The General vs. the Ambassador

By Joe Klein

A few months ago, after a sweltering day in the field surveying the progress his troops were making in turning Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) extremists, General David Petraeus squinted into the Baghdad sun and allowed himself a moment of astonishment. "It's just amazing how quickly some of these tribes are flipping," he said. Amazing, indeed. Petraeus has presided over a remarkable turn of events in Iraq. The most recalcitrant areas of the country--the heartland of the Sunni insurgency--have suddenly become the most placid. The safest place for President George W. Bush to land when he visited Iraq on Labor Day was al-Asad air base in Anbar province; a year ago, a military-intelligence report said the province had been "lost" to the jihadis. Now AQI seems to have been kicked out of Anbar, pushed back from Baghdad, forced to carry out its most lethal attacks on the northern periphery of the country. It was feared that the weeks before Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker made their September reports to Congress would be dominated by the insurgency's State of Iraq report: spectacular bombings, perhaps even a Tet-style offensive. But--fingers crossed as I write this--Baghdad seems merely murderous these days, without the efflorescence of gore that would have undercut the Bush Administration's story line.

The tale of how the Sunni tribes rejected the forced marriages, beheadings, smoking bans and strict fundamentalism imposed by the terrorists seems ready-made for Hollywood--and it will be front and center as Bush, Petraeus and Crocker try to sell more war to Congress and the public over the next few weeks. But it is not the only story in Iraq, perhaps not even the most important story. It is more about Iraq's recent past than about its future. It is almost irrelevant to the continuing political meltdown in Baghdad, the utter inability of Iraqis to figure out a way to govern themselves. It has little or nothing to do with the country's Shi'ite majority. Indeed, the U.S. military has had comparatively little interaction with Shi'ites outside Baghdad during the occupation. That task was left to the British and other coalition forces stationed in the Shi'ite heartland down south.

And so the man whose testimony may be the most important may not be Petraeus, the anticipated star of the show, but the other guy, Crocker, a much admired diplomat who has spent his entire career in the region. If Petraeus has seen some victories, Crocker has known nothing but defeat in his dealings with the failed government of Nouri al-Maliki--dealings that mostly involve trying to get the Shi'ites to treat the Sunnis fairly and stop fighting among themselves. As a result, Crocker may have a better handle on the most important questions facing the U.S. effort in Iraq: Can the success with the Sunni tribes be extrapolated? Can a similar program work with the Shi'ites? Can Iraq be saved from the bottom up, with success in provinces like Anbar building toward a national accord?

Petraeus and Crocker have been the best soldier and the best diplomat to serve the U.S. in Iraq. But they see the situation from different perspectives, and their ideas about what to do next may differ as well. The Petraeus testimony seems obvious. He will emphasize the Sunni success, the tamping down of violence in Baghdad, the need for political reconciliation. He will ask for more time, acknowledging that the natural rotation schedule will leave him with fewer troops, a reduction from 20 to 15 combat brigades over the next year. Bush may try to hold his Republicans in place and bollix antiwar Democrats by announcing a quick withdrawal of a brigade or two from Anbar and the north, but that will be politics, not policy. And policy--the question of what, if any, role the U.S. military should have in Iraq--is where the congressional questioning should focus. Will Petraeus propose moving U.S. troops into the restive Shi'ite south? What will he do about Basra, the crucial southern oil port where the British retreat has left slow-motion anarchy, a Shi'ite gang war? What will he do about Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, the most powerful and popular force in Shi'ite Iraq? The general's own staff is divided on many of these questions. But David Kilcullen, Petraeus' leading counterinsurgency specialist, recently wrote a piece in Small Wars Journal that may reflect the general's current thinking, that the Anbar experiment can be replicated by the Shi'ites. "[R]ecently Shi'a tribes in the south have approached us, looking to cooperate with the government against Shi'a extremists," he wrote.

This seems to be Bush's preference; it's certainly been the neoconservative line. Crocker, however, isn't so sure. In a recent conversation, he said, "We are getting some feelers from southern tribes who are tired of JAM," referring to the Jaish al-Mahdi, the Sadr militia. But, he continued, "tribal identities are stronger among Sunnis." Shi'ites tend to adhere to larger social structures, like the two prominent family dynasties in Shi'ite Iraq--the Sadrs and the Hakims. "It has a lot to do with Shi'ites' traditional underdog status," he said. Actually, Crocker seems constitutionally averse to grand strategies attempted by outside forces. "One thing I learned a long time ago is, you don't go into someone else's complicated society fully armed with your own preconceptions," he told me. And Kilcullen's bottom-up tribal assumptions don't fit very well into the top-down struggle between the Hakims and Sadrs and their respective militias. As I reported two weeks ago, when asked if there was a U.S. military role in Basra, Crocker said, "Under a different set of circumstances, you might argue--as some are now doing--that we need a Basra surge ... But you'd need a fairly large force, and we don't have the troops. And if we even proposed it, the political element in the U.S. would go nuts."

In a way, Crocker is the antithesis of the ideologues who provided the intellectual rationale for the Iraq war. He is a classic example of what the neoconservatives scornfully call an Arabist. He is fluent in Arabic and Farsi and has a real affinity for the cultures of the region. He was in the Beirut embassy when it was bombed by Hizballah in 1983, and he dug through the rubble for his lost colleagues. His proudest moment was raising the flag in post-Taliban Kabul, reopening the U.S. embassy. He was a co-author of a secret 2002 State Department assessment called "The Perfect Storm" that argued against a U.S. invasion of Iraq. He won't talk about that now except to say, "It accurately reflected my views at the time." His current views may not be all that different. He remains painfully aware of the prevailing Arab "defensiveness and mistrust toward the West and colonial projects."

Indeed, the Arabist version of Realpolitik raises the essential question about Iraq, the one that should have been asked before the invasion: Can the U.S. impose Western niceties--democracy, a constitution, a national army--on a noncountry divided into tribes and sects and family dynasties? My guess is that Petraeus might say yes and Crocker might say no, but that both would agree the U.S. does have a role in mediating the mayhem as the Iraqis stumble toward their own solutions. The general comes to this moment more optimistic than the ambassador, which is why Crocker should be listened to more closely. When I asked Crocker directly, "What do we do now?" he laughed and said, "Well, I always say, 'When they're coming over the wire ... don't panic.'" Someone needs to ask him that same question under oath.