The Historical Significance of General Petraeus

I noted yesterday that General David Petraeus, the Supreme Commander of the Multi-National Force Iraq, is the architect of one of the greatest military comebacks in American history.

Future academic research will have to deliver the decisive verdict on this point, but Retired Col. Ken Allard makes the case for Petraeus' historical brilliance in an essay today at the San Antonio Express-News:

There he was, this generation's equivalent of George Marshall, the brilliant proconsul testifying before Congress to underline the improbable but now indisputable victory over al Qaida.

In military history, the turn-around David Petraeus has commanded in Iraq rivals MacArthur's surprise landing at Inchon....

An earlier and more attentive generation might have idolized Petraeus. This one barely grasps his victory and has no idea who he is. The Pew Research Center reports that 55 percent of the public cannot even recognize his name — roughly the same percentage as those who wish the war would just fade away.

For most Americans, Iraq is distant thunder, an unpleasant interruption troubling the nightly news. Even if war coverage finishes above the producer's cut-line, the dots are rarely well connected for an audience in which military illiteracy is always a working assumption.

An example over the last fortnight has been the Shiite revolt in Basra and other parts of Iraq. Ever since Saddam's overthrow, well armed sectarian militias have been a basic fact of Iraqi life — so much so that it once seemed as though the country might be partitioned along ethnic and religious lines: Kurd, Sunni and Shiite. The surge changed all that, particularly when reinforced by the recreated and resurgent Iraqi military — the key to any American exit strategy worthy of the name. The new correlation of forces created the stable platform on which both military and political progress might be made.

Those developments could first be seen in the astonishing Sunni uprising against al Qaida, although the logic was pure Machiavelli: Where tribalism reigns, simply become the strongest, meanest tribe in the neighborhood.

Similarly, the authors of the new counterinsurgency strategy also seemed to have learned something from the Untouchables: When the enemy sends three of yours to the hospital, send five of his to the morgue. But al-Qaida clearly understood what the media and their notoriously fickle audiences did not: Americans had finally become serious about winning.

Victory has its own logic, eventually prompting the long overdue fight against the Shiite militias. However clumsy and ill-timed by the Maliki government, however uneven the skills of the adolescent Iraqi military, the assault against Shiite strongholds was exactly what was so loudly demanded on Capitol Hill this week: An unmistakable harbinger of Iraqi political progress.

How will history remember these successes?

I think the long-run legacy of Petraeus will mirror shifting historical interpretations of the war.

Short-term journalistic assessments remain dourly dismissive of American military and political capacity, a pessimism rooted in a thinly disguised antipathy to America's assertive international preponderance.

Yet, we will see, over the next few years, the U.S. wind down the mission, and Iraq's own forces of democracy and security will consolidate into a stable regime, with an increasing sense of national identity and political cohesiveness.

I'm more sure of it now than ever.

As noted today, by Samir Sumaida'ie, Iraq's Ambassador to the United States:

Those who argue that Iraq is fractured and hopelessly broken – a Humpty Dumpty that can never be put together again – are wrong....

Iraqi national identity has been weakened, but it is alive and kicking, and will embarrass all of those who rushed to write its obituary.

Opponents of the war have been writing Iraq's obituary since late 2003.

Meanwhile, the war's supporters have mounted a Herculean effort in resisting incessant demands for retreat and surrender. But with the Petraeus turnaround, endorsed here by Ambassador Sumaida'ie, the potential for the consolidation of Iraq's democratic federal system is no longer in question.

Iraq will be the standard against which other Arab governments are judged, and General David Petraeus will go down as one of the most important wartime commanders U.S. military history.