h.i.+ngton," he complained to a former officer involved in the postwar planning weeks before the war started. "They have no idea what they are doing. I may just pack it in."

He didn't want to be Army chief. With General Franks set to retire, there was only one job left in the military that Abizaid coveted: the head of Central Command, overseeing the Middle East and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Abizaid sent word to Rumsfeld that he would retire if he didn't get the job; Rumsfeld eventually agreed to give him the position. "It was one of the few times in my career that I really fought for a job," he recalled.

On July 7, 2003, Abizaid pinned on his fourth star and took over Central Command from Franks at a ceremony held in Tampa's largest indoor sports arena, home of the National Hockey League's Lightning franchise. Franks's send-off was the sort befitting a conquering hero. Crooner Wayne Newton stopped by en route to Las Vegas. So too did a tuxedo-clad Robert De Niro and country music performer Neal McCoy, who serenaded the general with the song "I'm Your Biggest Fan."

Franks, a lanky jug-eared general from west Texas, had enlisted in 1967 when his poor grades forced him to leave the University of Texas. After earning a commission through Officer Candidate School, he spent a year in Vietnam, earned his college degree, and then rose quickly in the 1980s and 1990s. He was a savvy technician whose expertise at melding airpower, artillery, and tanks on the battlefield had vaulted him to the top of his profession. In Iraq, he told himself, it was his job to destroy Saddam Hussein's military and topple his regime. What came afterward wasn't his problem. In that regard, he was a perfect match for Rumsfeld, who also had little interest in postwar reconstruction.

Before he bade farewell, Franks practically dared the growing resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan to take its best shot. "Twenty-two months ago the United States of America, in fact the free world, looked into the face of evil," Franks said in his west Texas tw.a.n.g. "We came on that day to recognize our vulnerability. And the world came to recognize America with att.i.tude. As President Bush said recently, 'Bring it on!'" He had no idea his great military victory was coming apart.

Among those in the crowd was Michael Krause, Abizaid's old history professor from West Point. As a cadet, Abizaid had been deeply impressed with Krause, who spoke fluent French and German. Krause had nominated Abizaid for the scholars.h.i.+p program that sent him to Jordan. Though they hadn't seen each other in years, he had come to Tampa for the ceremony at Abizaid's invitation.

Abizaid's new job running Central Command was the most coveted in the military. He was technically one of five American commanders who divided up responsibility for the entire globe, but as the general in charge of the greater Middle East, Abizaid was by far the most important. His turbulent area encompa.s.sed two dozen countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, where American troops were fighting. It wasn't his job to direct those wars, but he stood watch over the commanders who did. The job came with every imaginable amenity, including a Boeing jet to take him anywhere at a moment's notice. A CIA a.n.a.lyst traveled with him for updates each morning on the latest intelligence. An amba.s.sador from the State Department was on his staff to advise him on regional politics. All told, Abizaid was in charge of more than 200,000 troops. When Krause caught up with his former student in a small room inside the arena, he congratulated Abizaid on his new position. Abizaid smiled and shrugged. "Boy, what a mess I have gotten myself into," he replied.

A few days later Abizaid addressed the media for the first time as the top commander in the Middle East, and immediately made clear he would be a different commander from the uncurious and smug Franks. "So what's the situation in Iraq?" he asked rhetorically. The enemy had organized itself into cells and was "conducting a cla.s.sical guerrilla-type campaign," he said. The phrase captivated the reporters sitting in front of him, because it directly contradicted Rumsfeld, who only a couple of weeks earlier had proclaimed, "I guess I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' because there isn't one." As Abizaid left the briefing room, the head of Army public affairs, who also happened to be an old friend from his days in the Rangers, pulled him aside. "You are really in for it now. This briefing room hasn't seen that kind of candor in a long time," he told him.

Soon Abizaid was receiving rambling memos from the defense secretary telling him to keep quiet. One memo, which drew guffaws from the Central Command staff, arrived with an underlined excerpt from Che Guevara's biography, intended by Rumsfeld to prove that the violence in Iraq wasn't a guerrilla war. "It was unbelievable. It was painful," Abizaid recalled. "But it didn't change my mind." The internal debate, consisting of back-and-forth memos from D.C. to Qatar, continued for several more weeks. Publicly, the general's short statement settled it. The conflict became an insurgency. The exchange showed the influence Abizaid wielded as a four-star commander and acknowledged expert on the Arab world. He'd be very careful about how he used it.

