[antimedia] FW: General Petraeus

[Email subscription to blog articles]

 FYI--Phil
 

 General Known to See Peace as Still Possible 
 
By Rick Atkinson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 7, 2007 
 
Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is President Bush's choice to become the top
U.S. military commander in Iraq, posed a riddle during the initial march to
Baghdad four years ago that now becomes his own conundrum to solve: "Tell me
how this ends." 
 
That query, uttered repeatedly to a reporter then embedded in Petraeus's
101st Airborne Division, revealed a flinty skepticism about prospects in
Iraq -- and the man now asked to forestall a military debacle. 
 
Long recognized as one of the Army's premier intellectuals, with a PhD from
Princeton to complement his West Point education, Petraeus, 54, will inherit
one of the toughest assignments handed any senior officer since the Vietnam
War. He takes command of 132,000 U.S. troops in a country shattered by
insurgency and sectarian bloodletting, with a home front that is divided and
disheartened after 3,000 American combat deaths. If his riddle of 2003
remains apt, so does the headline on a Newsweek cover story about Petraeus
in July 2004: "Can This Man Save Iraq?" 
 
Skepticism is rife, inside and outside the Army. "Petraeus is being given a
losing hand. I say that reluctantly. The war is unmistakably going in the
wrong direction," retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey said in an interview
yesterday. "The only good news in all this is that Petraeus is so incredibly
intelligent and creative. . . . I'm sure he'll say to himself, 'I'm not
going to be the last soldier off the roof of the embassy in the Green Zone.'
" 
 
Petraeus, if controversial among some peers who deem him arrogant or
excessively ambitious, is seen by many others as perhaps the last, best hope
for success in Iraq. "If anyone can pick up the baton and run with it, it is
David Petraeus," said retired Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief
of staff. After spending 2 1/2 of the past four years in Iraq, as a division
commander and then as the officer overseeing the initial reconstruction of
Iraqi security forces, Petraeus is known to believe that a stable, pacified
Iraq is still possible -- if not probable -- but not without dramatically
improved security. 
 
Having also served in Bosnia after the catastrophic civil war there, he has
told friends that he sees troubling parallels between that country and Iraq.
Two months ago, he said, "I actually stay awake occasionally at night trying
to figure out the path ahead." 
 
Upon Senate confirmation and the receipt of his fourth star, making him a
full general, he is expected to spend some weeks assessing conditions in
Iraq and drafting a strategic plan that goes beyond the current debate over
whether to increase U.S. troop levels by up to five brigades, roughly 20,000
troops. That "surge" is consistent with the military's new counterinsurgency
manual, much of which Petraeus wrote, which stresses protecting the
indigenous population and imposing security as a condition for stability. 
 
One of Petraeus's longtime Army patrons, now-retired Gen. Jack Keane, has
advocated an even larger deployment this spring. But many strategists say
such an increase is pointless without a sweeping economic reconstruction
program and a robust rearmament of the Iraqi army with artillery, attack
helicopters and other heavy weapons. 
 
Many also say the additional forces to be used in any troop increase are
already badly worn down by the military's intense operational tempo since
the first deployments to Afghanistan in 2001. The new Democratic leadership
in Congress on Friday pointedly rejected even a short-term escalation in
U.S. forces in Iraq. 
 
These problems and more confront Petraeus, who has told friends that he has
no illusions about the complexity of the job at hand. Unaccustomed to
failure, he is, in the words of one former aide, "the most competitive man
on the planet." The son of a Dutch sea captain who took refuge in New York
during World War II, Petraeus grew up in Cornwall on Hudson, a few miles
outside the gates of the U.S. Military Academy, which he entered as a new
cadet in July 1970. 
 
"A striver to the max, Dave was always 'going for it' in sports, academics,
leadership, and even his social life," the West Point yearbook noted in
1974. A month after graduation, he married Holly Knowlton, the daughter of
the academy superintendent. They have two grown children. 
 
As a young lieutenant, Petraeus entered an Army battered by defeat in
Vietnam and badly frayed by drugs, lack of discipline and the American
public's diminished esteem for the military. Accolades and achievements
followed as he moved from post to post. Petraeus received all three prizes
awarded in his class at Ranger School, perhaps the Army's toughest physical
and psychological challenge, and he later won the George C. Marshall award
as the top graduate in the Army Command and General Staff College class of
1983. 
 
