In previous wars, presidents have reached down into the bureaucracy to find the most competent generals. Lincoln was famous for discarding generals until he got the right one, Ulysses S. Grant. John Pershing was promoted above other officers to command troops in World War I. George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower were also plucked from the ranks to command troops in World War II. But George W. Bush and his secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, settled for a barely competent general, Ricardo Sanchez, for the absolutely crucial job of getting the military occupation of Iraq off to a good start. When Sanchez failed, they then settled for a merely ordinary man, George Casey, under whom the situation continued to deteriorate. If you are whom you appoint, Sanchez and Casey speak volumes about the Bush administration. It took nearly four years of war for the Bush administration to choose the kind of general that previous presidents would have been hunting for—and demanding—from the very beginning: David Petraeus.Kaplan dismisses the notion that either Petraeus or Amb. Crocker could be percieved as Bush men.
The idea that General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are front men for the administration is ludicrous. Until he took the job as overall ground commander in Iraq, Petraeus was a favorite of liberal journalists: the Princeton man who enjoyed the company of the media and intellectuals, so much so that he was vaguely distrusted by other general officers who envied the good ink he received. As for Crocker, he is a hard-core Arabist, a professional species that I once wrote a book about: He is the least likely creature on earth to buy into neoconservative ideas about the Middle East. Neither of these men are identified with the decision to go to war. If I had to bet, I’d say that Crocker especially would have been against it, like his other Arabist colleagues. Thus, these men have no personal stake in proving the president right. They and their staffs are much more likely to provide a balanced analysis of the reality in Iraq than senators and congressmen looking over their shoulders at opinion polls and future elections. As Petraeus said, “I wrote this testimony myself,” meaning, the White House had nothing to do with it. Watching them brief Congress Monday, I came away convinced that they made a better impression on the public than anyone else in the room.Kaplan ultimately believes things are getting better, but we are still going to be stuck...
Probably the two most interesting statements in Petraeus’s report will get little coverage. First, that the data analysis he used to brief Congress was found by two intelligence agencies to be the best available on the Iraq war, and that reenlistment rates of troops in Iraq are above average: 130 percent among younger enlistees and 115 percent among those in mid-career. Those statistics constitute telling evidence that the troops themselves continue to find great meaning in their work, suggesting that they certainly don’t believe the cause is lost.
Of course, there is a basic contradiction in the analyses of Petraeus and Crocker. If Iraq has made all the progress they show in their charts and yet would fall apart if we left, then how relevant is that progress in the first place? The editorial writers at The New York Times remind us that military progress is meaningless without political progress. By that logic, since there has been no tangible national reconciliation at the top levels of government in Baghdad, there has been no meaningful progress at all. But that may be too neat an equation. If the surge has helped fortify political progress on the ground at the tribal level in Anbar and other regions of the country—by solidifying the Sunni alliance against al-Qaeda—then perhaps we should not rush toward the exit gates. Just because we can’t engineer change at the top does not mean that we can’t engineer change at the bottom in a way that will gradually and organically affect the top. As Crocker said, “The current course is hard; the alternatives are far worse.” Indeed, as Petraeus indicated, a rapid withdrawal would unleash centrifugal forces in Iraq that would tear the country further apart, whereas a slow and gradual withdrawal over time will improve the situation.
Alas, a series of dictators, culminating in Saddam Hussein, built a state out of a multiconfessional and multiethnic hodgepodge. Because that hodgepodge was so unwieldy—a Frankenstein monster of a polity—the force required to control it was, by necessity, tyrannical in the extreme. With that extreme tyranny now dismantled, rebuilding the Iraqi state must begin from scratch. It may be no accident that the progress we have seen is at the bottom, since that might be the only place where such progress can even begin to take hold.
Bottom line: I suspect we will be stuck in Iraq with tens of thousands of troops for years to come. The results we obtain may be meager, but they’ll still be better than if we suddenly withdrew.