His biggest problem in his new job was the command arrangement in Iraq. Shortly before he retired, Franks handed responsibility for military operations in the country to the Army's V Corps, which was led by Lieutenant General Richard Sanchez. The move had shocked Abizaid. Sanchez, a newly promoted three-star, had been given command of the corps only a few days earlier. He'd come to Iraq thinking that he was going to be one of a half-dozen division commanders in the country. Now he was in charge of the entire military effort in the country. "The burden I felt was unimaginable," he wrote in his 2008 autobiography. Abizaid told Franks the move didn't make any sense. "That's the decision," Franks replied.

It soon became clear Sanchez and his small staff, which was desperately short of intelligence specialists, logisticians, and strategists, couldn't handle the job. In early July, Abizaid got a call from General Jack Keane, the acting chief of staff of the Army. He had just returned from a visit to Baghdad and was deeply concerned about Sanchez's ability to handle the war effort. "Listen, this thing is over his head," he told Abizaid.

"Who do you think should take his place?" Abizaid asked. Keane suggested Petraeus. He had first met Petraeus when he was an a.s.sistant division commander in the 101st Airborne Division and Petraeus was one of his battalion commanders. When Petraeus was shot, Keane had helped control the bleeding and flew with him to the hospital. In the years since the shooting Keane, a garrulous New Yorker, had become an avid supporter and mentor, filling the role played previously by Galvin and Vuono. "We can find another division commander. Petraeus is the best guy we got," Keane insisted. Abizaid asked for time to think it over. Sanchez had served under him in Kosovo in the late 1990s, and Abizaid trusted and liked him. Franks had put Sanchez in a grossly unfair position, and Abizaid didn't want to fire him. He believed that he could help Sanchez get the specialists that he needed to succeed from the Army staff in the Pentagon, and that in the interim his Central Command staff could fill in the holes. He called Keane a few days later and said he was going to stick with his friend.

For most of his tenure, Sanchez had only about half of the staff that he needed. Some of the blame for this failure lay with senior officials in the Pentagon who were slow to fill slots because they a.s.sumed the war was over and that U.S. troops would soon be coming home. Abizaid, however, also bore some responsibility. He saw himself as a grand strategist whose job was to help shape the military's overall approach to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader Middle East, and he often ignored thankless but critical tasks such as pounding away at the Pentagon bureaucracy to cough up more personnel to help his overwhelmed commander.

In the summer of 2003, the 101st Airborne Division stood out as the rare American success in Iraq. Congressional delegations, eager for good news, flocked to Mosul. And Petraeus didn't disappoint. He bombarded them with PowerPoint slides cataloging the division's accomplishments: the police force was growing, roads were being paved, the telephones worked, wheat was being harvested, and insurgents were being arrested. The VIPs stayed in the Ninewah Hotel, a formerly state-owned business that Petraeus had badgered the reluctant provincial governing council into privatizing. They met with Governor Ba.s.so.

Before leaving, they sat through a crisply produced twelve-minute video showing 101st soldiers arresting insurgents and fixing up Mosul. It ended with a bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace" and Petraeus's voice from a 101st Airborne Division memorial ceremony. "There is nothing tougher than the loss of a brother in arms," he intoned. "We want to find meaning and purpose in such a loss. Above all we want to answer the question: What good will come from this?" As if to answer the question, a World War II black-and-white photo of exhausted 101st soldiers holding a n.a.z.i flag morphed into a shot of three soldiers clutching an Iraqi flag in a bombed-out building. The final image was, of course, Petraeus's idea, a way of harking back to the days of glory when the 101st had parachuted into the Normandy invasion and fought its way into Germany.

Petraeus believed in mythmaking. His peers referred to him somewhat derisively as "King David." Even Petraeus would admit the nickname carried a grain of truth. "I don't know where the King David thing actually came from, but you had to play that role a little bit," he conceded. Iraqis craved strong leaders.h.i.+p far more than abstract concepts such as democracy, and he was more than happy to provide it.

