The Professor of War

At 57, General David Petraeus has revolutionized the way America fights its wars, starting with the surge in Iraq and continuing into his current command, with responsibility for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen. Charting Petraeus’s relentless challenge to the institution he reveres — the U.S. Army — and to himself, the author hears about the unceasing drive, groundbreaking methods, and darkest moments of a four-star rebel.

By Mark Bowden
VanityFair

General David Petraeus, the architect of American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida, where he heads the U.S. Central Command.

Decked out in dress greens, his uniform so laden with insignia, badges, patches, ribbons, and medals that it seemed to pull him into a slight stoop, the Most Important General in America, David Howell Petraeus, arrived on Capitol Hill in September of 2007 bearing remarkable news.

Just back from Baghdad, the hot center of a four-year-long war that had come to be seen as a fiasco, Petraeus would testify that things had begun to improve—that the counter-insurgency strategy he had initiated eight months before was working, against all odds and expectations. Violent incidents had fallen off dramatically. Former Sunni insurgents had come around and begun to oppose al-Qaeda. Dangerous Shiite militias were putting down their arms. Instead of conceding futility and abandoning Iraq to chaos and civil war, there was a good chance the United States could stabilize the country enough to begin a relatively bloodless and honorable phased withdrawal.

The general brought, in short, unwelcome news, at least to many Democratic lawmakers.

When he arrived in the crowded hearing room, on the morning of September 10, only his immediate staff had read his planned testimony. With members of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees staring down at him from a two-tiered dais, the general emphasized that simple fact: “I wrote this testimony myself,” he said. “It has not been cleared by, nor shared with, anyone in the Pentagon, the White House, or the Congress.”

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