Operation Last Chance

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Two Clocks

Soon after arriving in Iraq, Petraeus invented a formulation that has since become a cliché: the disparity between the two "clocks" — Washington and Baghdad time — for ending the war. The Washington clock is "late fourth quarter, we're down a touchdown, and the other team has the ball," a senior Administration official told me. Petraeus knows that the American public is tired of the war — tired of not winning it, at least — and that a significant chunk of the Republicans in Congress may be about to abandon President Bush, as the respected Senator Richard Lugar did on June 26. The general would love to see "a couple of weeks without explosions" before September to reinforce his probable plea for patience. But insurgent forces responded to Phantom Thunder with high-profile bombings in recent days, and they are probably saving their best shots for the weeks before Petraeus leaves for Washington. The terrorists are lobbying Congress too.

There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters — but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false.

According to the Broken Army clock, troop levels will begin to wane in March 2008, no matter what Congress decides in September; the current 20 brigade combat teams will be reduced to 15 by August 2008. There is growing speculation in the military that Bush will try to pre-empt the Petraeus testimony by announcing a gradual drawdown from 20 to 15 combat brigades later this summer. "As if that isn't going to happen anyway," a senior officer told me. "But it may give us some political breathing space" — that is, it may subvert the Democrats' calls for a more rapid withdrawal — "if the President makes a big deal of announcing we're drawing down."

Petraeus won't talk about his September testimony, and he won't talk about the details of the inevitable U.S. withdrawal. But it is clear that he and his aides are preparing for the endgame. In Baqubah, General Odierno had told the Iraqis, "It's up to you to make sure [al-Qaeda] doesn't come back." One could only wonder about the fate of Sunni insurgents who had turned against the jihadis. Soon they would be facing a new foe, an Iraqi army and local police that have been notoriously awful in Diyala province — riddled with Shi'ite death squads, incompetence and corruption. Petraeus' "all in" bet relies on the police recruits squatting sullenly in Yusufia, indulging his cheerleading — "Are you ready to fight for your country?" Certainly, they were ready to fight for their families, their tribes, their mosques ... but for a Shi'ite Iraq? Probably not.

"The vision thing is really important," Petraeus told his commanders in Yusufia. "You have to visualize what security here should look like when you're gone." Petraeus was among the first to have the vision thing in Iraq, in Mosul in 2003, but the experiment was abandoned — there was a lack of sufficient troops — after he left. McCain and others believe, with some justification, that if the Petraeus counterinsurgency tactics had been adopted three years ago, the U.S.-led coalition might have had a shot. But now it seems likely that Petraeus will suffer the same fate in Baghdad as he did in Mosul. The various clocks are very much on his mind, but so are the daily sacrifices, the brilliant improvisations and occasional neighborhood victories of the troops he leads. "He doesn't want to be the fall guy," an aide said. And he doesn't deserve to be. It is hard to imagine, though, how this can turn out any other way.