He had put his headquarters in Saddam's northernmost palace, a fortresslike complex surrounded by man-made lakes and decorated with murals celebrating Mesopotamian warriors. He received visitors in his second-floor office, a large room with marble floors, a view of the Tigris River, and a latticework ceiling made to look like the drooping folds of a Bedouin sheikh's tent. His days began at 5:15 a.m. with twenty minutes of answering e-mails. By six o'clock he and his aide had begun a blistering five-mile dash around the palace complex that took him past the Freedom Barbershop, the Freedom Shopette, and the Freedom Laundry Service. Then he took his morning briefing in a cavernous room with tiered stadium seating for his staff and two projection screens. The briefings always began the same way: "This is Eagle Six," Petraeus would say, using his 101st Airborne Division call sign. "It's another beautiful morning in the Tigris River Valley."

He didn't worry so much about what his brigade commanders were doing as long as they were spending money, which he used as the best measure of whether they were winning over Iraqis. "I noticed Third Brigade is ahead on projects this month. First and Second brigades, do you need some suggestions or some help keeping up?" he'd ask on the morning calls. Worried that the flood of reconstruction money would spur inflation, he decided to open the border to trade with Syria. Boosting the supply of goods, Petraeus reasoned, would offset the increased demand from the extra cash and keep prices low. One evening around eleven he told Colonel Hatch, his division lawyer, to draft the order and have it in his in-box by the next morning. Hatch wasn't sure that he had the authority to open the border, so he crafted a vaguely worded "emergency" measure that would remain in effect "until revoked by a higher authority." To justify it, he cited a speech from General Franks declaring an end to illegal roadblocks and checkpoints. "It was kind of a stretch," he admitted later.

A couple of days later Petraeus and Ba.s.so flew to Rabiya, a dusty town on the Syrian border, to sign the order and declare the crossing open. He loved to fly; the alt.i.tude gave him a perfect perch from which to inventory the 101st's accomplishments for the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporter traveling with him. He pointed out a caravan of fuel tankers ferrying gasoline into Mosul from Turkey. He and the military attache in Ankara had worked with the Turks to make sure the fuel kept flowing. Mosul's Olympic-sized swimming pool gleamed in the sun. Soldiers from the 101st had fixed it just a week earlier. A bit farther out combines harvested wheat. Petraeus set the prices over the objections of the CPA, which had initially demanded a free-market approach. He wanted to make sure farmers got at least 10 percent more for their crop than Saddam paid. reporter traveling with him. He pointed out a caravan of fuel tankers ferrying gasoline into Mosul from Turkey. He and the military attache in Ankara had worked with the Turks to make sure the fuel kept flowing. Mosul's Olympic-sized swimming pool gleamed in the sun. Soldiers from the 101st had fixed it just a week earlier. A bit farther out combines harvested wheat. Petraeus set the prices over the objections of the CPA, which had initially demanded a free-market approach. He wanted to make sure farmers got at least 10 percent more for their crop than Saddam paid.

His helicopter landed at the border, kicking up a giant plume of sand, and hundreds of tribal dignitaries in robelike dishdashas rushed out to greet him. He gave a short speech on the benefits of trade with Syria and then, in accordance with local custom, sat down to consume a ma.s.sive feast of goat and rice with his hands. Long after he was full, the grateful sheikhs continued to pile food on his plate. The CPA prohibited the Iraqis from levying tariffs at the crossing, but Petraeus arranged an "administrative fee" of $10 for a small truck and $20 for a big truck. Some of the money went to repair the border facilities and the rest went to enrich the tribes in the area. This was how business had been done for centuries, even under Saddam.

As he lifted off in his Black Hawk, Petraeus looked down on the throng of sheikhs below waving and cheering next to brightly colored tents. A bit farther out a long ribbon of trucks was streaming across the border. "Amazing, isn't it?" he told the reporter with him. "It's a combination of being the President and the Pope." He caught a lot of flak for the quote from fellow officers who had long believed that the general's ego and ambition were out of control. Years later he would still wish he had never said it. The truth was it captured a bit of how he felt.

Exasperated CPA officials complained that Petraeus's quick elections had empowered too many Baathists and religious zealots. There were at least three or four provincial council members, including Governor Ba.s.so, who the CPA representative in Mosul said should be fired. Petraeus ignored her, maneuvering around Bremer's de-Baathification decree wherever possible. At Mosul University the edict would have forced him to relieve most of the school's faculty. He handed the problem to Hatch, who unearthed a provision in the Geneva Conventions that required occupying powers to ensure the "proper working of all inst.i.tutions devoted to the care and education of children." Petraeus forwarded Hatch's brief to Baghdad, arguing that he couldn't sack the professors without violating the conventions. Bremer agreed to let him fire and then temporarily rehire teachers through the end of the school year.

