By Margaret Menge
It’s evening in Baghdad – 8 p.m. – and David Petraeus is at home in his palace, on the outskirts of the city. It’s one of the many palaces built by Saddam Hussein – this one for his mother – and is surrounded by a man-made lake. It is now known as ‘Camp Victory’ -- the home and headquarters of the commander of the war in Iraq. That commander, for the last year and four days, has been General David H. Petraeus.
“Margaret” “Cornwall” “They had an ice storm,” the general’s aide says on handing the call over. The general takes the phone and says “hello.” It is not a blustery “hello” or a full-bellied “hello,” but just a simple “hello” that you might hear on any day of the week from anyone you meet around Cornwall. It’s Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, and David Petraeus has just passed the one-year mark. It’s been one year and four days since he arrived in Baghdad to take command of the Multi-National Force in Iraq. He’s been deployed and away from the U.S. for most of the last six years. And now, he can’t get enough about Cornwall. He inquires about the ice storm (and is delighted when told it appears as though Cornwall will pull through) and about the people in the Fox News special about him that aired last fall. He remarks how pretty Heather O’Dell (teacher at Cornwall-on-Hudson Elementary) looked on that special, and remembered her as a high school cheerleader and “always a leader.” He talks about the great education he received here in Cornwall, from teachers like Chic Sciple and Janet Dempsey and Mrs. Gertrude Dwyer -- “The line-up in elementary school was incredible…the teachers were fantastic,” he says – and about sports – about Coach McGinnis who “coached about everything there was,” and about playing Little League and winning the soccer championship in his senior year. He remembered that in Cornwall, nobody was left out in the cold, or on the bench. “It didn’t matter if you were four foot two inches,” he says, “You could still play on the pit basketball team.”
David Petraeus grew up on Avenue A in Cornwall-on-Hudson. The home was at 41 Avenue A, but became 43 Avenue A, he recalls, after the Knapps built a home in between. He hasn’t lived here since 1970, when he graduated from Cornwall Central High School and started as a cadet at West Point. And he hasn’t been back here in a few years (he was last at West Point in 2006 to honor his friend, Tom Brokaw, who was being given the Thayer Award). But he seems to remember every turn in every street, and every hill that was any good for sledding. They played hockey “quite seriously” on the pond behind the apartment building on Hudson Street. “There were no liability issues in those days. If you broke your neck so be it,” he says. There was also skating on Rings Pond every winter, he remembers, and sledding down Braden hill, behind the old Braden School (on Braden Place). And when he was older, they skied, at Hunter Mountain, and on Mount Beacon (and at Belleayre and Holiday Mountain for races). “We used to ski at West Point most of all. There was always somebody whose family had a whole bunch of season tickets,” he remembers.
It is getting on toward 9 p.m. in Baghdad, and David has been up since before dawn. He started his day at 5:30 a.m., as he does every day, with an ‘intelligence book’ from the Central Intelligence Agency, and then a meeting with the staff. “You spend a great deal of time every day assimilating information,” he says. He is rarely alone, as a security officer tails him from the moment he steps out of his private chambers. He spends a lot of time at the U.S. Embassy, with Ambassador Ryan Crocker, whom he refers to as “very good, and very selfless.” And about three days a week, he visits with units in and around Baghdad, and walks through local markets. The day before, he says, he walked through a market in southwest Baghdad without body armor or Kevlar, going into a billiard hall and a chai shop, where he mingled with Iraqi civilians. Six months ago, he says, you couldn’t have walked through that market -- it would have been too dangerous.
What David Petraeus has managed to do in Iraq only becomes really clear when we stop to remember that a year ago December, the Iraq Study Group issued a report that called conditions in Iraq “grave” and “deteriorating,” and when we remember that it seemed certain that the most important issue, and maybe the only issue, in this presidential campaign was going to be the war – and how to get out of it. “We were on the brink of failure in Iraq,” says Ralph Peters, a former Army intelligence officer turned New York Post columnist who worked at the Pentagon (and in the White House) under another famous American general, Barry McCaffrey. “In fourteen months in Iraq, Petraeus has accomplished more than anyone thought he could have…Petraeus is literally the indispensable man,” says Peters.
