Robert D. Kaplan gives credence to the testimony of Petraeus and Crocker and warns against a hasty withdrawal from Iraq
Bottom-Up Progress
The Iraq War has brought out the worst in a lot of people. Many who opposed it from the start have been beating their chests in triumph about how badly things have gone, while hunting for bad news wherever they can find it, which isn’t very hard. Many who supported the war have been searching for any positive trend that would allow them to claim that the tide is turning. This second group assumes that history will redeem them, not realizing that even if Iraq were brought gradually to rights, and the clerical regime in Iran were to suffer severe setbacks, it would still be hard to justify the loss of tens of thousands of lives merely for the sake of strategic positioning.
Of course, had the occupation been planned with the same meticulousness as the initial invasion, the loss of life might have been far less severe, and thus the war might have been justified with hindsight. That didn’t happen, though. Those like myself who argued for regime change are stuck with the facts as they are, not as we would like them to be.
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.
Indeed, to say that the occupation was doomed from the start, regardless of who was chosen to lead it, is pure determinism, since it assumes that individual men have no ability to affect outcomes. I have met and talked with both Casey and Petraeus, and the difference between them is vast. Casey is a modest, by-the-book general who evinces little imagination. Petraeus is both an innovative general and an outside-the-box intellectual, who draws on a lifetime of deep and varied reading.
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.
As for the substance of Petraeus’s report, you don’t have to believe that victory is around the corner to believe that our third general to run the occupation has made demonstrable progress where the previous two failed. The tactical situation on the ground is moving forward for the first time since Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad in the spring of 2003. The question is: How much progress has been made, and what does it mean, if anything?
Robert D. Kaplan is national correspondent for The Atlantic and a visiting professor at the U. S. Naval Academy. He is the author of Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground.
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