"Petraeus was very clever but extremely egotistical," said d.i.c.k Nabb, the senior CPA official in the Kurdish-dominated northern territories. "He wanted everyone to know there was a new king in the area." Petraeus insisted that the Kurds fly the official Iraqi flag along with the Kurdish flag over their government buildings. It was his way of making clear that they were now part of the new Iraq, though it infuriated the Kurds, who had operated their own autonomous region for more than a decade. "What you are doing is like asking the Jews in Germany to serve under the swastika," Nabb objected. The Kurds humored Petraeus, flying the Iraqi colors when he visited and promptly taking it down as soon as he left. "You need to remind him that we are not your enemies," Ma.s.soud Barzani, who led one of the Kurds' two major political parties, implored Nabb after Petraeus's initial visit.

A man whose talents and energy had sometimes seemed too big for the Army now had a vast canvas on which to paint. Critics had to concede that he got things done. He dealt with Iraq's chronic electricity shortages by cutting a deal with a rotund Turkish millionaire to s.h.i.+p heavy oil across the border in return for electric power from his privately owned plants. Neither Petraeus nor anyone on his staff knew the first thing about trading oil for kilowatts. So Petraeus gathered together a few officers and the former head of northern Iraq's state-owned oil company. "You need to know enough so we don't get swindled," he instructed.

A few weeks later his oil task force began negotiating a similar deal with surly Syrian oil officials who had flown from the border to Mosul on one of his Black Hawks. The Syrians refused to even address their Iraqi counterparts. "You have been conquered and are in a subjugated state," they insisted. So Petraeus's team handled the deliberations. By day seven they thought they were close to signing a deal, and the two delegations moved to a restaurant on the Tigris River. Several hours later Petraeus radioed Brigadier General Frank Helmick, who was leading the 101st team, to find out what was happening. "Well, we think we got it, but it's not quite there," Helmick told him.

Around 3:00 p.m. he radioed again. The Syrians were refusing to sign anything until they returned to Damascus and received formal government approval. "Don't let them leave," Petraeus ordered. When he arrived at the restaurant the delegations had retreated to separate rooms. Petraeus pulled aside the lone CPA representative on the U.S. team; the 101st had flown him up from Baghdad a few days earlier to help with the deal. "Can I just fly out to the border and throw open the valve without signing a formal contract?" Petraeus asked. Once the oil and the electricity were flowing, he figured, it would be too hard for the Syrians or the civilians in Baghdad to stop. The CPA representative, an Army lieutenant colonel, said okay. He wasn't going to tell a two-star general no. Next Petraeus sat down with the Syrians. "Okay, it is now or never," he finally said. They could open the valve that afternoon and sign the formal agreement sometime later or just forget about the deal.

The Syrians agreed to open it and the two delegations quickly hustled onto five helicopters. As the sun set, the Black Hawks touched down at a cl.u.s.ter of cinder-block and mud shacks a few miles from the border. A small band, hastily a.s.sembled for the ceremony, played an Iraqi tune. Petraeus, the senior Syrian official, and the former head of the northern Iraqi oil office turned the valve, sending oil flowing west. The Iraqis then pulled out a knife and slit the throat of a lamb, which gurgled and thrashed. Petraeus, the Syrians, and the Iraqis dipped their hands in the oozing blood and laid them on the pipeline.

The deal surprised Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was trying to freeze out Damascus, but no one countermanded it, and the oil continued to flow. The joke in the 101st was that Petraeus now ran the only division in the Army with its own foreign policy.

In August 2003 Abizaid arrived in Mosul, where Petraeus presented him with a list of everything he couldn't get from Baghdad. The biggest shortfall was money; the division had reconstruction projects costing tens of millions of dollars that it wanted to do and a microloan initiative that needed funds as well. Petraeus also wanted more lat.i.tude to work with former Baathists. Too many of these people were being frozen out.

