For Top General in Iraq, Role Is a Mixed Blessing : By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD — Gen. David H. Petraeus looked out from a Black Hawk helicopter at the vistas of Baghdad rushing by 150 feet below on a recent summer evening, pointing at bustling markets, amusement parks and soccer fields scattered through neighborhoods where miles of concrete barriers stood like sentinels against the threat of suicide bombers.

Pressing the talk button on his headset, the slightly built, 54-year-old general, the top American commander in Iraq, said glimpses of the normal life that have survived the war’s horrors have helped to boost his own flagging spirits, especially on days when signs of battlefront progress are offset by new bombings with mass casualties, the starkest measure of continuing insurgent power across Iraq. Then, he said ruefully, he wondered whether he “should have taken that civilian job” before accepting what many see as the most unpromising command since that of Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr. in Vietnam — who took charge, in 1968, when that war was going badly and American opinion was running strongly in favor of a pullout. General Petraeus’s task may be tougher still. When he was appointed six months ago and promoted to full general, President Bush cast him as a man known for aggressive, innovative thinking on counter insurgency warfare who could take the nearly 30,000 extra troops deployed to Iraq in January and turn the war’s tide with a “surge” aimed at securing Baghdad and its surrounding “belts.” At the time, Mr. Bush compared General Petraeus to an audacious, offense-minded football coach with a record of turning around losing games. The general echoed that mood. “Hard is not hopeless,” he said in a message to American troops on his arrival in Baghdad. Since then, Mr. Bush has often sounded as though his Iraq commander offers a fount of credibility on the war that can compensate for the president’s poor poll ratings. In war speeches, he cites General Petraeus like a talisman. At a news conference at Camp David this month, he used the general’s first name three times. “I look forward to what David’s going to say,” he said, referring to the Sept. 15 deadline for General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Iraq, to give a comprehensive status report to the White House and Congress. The date, for Mr. Bush, has become a kind of firebreak — the right moment, he says, for lawmakers locked in a showdown over the war to decide whether to support a continuation of the American military effort here. But for General Petraeus, being cast as the president’s white knight has been a mixed blessing. While he talks with Mr. Bush once or twice a week, in interviews he depicts himself as owing loyalty as much to Congress as the White House and stresses the downside, as well as the upside, of the military effort here. His view, he says, is that he is “on a very important mission that derives from a policy made by folks at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, with the advice and consent and resources provided by folks at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. And in September, that’s how I’m going to approach it.” Whether to fight on here, he says, is a “big, big decision, a national decision,” one that belongs to elected officials, not a field general. The importance of sober assessments — and, by implication, of shedding the rose-tinted view of the war that has strained Congress’s patience with Iraq commanders in the past — has been one of his themes. Talking to American officers this summer during a counter insurgency course at Taji, 15 miles north of Baghdad, he put it squarely. “We need forthright reports. We’re not trying to sugarcoat things, or put lipstick on a pig, or anything like that.” American officials say he has carried this unvarnished approach into his dealings with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The men have differed over a range of issues, particularly the American command’s push to recruit former Sunni insurgents into the Iraqi security forces or tribal auxiliaries. It is a move General Petraeus sees as having the potential for dealing a decisive blow to Islamic militant groups linked to Al Qaeda, but which Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, fears will empower Sunnis for an eventual civil war with the ruling Shiite majority.General Petraeus, in an e-mail message, played down reports that the relationship had been stormy, with Mr. Maliki threatening on one occasion to ask Mr. Bush to appoint a new American commander. “Actually, I have a very good relationship with the p.m., and I think he’d echo that assessment,” he said. “In fact, only on one occasion, several months back, have I ever been anything other than my normal easygoing self with the p.m. And that was while both of us were seated.” More than 30 years ago at West Point, where he married the former Holly Knowlton, daughter of the academy’s superintendent, General Petraeus was cited in his class yearbook as “always going for it in sports, academics, leadership and even his social life.” Since then, he has won a broad Army following that helped him assemble a star cast of officers who accompanied him to Baghdad, including one, Col. H. R. McMaster, who wrote a widely acclaimed book about the failures of the Army’s highest-ranking officers to give an honest accounting of the state of the war in Vietnam. But General Petraeus has been dogged, too, by detractors within the Army who say he is prone to overstate his accomplishments. His two previous Iraq tours, one as a two-star general commanding the 101st Airborne Division in the northern city of Mosul, another as a three-star general in Baghdad leading the effort to rebuild Iraq’s security forces, drew praise at the time. His pacification of Mosul proved short-lived. The rapid, $19-billion Iraqi force buildup produced, on his watch, battalions impressive for the numbers trained and the huge arsenal of weapons handed over by the Americans, but the Iraqi soldiers were often unreliable, and their units prone to infiltration by militias when deployed. Now, in the face of a stubbornly brutal conflict and declining war support at home, General Petraeus has pulled back from the pulsating sense of self-confidence that fellow officers say has been his hallmark — that he can prevail against any odds. He has become strikingly cautious, avoiding on-the-record comments on many politically contentious issues. Shunning generalizations on the war in interviews, he lays out colored charts and graphs that show falling numbers of suicide attacks, other bombings and civilian casualties, when comparing January’s figures with those in June and July. But he eludes anything that might signal what broader conclusions he will be carrying to Washington in September. His caution extends to the most fundamental question: whether the war can still be won. “Obviously, what we’re going to try and do is win it,” he says. “What we’re trying to do right now is generate enough hope to give it a chance. But the problem is, it’s likely to muddle along for quite a long time.” A campaign plan the general and Ambassador Crocker recently sent to Washington envisages an American troop presence of some size here at least through 2009. Despite the challenges, some of the old bullishness has survived. When asked which American generals he most admires, General Petraeus names two remembered for turning around wars that were going badly: Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, hero of the Civil War; and another Army legend whose biography the general read on a recent 14-hour flight from Washington to Baghdad: Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, who reversed Chinese advances in Korea in 1951. In Baghdad, he goes for regular five-mile runs in the 120-degree heat, and thrives on outpacing younger officers. His do-or-die competitiveness is legend in the Army. Fifteen years ago, he carried on during maneuvers at Fort Campbell, Ky., after being struck by a rifle bullet in the chest, until a commander ordered him taken away on a stretcher. Laughing about it now, he says he would have died if the bullet had hit the ‘A’ in Army, over his heart, instead of the ‘a’ in Petraeus on his nametag. One issue on which the general, like Mr. Crocker, is likely to part with proponents of an early American withdrawal is on the risk of much higher levels of violence if the troops leave quickly. In an interview last month, Mr. Crocker compared the killing to a five-reel movie, saying that “as ugly as the first reel has been the other four-and-a-half are going to be way, way worse.” Speaking to the officers at Taji, General Petraeus put the matter just as bluntly. “If you didn’t like Darfur, you’re going to hate Baghdad,” he said.


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