By Dexter Filkins
The New York Times Magazine, 19 February 2006
When I recently spoke with Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson at his headquarters in Baghdad, it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by a feeling of what might have been. Peterson, a big, witty officer in charge of training the Iraqi police force, spent two hours laying out a plan to bring order to a fractious country, a plan that was everything the American enterprise had always failed to be: bold, coherent and imagined all the way down to the hinges on the office doors.
The general volunteered for this job, leaving his family in Washington, and he works every day and every night on an assignment that will probably keep him in Baghdad for a year. When we met, he was wearing a blue baseball cap that said "police" in English and in Arabic, and he keeps a woodcut of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king, on his office wall to make sure he doesn't get ahead of himself. "An eye for an eye" Peterson said. "This society has been living under that rule for 3,700 years. Are you going to change this overnight? Did we change it overnight in our country?" Peterson seemed utterly determined to succeed. And it was not terribly difficult to imagine that he could. And then you think: if only we had done this three years ago.
In nearly every military and diplomatic realm, the American effort in Iraq is finally beginning to show the careful planning and concentrated thinking that seemed to vanish the moment American troops entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. We've heard progress reports in the past, of course, and they have often preceded a stunning setback. But what is new is the level of sophistication that Americans are bringing to their work, and the intensity of their engagement across so many fronts.
A more subtle response to the insurgency was a long time in the making. American generals were caught flat-footed by the resistance that bloomed in 2003; they didn't plan for it, and they had no playbook to fight it. The result in the field often amounted to a war of attrition, which was designed to kill and capture as many insurgents as possible but which ended up alienating Iraqi civilians. These days, however, the military is making new efforts to help local Iraqis feel safe and secure in their homes. The two top American commanders, Gen. George Casey and Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, are proponents of placing far less emphasis on killing guerrillas and much more on working with the locals. In Baghdad, General Casey has set up a local counterinsurgency school, through which American officers must pass before they can head into the field. Find an American officer these days, and he is likely to tell you about the police officers he is supervising or the local council he's helping to set up.
A new approach is equally evident at the American Embassy, where the current ambassador and erstwhile neoconservative, Zalmay Khalilzad, is employing a hands-on strategy that is positively Kissingerian in its realism. On some days, Khalilzad, a native of Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, and a Sunni Muslim, sits with Iraqi leaders for hours, fingering his prayer beads and hearing their complaints. In that sense, Ambassador Khalilzad could hardly differ more from his two predecessors, L. Paul Bremer III, who dispatched orders with the curtness of a viceroy, and John Negroponte, who, on instructions from Washington, stood largely out of view.
According to Iraqis and Western diplomats, Ambassador Khalilzad is orchestrating an extraordinarily ambitious power play: coaxing Sunni political leaders into the government while splitting the more moderate Iraqi insurgents from the beheaders and suicide bombers of Al Qaeda. If he succeeds, Khalilzad could remake the political landscape, curtail the insurgency and give the Iraqi government a bit of solid ground to stand on. If he doesn't succeed, the possibilities are endless, few of them good. Still, the ambassador's strategy is bolder than anything yet attempted.
Meanwhile, General Peterson, along with his boss, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, is trying to construct nothing less than a new national army, a police force for every city and the logistical and educational apparatus to support them. In earlier American efforts, an Iraqi policeman was considered "trained" if he had passed through a few days of schooling. These days, the training is much more extensive. On most mornings, the streets in Baghdad echo not just with the sounds of car bombs but also with shots fired from the police shooting range.
So far, there are signs that the new strategy may be working. As the Iraqi Army has taken over substantial portions of Iraq, insurgent attacks have declined from their peak in October. Of course, it's not clear whether that trend will continue. In the past, such trends have not. And Peterson isn't operating under any illusions about how long it will take him to complete his work. The charts that he uses to brief traveling Congressional delegations offer no date for when Iraqi Interior Ministry forces will be able to take full control of internal security.
And there's the rub: the Americans have already had three years in Iraq. It seems reasonably clear, given the opinion polls at home and the elections ahead, that they will not get three more, at least not with troop deployments at their current levels. The prediction floated by senior Iraqi officials is that American, British and other foreign forces, now numbering 160,000, will fall below 100,000 by year's end.
Given the chaotic situation that prevails in much of Iraq, that might not be enough. And even if American troops were to stay, it's not clear that the new American approach could succeed anyway. It may be that there are too many Sunnis with too many memories of being the group in power. Even with the best of intentions, Americans are still foreigners in Iraq; every day they do things — shoot up a car approaching a checkpoint, for instance — that make the Iraqis resent their presence. And the sectarian violence, which is turning every mixed Iraqi neighborhood into a battleground, might be too far along to turn around. Some officers, in private conversations, concede that they could lose.
In the classic arc of Greek tragedy, the hero rises to great heights, only to be brought low by his own hubris. In Iraq, the Americans may yet salvage a bloody success; commanders like General Peterson seem to believe to their bones that they can. But it's also possible that something more crushing is in the works, with a slightly different trajectory than the Greeks had in mind: the mighty country invades a smaller one, commits countless errors and wastes thousands of lives. After a time, the mighty country gathers itself and does everything right. And it is too late.
Dexter Filkins is a Times correspondent based in Baghdad. He last wrote for the magazine about the end of Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman's military career.
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Citation: Dexter Filkins. "Strategy Tragedy?," The New York Times Magazine, 19 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/19wwln_lede.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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