"The Iraqis are in the fight," says Gen. David Patraeus

Harold's List
BY ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Saturday, October 15, 2005 12:01 a.m. Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON--David Petraeus is not a physically imposing man. Slight, and slightly awkward, he looks every bit the egghead general (he has a Princeton Ph.D.) he is.

But in Iraq--where he first governed Mosul as commander of the 101st Airborne and then took over training of all Iraqi security forces in June 2004--he is something of a giant and one of the foremost authorities on many of the major questions about the war: Did we have enough troops? Which Iraqi leaders are most effective? Was it a mistake to disband Saddam's army? What is the current state of Iraqi security forces?

That his answers are likely to please neither side in these debates--he simultaneously thinks Ahmed Chalabi is too uncompromising when it comes to former members of Saddam's Baath Party, but also that Mr. Chalabi is committed to reaching out to Iraqi Sunnis and "in the best position to do that of anybody in the government"--is all the more reason to listen to them. For in addition to an impressive résumé, he also has an independent mind.

My encounter with the general this week is less dramatic than our first meeting--in Baghdad this August. It was the tail end of what had been a massive dust-storm and we were scheduled to fly, along with virtually the entire Iraqi government, to a graduation ceremony for security trainees at Numaniyah, southeast of the capital. Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari had already canceled, citing the weather. But due solely I suspect to Gen. Petraeus's determination, our fleet of Blackhawks did in fact take off from the Green Zone helipad and fly blindly for about 15 minutes before even he had to concede that there was no choice but to turn back. My consolation prize was a surprisingly frank briefing from the general over a spartan lunch of bologna sandwiches.

"You would have seen a unit in training which happened to be the Seventh Division, and those elements now have been deployed into Anbar province," he tells me on Tuesday. This time our venue is a boring Washington conference room, chosen only for its proximity to the general's other appointments of the day. Recently returned from Iraq to take command of U.S. Army training at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., his views are in demand. The week before he briefed President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the chairman of Joint Chiefs. The day of our interview, Mr. Rumsfeld is again on the schedule.

Gen. Petraeus seems a little less in his element in Washington. Perhaps he's nervous, or perhaps it's just the hyperalert air of a man who knows the fate of his work of the past 15 months will largely be determined over the next two--starting with today's referendum on the proposed Iraqi Constitution. That's because the Iraqi security forces he built will face their stiffest challenge yet in trying to protect the vote, and because their future will of course be dependent on who ultimately gets elected in December. "The most important coefficient," he emphasizes, "is the political environment."

As for the immediate challenge of today, Gen. Petraeus says he's not only optimistic, he thinks there's a good chance the process will actually have a galvanizing effect on morale. "The January elections were a defining moment for the Iraqi security forces," he says, by way of comparison. "They took a huge lift from those elections--their performance and the support they got from the Iraqi people following that, with several of their policemen martyring themselves to smother suicide-vest wearers. And since that time there's not a case of an Iraqi unit folding, going out the back of a police station."

He's alluding, of course, to the miserable performance of Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)--both army and police--during the simultaneous Sunni and Shiite (remember Moqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army?) insurgencies in April 2004.

Gen. Petraeus is careful (too careful) not to blame this on the strange combination of inattention and control-freakery that characterized the security strategy of L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. But when pressed, he concedes he was tasked to fundamentally reshape Iraqi security forces in June that year for a reason. "The original conception for the Iraqi military was a force that would be used to defend the territorial integrity of Iraq," he says. But the interim government that assumed control of the newly sovereign country "wisely and inescapably recognized that the biggest threat to Iraq was internal, not external, and those forces that were being trained and equipped and invested in, for whom infrastructure was being rebuilt, clearly needed to help Iraq fight the insurgency."

Thus was born the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq, or "min-sticky"--an awkward acronym even by military standards. One of Gen. Petraeus's frustrations is getting people to understand that things really have changed since then.