Abizaid agreed to help. But he had different reasons for coming to Mosul. He wanted to see the city and walk a patrol. He trusted his sense of the Arab world more than any intelligence report. Petraeus, meanwhile, was determined to make sure nothing happened to his four-star boss, and organized a ma.s.sive security detail to go out with him. U.S. troops stood guard on almost every block and Apache helicopters cut tight circles overhead. As Abizaid's convoy snaked through the city, hundreds of young men, drawn by the hubbub, rushed out of their homes to see what was happening. "Did you see the look on their faces?" Abizaid asked Brigadier General John Custer, his top intelligence officer, after returning to the palace. He was referring to young Arab men they had seen on the patrol. "A lot of those guys were wearing military uniforms a few months ago. They don't see us as their liberators or their friends."

Instead of the 101st Airborne acting as an all-powerful occupation force, what were needed were Muslim troops who could patrol alongside American soldiers and blunt the extremists' message that the troops were anti-Islam, Abizaid insisted. A few weeks earlier he put together a list of potential allies he thought could help: Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Tunisia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. His best bet was to bring in the Turks. Before arriving in Mosul, he'd been in Ankara, where Turkish officials offered to send several thousand soldiers. Abizaid thought they should go to turbulent Anbar Province in western Iraq. The biggest hitch was the Kurds, who had their own centuries-old feud with Turkey and were likely to fight the deployment. Abizaid and Petraeus received the leaders of the two main Kurdish political parties, Ma.s.soud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, in Petraeus's second-floor office. Abizaid knew both men from his 1992 relief mission in northern Iraq. Together he and Talabani had tried to calm the crowd that blocked his battalion from leaving.

Carrying themselves like Ottoman pashas, the Kurdish leaders took seats on the overstuffed chairs in Petraeus's office. "If the Turks move into Anbar, will you let them establish routes through your territory to supply their troops?" Abizaid asked. The Kurds grudgingly agreed to give the Turks safe pa.s.sage.

Two days later Bremer called Abizaid and told him the Kurds had scuttled the deal for Turkish troops. Abizaid was incredulous. "I just talked to them. Did the Kurds veto it or did you veto it?" he demanded.

"Well, it's not a smart thing to bring in neighbors, because once you bring in one neighbor, you have to bring in the other neighbors," Bremer replied. In his 2006 autobiography Bremer wrote that there was widespread opposition among both Kurds and the majority s.h.i.+te Muslims to Turkish peacekeepers. Abizaid's plan, he insisted, never would have worked.

Abizaid ordered his aide to check Bremer's daily schedule. There were no meetings with the Kurdish leaders shown. He was convinced that Bremer didn't want the Turks or any other Muslim forces because they'd complicate the Bush administration's plans to remake Iraq-plans he thought were unrealistic. "What it all meant to me was that they didn't want forces that they didn't think were controllable," he said. "The whole idea was they wanted control. The policy makers wanted control through American forces." In the fall, he got a memo from Rumsfeld suggesting another Muslim partner. Conditions were improving in Afghanistan, and Rumsfeld opined that the Afghan warlords might send forces to Iraq. Sending ill-disciplined Afghans, scarred by decades of civil war, to a country in the midst of its own ethno-sectarian conflict was the worst idea Abizaid could imagine. The ignorance about the region back in Was.h.i.+ngton could be astounding.

It wasn't much better among some American officers in Iraq. Abizaid was getting mostly good news from his division commanders throughout the summer and fall of 2003. With each pa.s.sing month they insisted they were getting more tips and a better handle on the enemy. "Over the last two weeks we've hit the weapons caches and we've really hit the money," Major General Ray Odierno told him on a visit to Tikrit in late July. In September General Sanchez and his division commanders all told him they were on the verge of breaking the resistance. Abizaid had his doubts. The de-Baathification policy was alienating tens of thousands of Sunnis. Efforts to rebuild the army and police were a mess. To prevent a future military coup, the Bush administration had capped the size of the Iraqi army at 45,000 soldiers and insisted that they be used only to defend Iraq against an invasion from outside countries such as Iran or Syria. Driving through Cairo, Abizaid pointed out the large number of Egyptian soldiers standing guard on the sooty streets. In the Arab world, big armies kept young men out of trouble and held fractious societies together. "There is no Arab army on earth that's less than 300,000 in a country the size of Iraq," he railed to his staff.

