Avoiding the V Word

Gen. David Petraeus has no intention of doing a victory lap on his way out of Iraq. So when his aides proposed a valedictory interview with NEWSWEEK, they made it clear the theme would not pick up from our 2004 cover, "Can This Man Save Iraq?" As "the boss" (which is what his subordinates call him) heads off next month to take over the U.S. military's Central Command, which is in charge of Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, there would be none of this, "So Did This Man Save Iraq?" No surprise there, from a military leader wise enough to quote Seneca in his guidance to the troops and media-savvy enough to warn them, "Don't put lipstick on a pig."

OK, instead we'll talk about Al Qaeda in Iraq. They've lost Anbar province and Baghdad, where at best they can mount a couple of mostly insignificant attacks a day. They've vacated the Sunni Triangle. Virtually the entire Sunni Arab population has turned against them, and nowadays not a single Sunni imam, politician or tribal leader of note inside the country supports them—which was not the case even a year ago. While they're still duking it out in the northern provinces of Nineveh and Diyala, the territory AQI can operate in is a tiny fraction of what it was. Their situation is so grim that foreign jihadis are looking for other stomping grounds, and Al Qaeda's top leadership has turned its attention to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Why then don't we just say it?: Al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated.

"You won't find a single military leader in this theater who will say that," says Petraeus.

"You could be the first, general."

"Yeah, I could, but I won't be."

"At least can't we say 'strategically defeated'?"

"We'll leave that to the academics. [U.S. Ambassador Ryan] Crocker and I explicitly, from day one, together, said that we have got to be coldly realistic and not let our enthusiasms creep into our assessments ... [Success] is still not self-sustaining; there is still a degree of fragility to it, and it could be reversed."

As the general's counterinsurgency guidance puts it, under the rubric "Manage Expectations": "Avoid premature declarations of success." And another of his bon mots (the Iraq War is littered with them): "Enemies get a vote too." He is far too politic to refer to the commander in chief's May 1, 2003, declaration of "Mission accomplished." But Petraeus acknowledged that this policy of modesty in the face of success is very much informed by our premature victory ejaculations of previous years (before he took charge, of course). "The champagne bottle remains in the back of the refrigerator," he says. "When you've been in Iraq for as long as actually both of us have, coming up on four years, you're a little less prone to get too excited too quickly."

Other players are quick to rush in where Petraeus declines to tread. "Al Qaeda is definitely defeated tactically," says Iraq's national-security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie. "As a tangible organization it is not any more around, just isolated pockets with no connection between them." Recently, Rubaie says, intelligence agencies intercepted communications between Al Qaeda in Iraq and senior Al Qaeda officials in Pakistan. "They asked them not to send any more foreign mujahedin, only suicide bombers. This is very significant—it means they no longer have any territory to defend." Petraeus as well confirmed intelligence intercepts along those lines, and said at one point two months ago the influx stopped completely. "They just said, 'Stop bringing in anybody'," apparently because the insurgents were too beleaguered to handle them. Some of that traffic has resumed, but on the order of 20 a month, Petraeus said—compared to hundreds a month previously.