Iraq's Repairman

The doors have been taken off our Blackhawk helicopter to accommodate heavy machine guns, so there's a blast of 100-degree heat blowing in everyone's face at 100 miles an hour. The view below is not inspiring: dreary streets, concrete buildings, uncollected trash everywhere. Block after block of Baghdad slips by, rooftop laundry flapping wildly in the backwash of the chopper's rotor blades. Only a fool wouldn't consider the possibility of an Iraqi insurgent down there, armed with a surface-to-air missile or a rocket-propelled grenade.

That's why the Blackhawk flies fast and low, says Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, shouting over the roar of the engine. By painful experience, pilots have learned the insurgents won't have time to fire if the helicopter skims the tops of buildings, appearing and disappearing quickly. Although 22 helicopters have gone down in this war, only two have been lost in the past couple of months. (As Petraeus explains this, he looks around for a piece of wood to tap, but there's only metal and nylon.) "Look at all the satellite dishes down there," he says hopefully. It's true: even though electricity comes on only for about six hours a day, hardly a building is without a cluster of dishes, which were banned during Saddam's time.

Petraeus is on his way to visit a military training program, where Iraqi officers like Col. Shaker Faris are trying to create effective fighting units from scratch. Colonel Faris's men are among the soldiers who eventually are supposed to take over from U.S. forces in Iraq, and it's General Petraeus's job to make that happen. President George W. Bush himself has made the training and arming of Iraqi national forces a top priority, and every American official from the president on down has adopted the same mantra: soon, Iraqis themselves are going to handle the insurgency and take responsibility for the security and safety of their own country. The process officially begins this week, with the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government. Then, "every day the Iraqis get better at securing their nation is a day sooner that our troops can come home," says National Security Council spokesman James Wilkinson. General Petraeus, in short, is the closest thing to an exit strategy the United States now has.

From Baghdad, our Blackhawk flies north into the Sunni Triangle. The door gunners keep their guns pointed down, eyes on anyone who moves. Stomachs jerk as the chopper lifts abruptly to clear high-tension wires; several times the pilot makes sudden, sickening turns to confuse potential enemies. We cross and recross the Tigris River before dropping down in front of Saddam's biggest palace, now headquarters for the U.S. Army's First Infantry Division. As Petraeus steps out onto the helipad, every hair is in place, his uniform neat and tidy. Not a bead of sweat shows. The civilians accompanying him look like rag dolls run over by a truck.

"So, Shaker, how many of these thousand can you really count on?" Petraeus asks Colonel Faris, referring to his 1,000-man battalion. Shaker is earnest and cheerful, but he's reluctant to put too much of a gloss on a grim situation. "There are about 20 guys I would call special, General," he says. "If there were really bad terrorists, they still couldn't get through these 20." "Well, we'll have to see what we're going to do about the rest of them," Petraeus replies, unfazed--at least as far as anyone can tell.

Leadership is always a bit of a confidence game. Project authority, display ability and power, and others will follow. Few do this as well as Petraeus. When a fellow Army Ranger, a twentysomething, recently asked the 51-year-old Petraeus how many push-ups he could do, the general offered a contest, dropped to the ground and won after doing 75 in a minute. He's got legs and lungs to match: just before the war, he finished the Army 10-miler in 63 minutes, a time only the fittest of young men could equal. ("And that was after I hurt my pelvis," he says.)