But he never said it that strongly to Bush or Rumsfeld. He wasn't afraid to disagree with his civilian bosses, particularly on military matters; his first Pentagon press conference proved it. But he didn't believe it was his job to argue with them once a decision had been made. The civilians set the policy and it was the military's job to execute it. Every senior commander struggled with how far to go in offering advice on policy issues, but in Iraq, where bad policy decisions were driving the insurgency, finding the right balance was especially tough. Should he emphasize the positive a.s.sessments coming from his subordinate commanders? Or should he focus on the deep policy disagreements he and his commanders had with Bremer and others in the administration? Was that really his job? There were no clear answers.

After one meeting in which he gave Rumsfeld a positive a.s.sessment of the security situation in Iraq, he turned to his immediate staff and asked how they thought he had done. "I felt like I might have been overly optimistic," he said. "Sir, you were overly optimistic. I don't think you really believed half of what you said," said Major General George Trautman, a Marine who was Abizaid's deputy chief for strategy.

Throughout the latter half of 2003 Abizaid debated going to Baghdad and taking command. Sanchez, whose staff had been thrown together in May, was chronically short of people in key areas such as intelligence. He was also overwhelmed by the job. His relations.h.i.+p with Bremer had grown so bad that the two men barely talked.

In Iraq Abizaid reasoned that he might be able to take some of the pressure off Sanchez, reach out to former Iraqi army officers, and press Bremer to rethink de-Baathification and other decisions that were causing so much unrest. "I think we should just go," he'd tell senior aide Colonel Joe Reynes. He was already spending as much as a week there every month, meeting with commanders and sheikhs. When he wasn't in Iraq or Afghanistan he was in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, or Egypt. The meetings were always the same. He'd ask for names of Sunni sheikhs in Iraq with whom he could meet on his next trip, and the Arab leaders would pa.s.s on a list and some advice. "You have to address the honor of the tribes. Pay the families when you kill one of their men; pay the sheikhs," the crown prince of Bahrain counseled in late October. Abizaid would make a fruitless pitch for them to send Arab peacekeeping troops. At some point they'd tell him what a huge mistake the invasion had been.

As soon as Abizaid seemed settled on moving to Iraq, he'd launch into an argument for staying. There were too many other problems in the region: the Afghan war, an increasingly aggressive Iran, and Al Qaeda's efforts to establish a presence in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. If he were in Baghdad, he couldn't give much attention to these problems, which he believed posed a greater long-term threat. Eventually Abizaid decided not to move his headquarters to Iraq; he would try to help Sanchez manage the war through his frequent visits.

Abizaid's long stretches in the Middle East allowed him to see more clearly than just about any other officer the drawbacks of a long-term occupation of Iraq. He believed that as time pa.s.sed, Iraqi resentment over the occupation would grow and the effectiveness of the military would be diminished. He recognized that until warring religious and ethnic groups were willing to share power, the fighting would grind on indefinitely.

In a tragic way, though, his deep knowledge of the Arabic world also constrained him. He commanded a ma.s.sive military force but worried that if it tried to do too much, it would only make the situation worse. Instead of pus.h.i.+ng for a strategy that recognized the central role that U.S. troops would have to play in stopping the violence, he often seemed to be casting about for a quick fix to Iraq's problems.

In the fall of 2003 Petraeus secured the surrender of Sultan Hashem Ahmed, Iraq's former defense minister and number twenty-seven on the United States' most-wanted list. "You have my word that you'll be treated with the utmost dignity and respect ... in my custody," Petraeus wrote in a letter sent through tribal intermediaries to Hashem. A few weeks later Hashem returned to Mosul, had a final breakfast with his family, and turned himself in to Petraeus. The two men talked in an airplane hangar in Mosul, and Petraeus found that the former general's a.s.sessment of some of northern Iraq's key political figures matched his own.

Abizaid knew Hashem's reputation well. The rotund former general had been a hero of the Iran-Iraq War. Despite his high position in Saddam's government, he was never considered part of the dictator's inner circle. "This guy could be what we've been looking for," Abizaid suggested to Sanchez. Maybe he could serve as defense minister? Hashem had blood on his hands from his days as an Iraqi general, but so did everybody in the country, Abizaid reasoned. There was an air of desperation to the inquiry. Bremer had no interest in resurrecting former generals in any capacity; nor did the s.h.i.+tes and Kurds who had been tortured by Saddam's regime. Hashem was sent to prison and four years later sentenced to death by an Iraqi court for his role in the ga.s.sing of the Kurds.