"Is Joe Biden convinced?" I ask, referring to the Delaware senator who spent the summer claiming that only a handful of Iraqi battalions were of any use. "You'll have to ask him," replies the general, launching into a survey of the state of play: "There are now nearly 120 army and police combat battalions [about 750 men each] that are 'in the fight.' And 'in the fight' by the transition readiness assessment means they are either Level One, Level Two or Level Three. Now certainly, roughly 80 of those are Level Three, which means 'fighting alongside.' In other words they're fighting literally side by side with our forces. They're not yet capable of independent operations on their own."

But "nearly 40 now are Level Two or better. . . . That's hugely significant because it's at Level Two, at the 'in the lead' category, that means they're doing independent operations. They're not fully independent though, and that's what Level One means. It means they need no Coalition assistance whatsoever."

He offers an example: "In one case, one of the units was reassessed from One to Two. It's doing the same mission, by the way, on Haifa Street in Baghdad. It's just a case of someone being asked, 'Are you sure they're really Level One?' and he said, 'Well maybe they do need a little help from the Coalition in logistics so I guess they properly should be Level Two.' The truth is they actually got a little bit better in that month or two since they were reassessed. . . . They own their own area of operations."

I can vouch for the general's assessment of the Haifa Street unit's performance, as well as that of the Iraqi forces now manning Baghdad's once-perilous airport road. I was there in June 2004, when one couldn't be sure if the few Iraqi forces visible were the real thing or impostors who might kidnap you and sell you to the highest bidder. Today smartly outfitted ISF are visible everywhere.
"People keep asking, 'When will Iraqi security forces take over from Coalition forces?' " says Gen. Petraeus. "Well, they've been doing it for months. . . . There was a ceremony a few months back when Coalition forces transferred security responsibilities to Iraqis in Najaf. The same thing happened just a few weeks ago in Karbala. Mostly recently, within the last week, four districts within Baghdad have been transitioned to Iraqi security force control and I think that's roughly 20% of Baghdad."

I ask the general if it was a mistake to disband Saddam's army in the first place. He responds that the decision was a much "tougher call" than most critics realize, given that there was "no infrastructure left" and it was such a "top-heavy force": "We're told there were 1,100 former brigadiers and above just in Ninevah province." Did we send too few troops of our own? He had enough when he was running Mosul, the general replies.

If there is a question mark hanging over the Petraeus era, it is the massive procurement corruption that appears to have happened at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense on his watch. When I was there in August, a multitude of sources--U.S. and Iraqi, and including the new defense minister himself--told me that the ministry's budget had been essentially looted during interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's government. The independent Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit had compiled a report documenting apparent kickbacks and worthless weapons contracts, and on the day of our interview this week the judge heading Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity announced that arrest warrants had been issued for 23 officials, including former Defense Minister Hazem Shalaan.

I ask Gen. Petraeus if he's aware of the development. "There is a sense, frankly, that there was some degree of corruption," he replies, but insists it involved "Iraqi money," not U.S. funds, and that some of the allegations might be "politically motivated"--both fairly feeble protestations. Building the Iraqi security forces is a joint venture in which there are not "American" and "Iraqi" funds. And the range of voices claiming corruption is too vast for it to be part of anybody's political vendetta against Mr. Allawi and his team.

A better explanation, which he also cites, is that corruption appears to have been endemic--and that it occurred in many other ministries besides defense. History will likely judge poor financial oversight to have been a widespread failure of both civilian and military occupation officials. One recent change is that Deputy Prime Minister Chalabi--with whom Gen. Petraeus worked closely, and whom he clearly respects--now chairs a Contracts Committee that reviews all tenders above $3 million.

Gen. Petraeus's record nonetheless remains one of massive accomplishment: He built functioning Iraqi security forces where few had existed. I ask him what he most wants Americans to understand about developments over there. "That Iraqis are in the fight," he says. "They are fighting and dying for their country and they are fighting increasingly well."

Mr. Pollock is a senior editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal.