Blame For The Top Brass

Given all the recriminations over the mess in Iraq, it is remarkable how little criticism has fallen on the U.S. military. Americans want to honor the sacrifice of the troops in the field and they may feel guilty about the cold reception given many veterans returning from the Vietnam War. But in the public blame game that's erupted on Capitol Hill and on the cable news talk shows, the armed services are largely given a free pass.

Some top soldiers, however, aren't so sure they should be let off the hook. Is there, NEWSWEEK asked retired Gen. William Nash, who commanded U.S. forces in Bosnia in the 1990s and remains plugged in, a sense within the Army of mistakes made in Iraq? "It's pervasive," he answered. Gen. Jack Keane, the Army vice chief of staff at the time of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, told NEWSWEEK: "Everyone recognizes that we made mistakes. The harder part is what to learn from them."

No one understands the Army's march of folly in Iraq better than the commander who has just been chosen to find a better way: Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. For the past 14 months, Petraeus has supervised the writing of the Army's new field manual on counterinsurgency warfare, FM 3-24. Mistake No. 1, the manual instructs, is to "overemphasize killing and capturing the enemy rather than securing and engaging the populace." That pretty well describes what the Army has done in Iraq since the first improvised explosive devices began detonating.

Petraeus was an exception. While other generals were trying by force to crush the insurgents, Petraeus was working to isolate them by winning the population's hearts and minds. The commander of the 101st Airborne, he labored to pacify Mosul, the area of northern Iraq under his control in the first year after the invasion, by satisfying the people's needs: security, jobs, the repair of local utilities and the rebirth of local democracy. His success there led the press and military establishment to regard him as a "water walker"; the praise heaped on him--NEWSWEEK ran a cover story in July 2004 asking, "Can This Man Save Iraq?"--is qualified only by jealousy.

Yet a question remains about the 54-year-old, wiry, intense, brilliant three-star general President George W. Bush appointed to lead Coalition forces in Iraq. Will Petraeus, like so many generals in all wars before him, be honor- and duty-bound by the Army's chief virtue, which is also its main vice: the tendency to smartly salute civilian superiors, no matter how wrongheaded they are?

The military values obedience for an essential reason. "The Army is in the business of training 18-year-olds to expose themselves to machine-gun fire," says Stephen Biddle, a former professor of national-security studies at the Army War College. The top brass must defer to civilians in a democracy. The American public would not be well served by generals who thumb their noses at the commander in chief in the style of Douglas A. MacArthur, whom President Harry S Truman had to relieve for disloyalty during the Korean War. But surely the model is not former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who bullied the top brass into submission for most of the Iraq war.