Mosul November 7, 2003 Abizaid sat across from Petraeus in his second-floor palace office with its view of the Tigris River, a ribbon of greenish blue stretching to the horizon. He'd come to get Petraeus's thoughts on replacing his 22,000-soldier airborne division with a much smaller force of about 8,000 troops. Abizaid and Petraeus had never had a particularly warm relations.h.i.+p. As they shot up through the ranks ahead of their peers, they'd always been rivals more than friends. Still, Abizaid respected the work Petraeus had done in Mosul, and told him as much. No one had done a better job winning over Sunni Arabs or working around the CPA's disastrous decision to ban former Baathists and military officers from taking part in the government. "We are in a race to win over the Iraqi people. What have you and your element done today?" was the mantra plastered on the wall of every 101st Airborne Division command post. Petraeus had created a sense of hope in the north that didn't exist elsewhere.

Abizaid's worry was whether it could last. He doubted that any American could ever really penetrate the tribal, sectarian, and ethnic politics. He was right about Iraq's overwhelming complexity. Even Petraeus didn't fully grasp the political undercurrents that the insurgency would exploit to undo his achievements and gain a foothold in northern Iraq after the 101st departed. But Abizaid underestimated the role that aggressive commanders such as Petraeus were playing in stabilizing the fractious country, at least temporarily. Without Saddam and his henchmen around anymore, only the U.S. military had the capacity to fill the vacuum.

The news of the planned cuts didn't come as a surprise to Petraeus. Cutting so dramatically was high-risk, he warned Abizaid. But he said he thought it could work. His division had already trained 20,000 Iraqi police and military troops, who had held their own so far. As long as his successor had enough money to keep his ma.s.sive reconstruction program going, Mosul could get by with fewer Americans, he said.

Shortly after their meeting, attacks spiked throughout Petraeus's sector. The 101st suffered more deaths in November and December than any other division in Iraq. Petraeus thought he knew what was causing the unrest. Part of the problem was that his reconstruction money was running out. He'd spent $34 million in both captured enemy money and whatever funds he could hara.s.s out of Baghdad. Now the cash was gone and new funds from Was.h.i.+ngton were slow in coming. At his morning battle update briefings in the marble-floored palace auditorium, he tracked the division's spending obsessively, reviewing upward of seventy slides each day. They all sent the same message: the manic pace of the division's first months in Mosul was ebbing.

"Why aren't we digging more wells?" Petraeus asked.

"Because we're out of money," his briefer replied.

"Dig," Petraeus said. He'd take a risk and bet the money would eventually come.

The other big stumbling block was the CPA's de-Baathification policy, which was finally catching up with him. Earlier in the summer Bremer had permitted him to fire and then temporarily rehire teachers through final exams. After the exams Petraeus a.s.sembled a team of Iraqis to evaluate the former Baathists for permanent positions and was delighted when it gave 66 percent of them a reprieve. He sent their voluminous findings to Baghdad on two cargo helicopters, but the CPA reconciliation committee, run by Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi, never gave permission to rehire them. In late November Chalabi visited Petraeus at his stone palace in Mosul, and Petraeus pleaded with him for relief: "I am not saying that all these people should be kept, but if you are going to tell people that they're never going to work again, you might as well throw them in jail."

"At least they can eat there," a less-than-sympathetic Chalabi replied.

A few weeks later, a colleague who worked for Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz visited Petraeus in Mosul and warned him to watch his back on the de-Baathification issue. "The policy n.a.z.is in the defense secretary's office are keeping their eye on you," he said.

By boosting the number of raids and capturing several insurgent leaders, the 101st was able to drive the attack rates back down. Petraeus also worked hard to give former military officers and Baathists who had been blackballed by Baghdad a sense that they were going to have a future in the new Iraq. One way he did it was by staging periodic Baath Party renunciation ceremonies. On a drizzly winter day in December a line of about 2,200 former military officers snaked down a hill in front of the Mosul Police Academy. When he first saw the huge turnout from his helicopter, Petraeus was stunned and delighted. At best, he had expected a crowd of a couple of hundred.

