Iraq's Repairman

A week later Generals Petraeus and Amar are off in a pair of choppers for quick visits to Taji and Kurkush, where the American military is training Iraqi soldiers. "These are industrial-strength training facilities," Petraeus says; each covers several square miles of former Iraqi military bases. (There are others, as well, in both Jordan and Iraq.) Soldiers get an eight-week boot camp, similar to what the U.S. Army does; officers and noncoms, another two- to six-week refresher course, much less than the U.S. norm. So far only 66 percent of the Iraqi security forces have had any training at all. Police get only eight weeks, compared with a year during Saddam's era.

But Petraeus is pleased when he reviews a battalion of the Iraqi National Task Force, going through the paces of house searches and explosives training. "Be very careful," he tells a soldier hiding beside a doorjamb, rifle downward, "so your muzzle is not shooting your foot." He tells the American officers they need to get these soldiers some live-fire practice. When the recruits are mustered, General Amar gives them a pep talk on Iraqi patriotism. Petraeus follows with his stock speech: "In a few weeks you will be walking point for your nation. The eyes of your countrymen and the world will be on you. The missions you are going to perform are very important, but we will make sure they are doable."

Back in Baghdad, Petraeus breezes into his palace office, and his first question is "What blew up today?" This day it turns out to be a suicide bomber who tore into a crowd of young men waiting to enlist at a recruiting center in the heart of the capital; 35 were killed, and the center shut down. There's more bad news: six Civil Defense Corps soldiers have been arrested in Ar Ramadi, suspected of helping insurgents set a bomb that blew up as a Marine Corps convoy passed by.

Petraeus is worried that once the Iraqis get sovereignty, they will be under extraordinary pressure to do too much, too soon. "One of the lessons learned in the early-April period was the sense of doable missions--set these units up for success. You want to accelerate, but not so that you risk failure. You don't just flip a light switch. You don't build an army or police in a matter of months. This is a perilous mission." Like building an airplane in flight.

It's hard to talk to general Petraeus for more than five minutes before he veers back to his experience in Mosul, where as the 101st Air Assault Division commander he was, in effect, the viceroy of the north (or, as some Iraqis jokingly called him, "King David"). Virtually everyone agrees his command there was a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way. When troops went on cordon-and-search operations, they took care to tell each homeowner, "Thank you for allowing us to search your home." Civil-military-affairs teams returned to the neighborhood afterward to explain why they had been there. Posters were displayed in the 101st's barracks, saying, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO WIN IRAQI HEARTS AND MINDS TODAY?

"I go back there and it's like the return of the prodigal son," Petraeus says. "There's even a street sign in Mosul named for the 101st Airborne, and you know it's authentic because there are two misspellings in it." In the cause of nation-building, he was never short of ideas. He launched a television program called "Nineveh Talent Search," a sort of Iraqi Idol, that was popular enough to go into a second season. (Another program, "Iraqi Blues," a sort of homegrown "Cops," was less successful.) He hosted a call-in radio show with his favorite translator, a former New York cabby named Sadi Othman, who is still with him. And he wrangled so much money out of a program called CERP, which gives discretionary funds to U.S. commanders to finance local reconstruction projects, that he nicknamed the captain running his accounts Miss Moneypenny. When the CERP money ran dry, he enlisted his best friend in Congress--Majority Leader Frist--to goose the Pentagon for more. "This guy," says General Eaton, "he has a capacity to blow through bureaucracy that not many guys do. He doesn't understand the nature of a wall; he'll either go through it or over it or around it."