http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0130gs.html
The Iraqis call him King David. General David Petraeus earned the somewhat affectionate nickname in 2003 after taking Baghdad and then Mosul--a city whose governor he became, almost coincidentally. When all Iraqi institutions crumbled, a development that the Americans had not foreseen, one guard who had not fled explained to Petraeus that since he had conquered Iraq, it was also up to him to govern Iraq. Petraeus improvised, pursuing a military offensive and reconstruction at the same time. "We discovered that we were strangers in a strange country," Petraeus tells me.
He admits that the Army knew nothing about Arab civilization. But he drew the necessary conclusions. Later, back in the United States as head of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Petraeus radically modified American military culture. "My generation was trained to destroy Soviet tanks with helicopters," he recalls, but such training was useless in the modern struggle with terrorism. For that matter, Petraeus refuses to use the term "War on Terror." Terrorism, he explains, is just one aspect of a global war by extremists against our values and our ways of life. On the basis of this definition of extremism and of his experience in Iraq, Petraeus rewrote the counterinsurgency manual, the Army's new Bible. In 2007, George W. Bush sent him back to Iraq to apply his ideas. And as Barack Obama said during his presidential campaign, under Petraeus, the surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."
Did Petraeus win the war, or at least prevent the United States from losing it? "We must no longer think in terms of victory or defeat," he says. "The time is past for raising a flag on a hill." The war against extremism must be measured in terms of "dynamics" and "progress." In Iraq, Petraeus says, there has been remarkable progress, in collaboration with the new Iraqi army--"progress that is measurable, fragile, and reversible." But public opinion in the United States, the general observes, has already forgotten how things were one year ago. From 40 attacks a day in Baghdad in 2007, the country has moved to a crime rate comparable with that of certain Latin American countries.
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