Most in the crowd had fought in Iraq's b.l.o.o.d.y war with Iran during the 1980s. They felt as though they had served their country bravely. Now they were standing in the rain begging forgiveness for sins they didn't believe they had committed. "I am here for my kids and nothing else," one of the officers angrily told an American reporter. Petraeus couldn't give the men their old jobs back. All he could offer was a piece of cake, a soda, and a little bit of hope for the future. He pressed his soldiers to treat the Iraqis with dignity, and warned them not to run out of renunciation certificates. Petraeus wasn't naive; he knew the ceremony wasn't going to win anybody over. Years later he'd refer to the event as a "wild scheme." But maybe it could buy him some time with the fence-sitters before they slipped over to the side of the resistance. The penitents were searched for weapons and brought into the police academy building in groups of 100. Petraeus addressed them from a plywood riser.

"The individuals gathered here have a.s.sembled voluntarily," he said by way of welcoming. "Their only benefit will be the sense of personal closure that comes from disavowing links with the former regime and supporting those who are building the new Iraq." The Iraqis solemnly, and in many cases sullenly, raised their hands and vowed to embrace the new Iraq. Then they signed a renunciation pledge, were handed a certificate, and were encouraged to visit the "veterans' employment office" that had been set up by Petraeus's artillery unit.

Before he left Iraq, Petraeus also tried to sh.o.r.e up Ba.s.so's hold on his office. The governor's detractors had unearthed a tape of him giving a pro-Saddam speech prior to the invasion and broadcast it on Mosul television. Once again, council members began to complain that he was a Baathist and needed to go. Petraeus met with the two top Kurdish leaders, Talabani and Barzani, and received commitments from them that they would support the governor. He thought Ba.s.so was fine.

Although he didn't realize it, Petraeus was holding Mosul together with the force of his personality and his 22,000 troops. Neither was sustainable over the long term. As soon as he left, the political compromises that he had imposed on the Iraqis-in many cases for their own good-would start to unravel. The provincial council, which rarely made a decision on anything without Petraeus pus.h.i.+ng, forced Ba.s.so to resign less than a week after the 101st left Iraq. The reconstruction effort slowed as well. Without Petraeus's hectoring, Mosul would get less money from CPA and Baghdad. The city was headed for problems.

As the 101st prepared to head home, Petraeus and Sergeant Major Marvin Hill, the division's senior enlisted soldier, spent a Sunday afternoon walking the palace grounds, which they had dubbed "Camp Freedom." "We were looking at all the things that had changed and remembering all the division had accomplished," recalled Hill. He'd been warned prior to going to work for Petraeus that the general was a noncommissioned officer's nightmare-a real micromanager. But Hill liked the general's energy and was proud of what the division had accomplished. After an hour, they walked back to Petraeus's office in the palace and talked about their next jobs in the Army. Petraeus told Hill that he'd be an ideal candidate to take over the Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss. His Iraq experience would be a huge boon there and the job would give him time to see his family.

Petraeus had been hoping that the Army would reward his success in Mosul by promoting him to three stars and giving him command of 18th Airborne Corps, one of the top combat commands. He'd learned a few days earlier that he wasn't going to get it, and when he told Hill his disappointment was unmistakable. Hill said the Pentagon almost certainly had other plans for him. Petraeus agreed. The decision, however, seemed to send a signal: success in Mosul was not what the Army most valued.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

"We Didn't Know"

Camp Victory March 2004 It was his first day in Iraq and Major General Pete Chiarelli was going downtown. He had arrived the night before and slept a few hours at the airport camp where the Army had its main headquarters. Now he was headed to an appointment in the Green Zone, the walled enclave in the city center where L. Paul Bremer III and his Coalition Provisional Authority were installed. It was no more than a twenty-minute drive, but the road linking the airport and the Green Zone was hazardous, so generals usually flew. As his helicopter lifted off the pad with its side doors open, he looked out on the capital. It was a teeming city of tightly packed concrete houses and neighborhood shops that stretched mile after mile into the distance. The only skyline was formed by towering mosques, a few hotels and apartment complexes, and battle-damaged ministries. Even the patches of eucalyptus and date palms were coated in a yellow-brown dust. The roads were almost deserted at that early hour. Things looked peaceful, at least to a newcomer skimming above the rooftops.