General Petraeus, Too Optimistic

When Gen. David Petraeus went before Congress a couple of weeks ago, it brought back memories. And while his appearance received fairly high marks from pundits and many scored it a public relations victory for the White House, I wasn’t left with a sense of optimism as I was the first time I met the general.

It was September 2003 and I had traveled with a small congressional delegation to Iraq. On the second day of the trip, we went to Mosul, the third largest city located in the northern part of the country. That’s where Gen. Petraeus was stationed at the time, and his presentation was a very bright spot in an otherwise rather dreary and frightening trip.

You might recall that by the fall of 2003, the sheen had worn off the war and much of the reporting coming out of Iraq painted a very bleak picture. To combat that, the administration wanted as many members of congress as possible to go see for themselves. They knew the picture would be controlled almost completely by the military and, for a while, the strategy worked beautifully.

Congressmen would go see Iraq through the military’s rose colored glasses and come back with glowing reports, often times suggesting the media wasn’t telling the whole story. However, the strategy went a bit awry during my trip. We had been in Baghdad for all of 15 minutes when our military convoy suddenly came to a screeching halt. We were going to have to take a different path because an Iraqi had blown himself up earlier while trying to plant an explosive device along the original route.

We detoured on to the military headquarters where the general in charge went into the standard “everything’s getting back to normal in Iraq” spiel. When it came time for questions, I told him what had happened to our convoy and that it didn’t seem “normal” to have folks blowing themselves up. He said, “It depends on your definition of ‘normal’ n it happens 26 to 27 times a day around here.”

As the trip progressed, we would learn just how abnormal things really were. Paul Wolfowitz, who was then with the Department of Defense, was staying at a Baghdad hotel that was bombed; a Red Cross office was blown up, as were a number of Iraqi police stations.

It turns out we were there for the beginning of the insurgency, but amidst all that bad news, there was David Petraeus, a general who was focusing great energy on community-building; who had his troops doing everything they possibly could to help rebuild Mosul and develop relationships with the people there.

I remember thinking, “Here’s a guy who really gets it – he’s the future of the military.”

A few weeks later, I would read that the insurgency had struck Mosul just as it had other areas and I figured if it was happening there, we were in for a very long road indeed.

Petraeus had not misled us, and his optimism was quite contagious then just as it is for many people now.

However, as I learned back then, David Petraeus is not a miracle worker and, unfortunately, in a quagmire of this magnitude, that’s what would be required.

(Originally published by Examiner Newspaper Group)