Wait a minute!: I served under Petraeus in Iraq and I saw the difference he made

By Blake Hall

Best Defense veterans' bureau

"Tell me how this ends." General Petraeus posed
that rhetorical question to historian Rick
Atkinson in 2003. Petraeus then was commanding the 101st
Airborne during the invasion of Iraq. His question captured the fundamental
disconnect between what we were doing in Iraq - removing Saddam Hussein - and
the purpose of war, famously defined by Carl Von Clausewitz as the
"continuation of politics by other means." Because regime change is not a
coherent political strategy, Petraeus rightly wondered what our strategy would
be for Iraq, even as his soldiers advanced towards Baghdad.

I served under General Petraeus in Iraq after
he assumed command in February of 2007, and I have the utmost respect for him
as a leader, a soldier, and a man. I led a platoon that hunted high value
insurgent leaders in cities throughout Iraq, including Mosul, Lake Thar-Thar,
Baghdad and Karbala. Tactically, we were very good at capturing targets, but,
strategically, the reality on the ground under General Casey, before General
Petraeus assumed command, was farcical.

Prior to Petraeus' arrival, we sallied out from
our fortress like Forward Operating Bases to drive around Mosul or Baghdad for
a few hours at a time, only to leave the city with the insurgents as soon as we
returned to our base. Worse, we were frequently blown up by roadside bombs
while we were driving around, for insurgents could emplace explosives on the
streets with impunity while we were sleeping back at our base. I could never
hope to adequately articulate the deep sense of frustration that stems from
frequent orders to patrol streets with no clear purpose when said streets are
laced with explosives meant to kill you and your men.  It was like being the British during the
Revolutionary War except we had no strategic design to rule Iraq indefinitely.

We were targeted with bombs because Sunni Arabs
had no incentive to integrate into a post-Saddam Iraq. Though they had ruled
Iraq as heirs to the Ottoman Empire, they immediately became second
class-citizens once American democracy arrived in the country because they only
represented about 20% of the country's population. Paul Bremer's Coalition
Provisional Authority further decreed that no Baath Party member -- effectively
every Sunni in Iraq -- could hold any position in government. Then Bremer
disbanded the military, the one institution the Sunnis had left,
single-handedly creating a bloody insurgency that caused untold human suffering
for American and Iraqi families alike.

It was that context that drove the Sunnis to
invite Al-Qaida into Iraq in order to fight for their political rights. Over
tea in a house in Dora, an Al-Qaida stronghold in Baghdad from 2004 - 2007, a
Sunni sheikh from the Janabi tribe recounted to me the proceedings of a
gathering of Sunni sheikhs in 2003. He told me, "Some said the Australians, the
British and the Americans are the power now, we should work with them. Others
said we must fight." He paused and gave me a wan smile. "Maybe we should have
chosen differently."

General Petraeus possessed an intimate
understanding of these dynamics. After Paul Bremer exponentially increased the
size of the Sunni insurgency by disbanding the Iraqi Army, it was then Major
General Petraeus who made a trip down to Baghdad to let Bremer know that, "Your
policy is killing our troopers."  It was
General Petraeus who stabilized Mosul through the same methods he would employ
four years later, after much bloodshed and suffering, for the entire country.
And it was General Petraeus who understood that unless he himself wrote the
ending for Iraq, the American military might suffer the taint of defeat for the
first time since Vietnam.

General Petraeus inherited a crisis when he
took command of Iraq in 2007. The crisis had three components. First, a
ruthless offshoot of Al-Qaida, not present in Iraq when Petraeus made his
remarks to Atkinson, had established itself in Iraq after the Sunnis invited
them into the country out of desperation. Second, Sunni Arabs were being
slaughtered by Shi'a Arabs in Baghdad. Third, after four years of war, a
coherent political strategy for Iraq was non-existent.

Petraeus correctly
perceived that the American public and policymakers alike would conflate the
establishment of security in Iraq with victory. Michael Hastings has tried to
deride General Petraeus for that insight, citing a quote from Petraeus'
Princeton dissertation where he wrote, "What
policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters
- more than what actually occurred." Rather than deriding General
Petraeus, however, he should be thanking the man who was able to extricate the
American military from a hopeless conflict without the taint of defeat. General
Petraeus was subordinate to civilian policymakers; the failure to set a
definable political strategy for victory in Iraq did not rest on his shoulders.

Iraq was
not, nor did it become, a clear and present danger to the national interests of
the United States of America except for the moment when Al-Qaida established a
presence on Iraqi soil. Petraeus homed in on that emergent threat to American
interests and he crushed the Al-Qaida network by brilliantly integrating
American military efforts with the Sunni tribes. I know because I hunted those
networks night and day with my men. Petraeus pushed us hard, I lost twenty
pounds in the months after he took control due to the operational tempo, but,
under his leadership, we decimated Al-Qaida in Iraq.

Today, we
are an Army that is not defeated and we do not have to navigate the
near-impossible question of how to extricate ourselves from the conflict in
Iraq, for our most brilliant General has solved that problem for us in a
masterstroke. Because of Petraeus, my men and I will be able to put our
grandchildren on our knees and tell them with pride about how we defeated
Al-Qaida in Iraq - never mind that they weren't there when we invaded; the
civilian policymakers bear the blame for that development. Because of Petraeus,
more American service members will return to their families, and more veterans
will live whole and fruitful lives.

I cannot
stand the hypocrisy of my country. We have presidents, presidential candidates
and corporate executives who fornicate and adulterate with impunity, some when
their wives were stricken with cancer, yet this one man who has given his
entire life to America errs one time and the media and hacks like Michael
Hastings attack him with impunity. There should be no mass audience for a
situation should remain a private issue between General Petraeus and his wife.

David H.
Petraeus spent the better part of a decade living in shitty little trailers in
Iraq and Afghanistan defending the freedoms that we all enjoy. That he is a human
being, and therefore fallible, should not come as a shock anyone. His were true
accomplishments. He erred in his personal relationship, yet he saved the lives
of thousands, and probably tens of thousands, with his intellect. The flaw is
miniscule when contrasted against the full body of his accomplishments.

If we are
angry, then we should be angry at the effect of war and separations on the
military divorce rate, which has steadily gone up as our men and women in
uniform spend more time away from their families. We should be angry at the
self-righteous tone of a country that insanely demands perfection from those we
respect. We should be angry that the incompetent policymakers who started these
wars without purpose are writing books and going on vacations despite the trail
of human suffering and empty beds they have left in their wake.

General
Petraeus allowed me, and my men, to tangibly achieve the strategic defeat of
Al-Qaida in Iraq, even if Iraq itself has slipped under Iranian influence.
Because of his leadership, the fifteen months in Iraq that my men and I spent
in Iraq actually matters in some meaningful way. Under his steady hand, we
achieved enough to get out of that country without severely compromising
American prestige and the finest military that America has ever enjoyed. It is
a national tragedy that we would let a personal scandal deprive the CIA of the
most brilliant military mind in the country.

Blake Hall , a former Army captain, led a reconnaissance
platoon in Iraq from July 2006 to September 2007. He is the founder of Troop ID , the first digital authentication engine capable of verifying military affiliation
online.