Petraeus: “Astonishing Signs of Normalcy”?General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, is the man everyone’s watching. Petraeus has a deserved reputation for clarity and honesty, something I’ve observed firsthand on two occasions I’ve had to interview him. His status assessment on the surge, slated to be delivered to congress in September, will be a political milestone for how Washington views the war, and so there’s no shortage of speculation about what message Petraeus will deliver. If it’s anything like his interviewwith USA Today, though, expect his briefing to accentuate the positive.
On a day when the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra threatened to reignite sectarian chaos, Petraeus gave a curious description of Baghdad to the paper:
If you drive around Baghdad, you’ll find astonishing signs of normalcy in perhaps half to two-thirds of the city. … In fact, the car bomb numbers have come down fairly steadily as well until just a couple of days ago, and we’ll see if we can get those coming down again. …There’s a real vibrancy in certain parts of Iraq, and in others obviously there is continued fighting and a sectarian cycle of violence underway. Obviously, there is damage, a need to … help them stitch back the fabric of society that was torn during the height of the sectarian violence.
When I was in Baghdad in March, I saw normalcy myself, but I also saw a police force infiltrated with Shiite militias and a city teeming with tension. His interview came right as Baghdad instituted a total vehicular curfew, a number of Sunni mosques were bombedin retaliation for Samarra, and Iraq waits to see how bad the fallout from the attack will be. If that wasn’t enough, the Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on Iraq shows no decrease in violence, despite the arrival of Petraeus as commander and a 30,000-troop reinforcement. Suggesting that the “vibrancy” of certain parts of Iraq is as significant as this larger picture risks diminishing Petraeus’s hard-won credibility for the first time in his career.