And just what has he done? General Petraeus, for the last year, has managed what he calls a “very, very aggressive counterinsurgency campaign.” It’s not the kind of war that most soldiers are trained for. It requires a more diverse set of talents. “Some people say it’s really the graduate level of warfare,” says Petraeus. Peters, who has been to Iraq on special missions every year since the war began, defines counterinsurgency as, “Killing the people who need killing, helping the people who need helping, and knowing the difference between the two.” He’s read the counterinsurgency manual that Petraeus authored – he calls it “counterinsurgency for pussies” – and says that the general may have had to unlearn some of what he thought he knew. “My own concern going into this was that he [Petraeus] wouldn’t be tough enough…but he’s certainly disabused me of that,” says Peters. “He’s been absolutely relentless…I’d argue that he’s been one of our most effective killers.”
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“He’s been absolutely relentless…I’d argue that he’s been one of our most effective killers,”
-- Col. Ralph Peters, former Army intelligence officer and frequent commentator on national security issues for the New York Post and Fox News.
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Petraeus was named by President Bush in January of 2007 to take command in Iraq as part of a “shake up” that included also replacing the head of Central Command and increasing troop levels by 30,000. It was called the “surge.” Democrats didn’t like it; but many of them didn’t want to be accused of standing in the way of success in Iraq. The general public was jittery; it reminded many of them of the beginning of the gradual escalation in force in Vietnam. It didn’t seem likely to work in quelling the violence that was making for miserable reports on cable news every night (they always began: “sectarian violence erupted in southern Baghdad early this morning…”). But it has worked. A year ago, General Petraeus says, there were 55 Iraqis dead a night from sectarian violence – Sunni Muslims killing Shiites and vice versa. “That’s a cancer that eats at society,” he says. “It tore Iraqi society apart…It had beyond a corrosive effect.” That sectarian killing has largely abated, but the cancer has not been cut out. “Al Qaeda is a very resilient enemy. Truly barbaric. Will stop at nothing. And is constantly trying to re-ignite ethno-sectarian violence,” says Petraeus. “We have done enormous damage to them in the last year,” he says, but acknowledges that the fight is not over: “It’s like a boxer that’s been knocked down again but can come back off the canvas with a lethal right hand.”
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“He’s very intelligent, and extremely ambitious, but in a positive way,”
– Col. Ralph Peters, former Army intelligence officer.
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Petraeus has been out of sight for most of the last year, except for the two days last September when he testified for hours on end before the House and Senate Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees. The general sat at a table next to Ambassador Crocker, the two of them looking up at the members of Congress like schoolboys hauled before the principal. The chair of the committee was repeatedly interrupted by shouts from Code Pink protesters, whom he ordered to be taken out of the room by Capitol Police without delay. And when the disturbances were finally quelled, and they’d gotten through all of the opening statements,…just when General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker were about to begin, it was discovered that the microphones in front of them were not working. David talks about testifying in those hearing rooms on Capitol Hill, with the whole world watching on television, as a surreal experience. “Obviously, the glare if you will, the sense of being under the microscope was pretty keen,” he says. “It’s almost an out of body experience.” But what people watching him on television saw was a man who appeared to be completely, supremely in control of his faculties. He was unflinching when criticized and unyielding when a few of the Democratic members persisted in trying to interrupt him as he was giving answers. He just kept on talking, not altering his speech, not showing any sign of perturbation. Petraeus, in that testimony, spoke of a greatly improved security situation, but of a political situation that left something to be desired. But on that front too, good news has now come.
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“David, being the intellectual soldier that he is, has been able to make the most of the surge.”
-- Gen. Raymond Bell of Maple Road in Cornwall-on-Hudson, who graduated from West Point in 1957. Gen. Bell was acquainted with Sixtus Petraeus, David's father, and tracked David’s rise from a two-star to a four-star general.
