‘No Victory Dances’

Gen. David Petraeus is due to relinquish his role as the commanding general in Iraq in mid-September, moving up to head CENTCOM, the U.S. military's Central Command, in overall charge of the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He sat down for an hour and a half this week with NEWSWEEK's Rod Nordland, at the general's office in the American Embassy, in Saddam's old Republican Palace. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: General, I was just down in Fallujah—with the Provincial Reconstruction Team there. Not only is it quiet but we're on our way out.
David Petraeus: It's a pretty transformed place over the last year or so. But again we have to keep our eye on it. None of these places can we take our eye off the ball along with our Iraqi partners because our presence in Fallujah is very significantly reduced. Our presence in Anbar province has been reduced from 14 maneuver battalions to six in the course of this year.

I asked tribal sheiks there whether Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) could ever come back if Sunnis fail to reach a political settlement with Baghdad, and they all said, "No, we're past Al Qaeda. We might start fighting the Americans again, but not with Al Qaeda."
I think it's true that they are past Al Qaeda. They are past ... an organization that embraces an extremist ideology, employs indiscriminate violence, and practices oppressive social actions such as forced marriage or cutting fingers off smokers.

Forget that, no smoking ...
That was the tipping point when they cut the fingers off the first person who was smoking. I mean, can you imagine an Anbar sheik being told he can't smoke? They're not necessarily past what used to be called "resistance," though, or something like that; although, look, candidly, even that, I think at this point is more political rhetoric because what are the alternatives? They know, and they will tell you in private, and they probably did, that they made a colossal error in not voting in 2005 and in boycotting the elections. They know that Iraq is no longer potentially wealthy. Iraq is an incredibly wealthy country. It has just passed a $22 billion supplemental budget because it realizes how much it's going to make because of the increased oil exports because of the improved security situation ... complemented very much by the increase of the price in oil. To enjoy their share of Iraq's bounty, they obviously have to participate. The real challenge they will always be wrestling with is ... not only to make their voice heard, but to get the most prominent place at the table that they can possibly achieve. And of course, as the Al Qaeda threat has diminished, there's been a certain amount of drama, if you will, political drama, in the relations among the tribes as well as between the tribes and, let's say, the established Iraqi Islamic Party.

We interviewed two people who claimed to be the police chief of Fallujah, two days apart.
You go through these things. You know, when you've been in Iraq for as long as actually both of us have—you know, it's coming up on four years—I think you're a little less prone to get too excited too quickly. There's a certain degree of posturing and rhetoric, and that can occasionally be quite heated, in the new Iraq, what some have termed the "emerging Iraqracy."

That's a good one, but hard to pronounce.
It is. Yes, and you have to sort of lead up to it a little bit, to talk about how it's not [just] democracy, it's Iraqracy.

We've been burned before by being overly optimistic in this war.
We have, we have. And so we have to be very careful, and we are with respect to Anbar. We know [the insurgents are] trying to come back in ... and we have picked up a number of those individuals who have tried to come back in. And of course they attacked and killed several of our marines and sheiks in the attack [June 26 in Karmah, near Fallujah]. But the fact is that the level of violence in Anbar is the lowest in our recorded history, literally, the lowest of any of our data.