As he rose through the ranks, Petraeus alternated command and staff
assignments with duty as an aide to several of the Army's most prominent
four-star generals, a pattern that caused one envious peer to call him a
"professional son." At Princeton University, Petraeus's dissertation, "The
American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam," examined the caution that
seized the high command after the war. 
 
His intensity, cutting intellect and competitiveness have rubbed some
officers the wrong way. Muttered jibes about "King David" have been heard
around his command post. He remains obsessive about what he calls "the P.T.
culture" -- physical training -- and has been known to challenge soldiers
half his age to various athletic competitions. "If anyone beats him in the
shorter runs, four miles or so, he takes them out for 10 miles and smokes
them," a staff officer observed several years ago. At 5-foot-9 and 155
pounds, Petraeus evokes George Bernard Shaw's description of the British
general Bernard L. Montgomery: "an intensely compacted hank of wire." 
 
Twice, accidents almost ended his career, or even his life. In 1991, as a
battalion commander at Fort Campbell, Ky., he was shot in the chest with an
M-16 rifle when a soldier tripped during a training exercise. Rushed into
surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he underwent
five hours of surgery by Bill Frist, who a decade later became Senate
majority leader. While skydiving in 2000, Petraeus survived the abrupt
collapse of his parachute 60 feet up. His shattered pelvis was reassembled
with a plate and long screws. 
 
As commander of the 101st Airborne, Petraeus saw combat for the first time
during the division's drive up the Euphrates Valley, with sharp firefights
in Najaf, Karbala and Hilla. But it was during the division's subsequent
occupation of Mosul and northern Iraq that he won widespread acclaim by
resurrecting the local economy, restoring services and preserving order with
strategic force, which included killing Saddam Hussein's two sons. Posters
in the division bivouacs read: "What have you done to win Iraqi hearts and
minds today?" 
 
More than 60 soldiers from the 101st died during the deployment, and upon
bringing the division back to Kentucky in February 2004, Petraeus remarked,
"It's been a long, tough year, and I am older in more ways than just age." 
 
His subsequent service as commander of the Multi-National Security
Transition Command, responsible for training Iraqi security forces, was
another long, tough year -- that stretched to 15 months. Tens of thousands
of Iraqi soldiers and police were trained, with concomitant efforts to
supply infrastructure, equipment and procedures. But the project at best
remains an imperiled work in progress, with alarming signs of sectarian
fractures spreading through the Iraqi security institutions that Petraeus is
known to consider as crucial to restoring stability there as any additional
coalition forces could be. 
 
Both long stints in Iraq have given Petraeus an intimate knowledge of the
country's ethnic fractures and the limits of American influence. "A certain
degree of intellectual humility is a good thing," he once told a reporter.
"There aren't always a hell of a lot of absolutely right answers out there."

 
His cordial relations with the media, and the Newsweek cover story that
depicted him as a potential savior for the Bush administration, rankled some
of his superiors in the Pentagon, according to two now-retired senior
generals. When Petraeus was sent to command the U.S. Army Combined Arms
Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in 2005, some of his peers wondered
whether his career was in eclipse. 
 
In asking that nettlesome question four years ago -- "Tell me how this ends"
-- Petraeus alluded to the advice supposedly given President Dwight D.
Eisenhower in the mid-1950s when he asked what it would take for the U.S.
military to save the beleaguered French colonial empire in war-torn Vietnam:
"Eight years and eight divisions." 
 
With only ten divisions now in the U.S. Army, and the American public's
patience ebbing, Petraeus recently acknowledged that such a prescription is
not likely to be any more acceptable today than it was in the 1950s. 
 
Conrad C. Crane, a West Point classmate of Petraeus's who last year helped
him write the new counterinsurgency manual, said: "There have been
situations in our history where American generals were given tough problems
to resolve, like Lincoln grabbing U.S. Grant in 1864. Those situations have
all demanded steadfastness, fortitude, initiative and creativity. It will
take all those traits in Baghdad. 
 
"We've got a big problem," Crane added. "He's the right guy to fix it. If
anybody can fix this, he can." 
 
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report. 
 
COMMENT: Shades of The Man of La Mancha......The Impossible Dream! Good
Luck!! 
 
LIFE'S TOO SHORT TO BE HAPPY...
  _____  

 
<http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/1615326657x4311227241x4298082137/aol?redir=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eaol%2Ecom%2Fnewaol> Check out the new AOL. Most
comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions
of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.powerblogs.com/pipermail/antimedia/attachments/20070117/94d7c6be/attachment.htm