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On Feb. 14, finally, Petraeus was feeling that a corner had been turned. There is a Page 1 article in the New York Times about the three laws passed the day before by the Iraqi Parliament – which the Times refers to as having “the potential to spur reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites and set the country on the road to a more representative government.” Petraeus refers to the passage of the laws as “quite a lift” for morale. “We’ve fought pretty hard to give them this opportunity, and they’ve finally exploited it,” he says. But he is careful to steer clear of the sort of triumphalism to which political supporters of the war are sometimes given. “We don’t really use the terms ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’ anymore,” he says. “We use the word ‘realist.’ Iraq is very hard.” It is surely so, but he makes it seem easy. We don’t even hear talk now about how strange it is that we don’t talk about the war. We don’t hear a thing about the Iraq Study Report that recommended pulling all troops out of Iraq by 2008. Gen. Petraeus recently recommended, as did Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a halt to the drawdown of the 30,000 troops added in the surge. And there doesn’t seem to be much of an outcry, from Democratic politicians, or from the legions of regular Americans who seemed about fed up with the war just a year ago. In fact, the name “Petraeus” has become the trump card used by Republicans to put a quick stop to talk about withdrawal. In campaigning in Wisconsin before Tuesday’s primary last week, Senator John McCain referred to Petraeus as “one of the great generals in American military history” and warned against early withdrawal, saying it should be up to General Petraeus when our troops come home.
So high has David Petraeus’ star risen, that he is now frequently mentioned as a possible presidential candidate – though it is usually in the context of “What if?” or “Wouldn’t that be the ideal ticket?” When asked about speculation in the media that he may be interested in political office, he answers swiftly, “I can assure you, there is no validity to that.” He says he hasn’t voted in at least the last two general elections, and in fact, a request to the Board of Elections in Arlington County, Virginia, where he lives, turns up no record of a David Petraeus registered to vote there. But he is thinking about coming home. “At a certain point, you do need to reconnect,” he says. Petraeus has been deployed for most of the last six years, starting in 2001, when he served a ten-month tour in Bosnia. He was commander of the 101st Airborne division in 2003, during the drive to Baghdad, and after, when the brigades under his command were charged with securing the peace in and around Mosul in northern Iraq. He’s due to appear again before Congress in April, but then it’s back to Iraq. There were reports a couple of months ago that he was being considered to head NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but it has since been decided that the general will at least stay in Iraq through the summer and into the fall. The difficulty, with a war like this, is the end never seems quite in sight. Petraeus is asked whether he doesn’t want to see the mission through. “There’s no question about it,” he says. “On the other hand, there’s a certain point where it’s useful to get someone with a new set of eyes. And again, I’m not sure where that point is.”
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“David was just a delightful little boy. Full of fun and mischief. He was bright. Carol [David’s sister] was more intellectual,..”
-- Janet Dempsey, Cornwall Town Historian and Petraeus’ fourth grade teacher.
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David Petraeus acknowledges that he’s been away from his home in Arlington, Virginia for a long time. It’s a home up on the ridge, just behind the Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery, in a part of Arlington called Fort Myer. His wife Holly is there (their daughter lives nearby, their son is away at school, at MIT), and has been waiting for his return. The president, he says, is “quite conscious” of the length of time he’s been away, and that he will need to return before long. Which raises the question of what might be the next step for General Petraeus. Col. Peters says it would be logical to see Petraeus named head of Central Command, or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even if Sen. Clinton is elected. “I would be shocked if Hillary did anything to stab Petraeus in the back, because he’s so popular,” says Peters. But if Obama wins, it might be a different story. Sen. Barack Obama, after winning the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, came down hard on the issue of the war, saying if elected he would withdraw troops by 2009. So it doesn’t seem likely he’d want at the highest echelons a general like David Petraeus who is allied with the Powell doctrine, with the surge, and with Sen. McCain.
When this favorite son of Cornwall is called back from Iraq, and touches feet back on the home soil, he will likely face a thankful nation of people who – no matter the ultimate outcome of the war – are in awe of his abilities, and anxious for his leadership. “Tell me how this ends,” Petraeus used to ask a Washington Post reporter who covered him in Iraq, “Tell me how this ends.” We wish we knew, David.
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“He [Petraeus] set the example for what should have been done early, and was not done, to a large extent.”
-- General Raymond Bell of Maple Road in Cornwall-on-Hudson, who graduated from West Point in 1957 and later taught German and history there. General Bell opposed the war in Iraq.
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